title
stringlengths 6
88
| about_speakers
stringlengths 34
1.43k
⌀ | event
stringclasses 459
values | transcript
stringlengths 18
60.6k
|
|---|---|---|---|
The beautiful, hard work of co-parenting | {0: 'Joel Leon is a performer, author and storyteller from the Bronx. He is the author of "A Book About Things I Will Tell My Daughter" and "God Wears Durags Too," and a father to Lilah and West.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | My name is Joel, and I'm a co-parent. So, growing up, I never heard the term "co-parent." I heard a lot of other things, though, for starters, "absentee father," "sperm donor" — that's a good one — "deadbeat dad" and, my personal favorite, "baby daddy." "Baby daddy," for those not in the know, refers to an individual who helps to conceive a child but does little else. Baby daddy is also someone who is not married by law to the mother of said child. Growing up, I thought "co-parent" was reserved primarily for white families that starred in Netflix prime-time dramas. (Laughter) It still kind of does. But it wasn't used to explain the role of a parent. Right? Either you had kids or you didn't, and no one in my social circles or at our dinner table was having complex conversations about the role fathers played in that conversation, right? A more balanced, open, loving approach to parenting was not something we were discussing within our social circles. A majority of the time, the fathers I knew of growing up were barely present or just completely nonexistent. "Co-parent" wasn't a term I heard or saw where I grew up, where I came from. I come from the hood. That hood would be Creston Avenue, 188th in the Bronx. And for — one person, that's what's up. (Laughter) Appreciate that. For a lot of us in that hood, there was only one person you could already turn to for food, shelter, warmth, love, discipline: our mothers. My mother, who I playfully call "Linda T," was my first example of real love and what showing up as a healthy co-parent looked like. She was a strong, determined single mother, a woman who would have benefited greatly from having a secure and stable partner as a co-parent. So I vowed whenever I got married, my boo and I would be together forever. You know? (Laughs) We'd share the same bed and home, we'd sleep under the same covers, we'd argue at IKEA — normal stuff. (Laughter) My partner would feel seen and loved, and our children would grow up in a two-parent household. However, things rarely ever end up how we plan them. Our daughter Lilah has never known a household with both of her parents living together under one roof. Her mother and I were never married. We dated on and off for several months before we found out she was pregnant. Up until then, my mother didn't even know she existed. I was ashamed, I was embarrassed, and, at times, I was suicidal. I was asking myself, what was I doing? Where was I going wrong? I never wanted the stigma or label of what some identified as the stereotypical "black father." So: absentee, confrontational, combative, not present. It took a lot of work, time, energy and effort for us to finally realize that maybe co-parenting for us didn't need to mean a shared household and wedding bells, that maybe, just maybe, the way we showed up as co-parents lay not only in the layered nuances of our partnership but the capacity within our hearts to tend to a human that we helped create together. (Applause) It would involve love in a nurturing and safe environment that would feed Lilah long after we both left this earth. Fast-forward four years, and Lilah is now in pre-K. She loves gummies, and she says things like, "My heart is filled with love." She's the most loving, compassionate, empathetic human being I know, and the reason I get to tell you all of this is because she's back in the Bronx with her mother. You see, this is co-parenting, and in an ideal world, my mother would have had a co-parent, too. She would have had support, someone to show up and give her a break, a time off. In an ideal world, every parent is a co-parent. In an ideal world, both parents share the weight of the work appropriately. Lilah's mother and I have a schedule. Some days, I leave work and pick Lilah up from school, some days I don't. Lilah's mother gets to go rock climbing or study for the LSAT, and I get to stand in a room full of bold, dynamic and powerful women and talk about dad stuff. (Applause) It is work, it is beautifully hard work dismantling the systems that would have us believe a woman's primary role is in the kitchen, tending to all things domestic, while the hapless dad fumbles all over himself whenever he has to spend a weekend alone with the kids. It is work that needs to happen right now. You see, far too often, what it seems like is when both parents are working, one parent is typically tasked with organizing the household and keeping the home running. That person is typically a woman or someone who identifies as such. Far too often, those who identify as mothers and as women have to sacrifice their dreams in order to appease the standard. They have to sacrifice their dreams in order to ensure that motherhood takes precedence over all else. And I'm not here to say that it doesn't, but what I am here to say is, as equal partners and co-parents, it is our duty to ensure that our co-parenting partners don't have to put their passions, their pursuits and their dreams to the back burner just because we're too self-absorbed to show up as allies. (Applause) Co-parenting makes the space possible for everybody. As a co-parent, the time I've gotten to share and spend with Lilah is time I appreciate, the time that has allowed me to be fully present for my child, removing the notion that the emotional labor required to raise a child is a woman's work. As a co-parent, Lilah and I have built snowmen, we've played with acorns, we've rapped to the soundtrack of "Moana," I know you have, too. (Laughter) She's sat with me while I've led workshops at Columbia University, when I talk about the intersections of poetry, hip-hop and theater. We get to talk about her emotions and her feelings because we have exclusive time together, and that time is planned time, it's organized around not just my schedule but her mother's. Both of us, as co-parents, have unique parenting styles. And we may argue at times, but what we can always agree on is how to raise a human — our human. I will never fully understand or comprehend what it means to hold a child in my body for 10 months. I will never be able to understand the trials and tribulations of breastfeeding, the work that it takes, the emotional, physical, psychological and emotional toll that carrying a human can have on the female body. What co-parenting does is say, we can create balance, a more balanced home and work life for everyone involved. Co-parenting says that while parenting may involve sacrifices, yes, the weight of that sacrifice is not solely resting on one parent alone. No matter your relational dynamic, no matter how you identify as a human being — he, she, they, ze — co-parenting says we can create space and equity, better communication, empathy, I hear you, I see you, how can I show up for you in ways that benefits our family? My goal: I want more fathers to embrace co-parenting as a model for a better tomorrow, a better today for ourselves, for our co-parenting partners, for our families, for our community. I want more fathers talking about fatherhood openly, candidly, honestly, lovingly. Right? I want more people to recognize that black fathers in particular are more than the court system, more than child support and more than what the media might portray us to be. (Applause) Our role as fathers, our role as parents, our value as parents is not dependent on the zeroes at the ends of our checks but the capacity within our hearts to show up for our families, for the people we love, for our little ones. Being a father is not only a responsibility, it's an opportunity. This is for Dwain, this is for Kareem "Buc" Drayton, this is for Biggs, this is for Boola, this is for Tyron, this is for all the black fathers who are showing up on a day-to-day basis. This is for Charles Lorenzo Daniels, my father, who didn't have the language or the tools to show up in the ways that he wanted to. Thank you. My name is Joel. Hi Bria, hi West. (In Yoruba) Amen. (Applause) |
Why you should get paid for your data | {0: 'As an AI researcher and specialist on digital assets, Jennifer Zhu Scott has her finger on the pulse of technologies that are poised to change our economies and our lives.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | I grew up in the late '70s in rural China during the final years of my country's pursuit of absolute equality at the expense of liberty. At that time, everybody had a job, but everyone was struggling. In the early '80s, my dad was an electrician, and my mom worked two shifts in the local hospital. But still, we didn't have enough food, and our living conditions were dismal. We were undoubtedly equal — we were equally poor. The state owned everything. We owned nothing. The story I'm going to share with you is about my struggles of overcoming adversity with my resilience, grit and sheer determination. No, I'm just kidding, I'm not going to do that to you. (Laughter) Instead, I'm going to tell you, what I'm going to talk about today is about a new form of collective poverty that many of us don't recognize and that urgently needs to be understood. I'm sure you've noticed that in the past 20 years, that asset has emerged. It's been generating wealth at a breakneck pace. As a tool, it has brought businesses deep customer insights, operational efficiency and enormous top-line growth. But for some, it has also provided a device to manipulate a democratic election or perform surveillance for profit or political purposes. What is this miracle asset? You've guessed it: it's data. Seven out of the top 10 most valuable companies in the world are tech companies that either directly generate profit from data or are empowered by data from the core. Multiple surveys show that the vast majority of business decision makers regard data as an essential asset for success. We have all experienced how data is shifting this major paradigm shift for our personal, economic and political lives. Whoever owns the data owns the future. But who's producing the data? I assume everyone in this room has a smartphone, several social media accounts and has done a Google search or two in the past week. We are all producing data. Yes. It is estimated that by 2030, 10 years from now, there will be about 125 billion connected devices in the world. That's an average of about 15 devices per person. We are already producing data every day. We'll be producing exponentially more. Google, Facebook and Tencent's combined revenue in 2018 was 236 billion US dollars. Now, how many of you have received payment from them for the data you generate for them? None, right? Data has immense value but is centrally controlled and owned. You are all walking raw materials for those large data companies, but none of you are paid. Not only that, you're not even considered as part of this equation for income. So once again, we are undoubtedly equal: we're equally poor. Somebody else owns everything, and we own nothing. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? So what should we do? There might be some clues in how my life turned out after that difficult start. Things began to look up for my family in the '80s. The system evolved, and people began to be allowed to own a piece of what we created. "People diving into the ocean," or "xia hai," the Chinese term, described those who left state-owned enterprise jobs and started their own businesses. Private ownership of a business became personal ownership of cars, properties, food, clothes and things. The economic machine started rolling, and people's lives began to improve. For the first time, to get rich was glorious. So in the '90s, when I went to study in Chengdu in west China, many young individuals like myself were well-positioned to take advantage of the new system. After I graduated from my university, I cofounded my first business and moved to Shenzhen, the brand-new special economic zone that used to be a fishing village. Twenty years later, Shenzhen has become a global innovation powerhouse. Private ownership was a form of liberty we didn't have before. It created unprecedented opportunities for our generations, motivating us to work and study incredibly hard. The result was that more than 850 million people rose out of poverty. According to the World Bank, China's extreme poverty rate in 1981, when I was a little kid, was 88 percent. By 2015, 0.7 percent. I am a product of that success, and I am very happy to share that today, I have my own AI business, and I lead a very worldly and dynamic life, a path that was unimaginable when I was a kid in west China. Of course, this prosperity came with a trade-off, with equality, the environment and freedom. And obviously I'm not here to argue that China has it all figured out. We haven't. Nor that data is fully comparable to physical assets. It is not. But my life experience allowed me to see what's hiding in plain sight. Currently, the public discourse is so focused on the regulatory and privacy issue when it comes to data ownership. But I want to ask: What if we look at data ownership in completely different ways? What if data ownership is, in fact, a personal, individual and economic issue? What if, in the new digital economy, we are allowed to own a piece of what we create and give people the liberty of private data ownership? The legal concept of ownership is when you can possess, use, gift, pass on, destroy or trade it or sell your asset at a price accepted by you. What if we give that same definition to individuals' data, so individuals can use or destroy our data or we trade it at our chosen price? Now, I know some of you might say, "I would never, ever trade my data for any amount of money." But that, let me remind you, is exactly what you're doing now, except you're giving your data away for free. Plus, privacy is a very personal and nuanced issue. You might have the privilege to prioritize your privacy over money, but for millions of small business owners in China who can't get bank loans easily, using their data to gain rapid loan approval from AI-powered lenders can answer their more pressing needs. What's private to you is different from what's private to others. What's private to you now is different from what was private when you were in college. Or, at least, I hope so. (Laughter) We are always, although often subconsciously, making such trade-offs based on our diverse personal beliefs and life priorities. That is why data ownership would be incomplete without a pricing power. By assigning pricing power to individuals, we gain a tool to reflect our personal and nuanced preferences. So, for example, you could choose to donate your data for free if a contribution to a particular medical research is very meaningful for you. Or, if we had the tools to set our behavior data at a price of, say, 100,000 US dollars, I doubt any political group would be able to target or manipulate your vote. You control. You decide. Now, I know this sounds probably implausible, but trends are already pointing to a growing and very powerful individual data ownership movement. First, start-ups are already creating tools to allow us to take back some control. A new browser called Brave empowers users with "Brave Shields" — they literally call it that — by aggressively blocking data-grabbing ads and trackers, and avoid leaking data like other browsers. In return, users can take back some bargaining and pricing power. When users opt in to accept ads, Brave rewards users with "basic attention tokens" that can redeem content behind paywalls from publishers. And I've been using Brave for a few months. It has already blocked more than 200,000 ads and trackers and saved hours of my time. Now, I know some of you interact with your browser more than with your partners, so — (Laughter) you should at least find one that doesn't waste your time and is not creepy. (Laughter) Do you think Google is indispensable? Think again. A search engine is indispensable. Google just has the monopoly — for now. A search engine called DuckDuckGo doesn't store your personal information or follow you around with ads or track your personal browsing history. Instead, it gives all users the same search results instead of based on your personal browsing records. In London, a company called digi.me offers an app you can download on your smartphone that helps to import and consolidate your data generated by you from your Fitbit, Spotify, social media accounts ... And you can choose where to store your data, and digi.me will help you to make your data work for you by providing insights that used to be exclusively accessible by large data companies. In DC, a new initiative called UBDI, U-B-D-I, Universal Basic Data Income, helps people to make money by sharing anonymous insights through their data for companies that can use them for market research. And whenever a company purchases a study, users get paid in cash and UBDI points to track their contribution, potentially as much as 1,000 US dollars per year per their estimation. UBDI could be a very feasible path for universal basic income in the AI economy. Further, individual awareness of privacy and data ownership is growing fast as we all become aware of this monster we have unleashed in our pocket. I'm a mother of two preteen girls, and trust me, the single biggest source of stress and anxiety as a parent, for me, is my children's relationship with technology. This is a three-page agreement my husband and I make them sign before they receive their first [mobile phone]. (Laughter) We want to help them to become digital citizens, but only if we can make them become smart and responsible ones. I help them to understand what kind of data should never be shared. So if you Google me, in fact — actually, sorry — if you DuckDuckGo me, you will find maybe a lot about me and my work, but you may find no information about my daughters. When they grow up, if they want to put themselves out there, it's their choice, not mine, despite that I insist they're the most beautiful, smartest and most extraordinary kids in the world, of course. And I know many people are having similar conversations and making similar decisions, which gives me hope that a truly smart data-rich future will be here soon. But I want to highlight the Clause 6 of this agreement. It says, "I will never, ever search for any information online if I would be embarrassed if seen by Grandma Dawnie." (Laughter) Try it. It's really effective. (Laughter) Throughout history, there has always been a trade-off between liberty and equality in the pursuit of prosperity. The world has constantly been going through the circle of wealth accumulation to wealth redistribution. As the tension between the haves and have-nots is breaking so many countries, it is in everyone's interest, including the large data companies, to prevent this new form of inequality. Of course, individual data ownership is not the perfect nor the complete answer to this profoundly complex question of what makes a good digital society. But according to McKinsey, AI will add 13 trillion US dollars of economic output in the next 10 years. Data generated by individuals will no doubt contribute to this enormous growth. Shouldn't we at least consider an economic model that empowers the people? And if private ownership helped to lift more than 850 million people out of poverty, it is our duty and we owe it to future generations to create a more inclusive AI economy that will empower the people in addition to businesses. Thank you. (Applause) |
How do blood transfusions work? | null | TED-Ed | In 1881, doctor William Halsted rushed to help his sister Minnie, who was hemorrhaging after childbirth. He quickly inserted a needle into his arm, withdrew his own blood, and transferred it to her. After a few uncertain minutes, she began to recover. Halsted didn’t know how lucky they’d gotten. His transfusion only worked because he and his sister happened to have the same blood type— something that isn’t guaranteed, even among close relatives. Blood types hadn’t been discovered by Halsted’s time, though people had been experimenting with transfusions for centuries— mostly unsuccessfully. In 1667, a French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denis became the first to try the technique on a human. Denis transfused sheep’s blood into Antoine Mauroy, a man likely suffering from psychosis, in the hopes that it would reduce his symptoms. Afterward, Mauroy was in good spirits. But after a second transfusion, he developed a fever, severe pain in his lower back, intense burning in his arm, and he urinated a thick, black liquid. Though nobody knew it at the time, these were the signs of a dangerous immune response unfolding inside his body. This immune response starts with the production of proteins called antibodies, which distinguish the body’s own cells from intruders. They do so by recognizing the foreign proteins, or antigens, embedded in an intruder’s cell membrane. Antibodies latch onto the antigens, signaling other immune cells to attack and destroy the foreign cells. The destroyed cells are flushed from the body in urine. In extreme cases, the massive break down of cells causes clots in the bloodstream that disrupt the flow of blood to vital organs, overload the kidneys, and cause organ failure. Fortunately, Denis’s patient survived the transfusion. But, after other cross-species transfusions proved fatal, the procedure was outlawed across Europe, falling out of favor for several centuries. It wasn’t until 1901 that Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner discovered blood types, the crucial step in the success of human to human blood transfusions. He noticed that when different types were mixed together, they formed clots. This happens when antibodies latch on to cells with foreign antigens, causing blood cells to clump together. But if the donor cells are the same blood type as the recipient’s cells, the donor cells won’t be flagged for destruction, and won’t form clumps. By 1907, doctors were mixing together small amounts of blood before transfusing it. If there were no clumps, the types were a match. This enabled them to save thousands of lives, laying the foundation for modern transfusions. Up to this point, all transfusions had occurred in real time, directly between two individuals. That’s because blood begins to clot almost immediately after coming into contact with air— a defense mechanism to prevent excessive blood loss after injury. In 1914, researchers discovered that the chemical sodium citrate stopped blood coagulating by removing the calcium necessary for clot formation. Citrated blood could be stored for later use— the first step in making large scale blood transfusions possible. In 1916, a pair of American scientists found an even more effective anticoagulant called heparin, which works by deactivating enzymes that enable clotting. We still use heparin today. At the same time, American and British researchers developed portable machines that could transport donor blood onto the battlefields of World War I. Combined with the newly-discovered heparin, medics safely stored and preserved liters of blood, wheeling it directly onto the battlefield to transfuse wounded soldiers. After the war, this crude portable box would become the inspiration for the modern-day blood bank, a fixture of hospitals around the world. |
The secret messages of Viking runestones | null | TED-Ed | In the 8th century CE, Vikings surged across the misty seas. They came from Scandinavia in Northern Europe but would travel far and wide. Some plundered and settled in the British Isles and France; others braved Artic exploration or forged clever new trade routes to the Middle East. With their steely navigational skills, advanced long-ships and fearsome tactics, the Vikings sustained their seafaring for over three hundred years. But for all their might, they left few monuments. Instead, fragments of stone, bark, and bone provide the keys to their culture. Found in graves, bogs, and sites of ancient settlements, many of these objects are inscribed with messages in Old Norse written in runic letters. But the Vikings also scratched runes into household goods, jewellery, weapons, and even shoes. Deciphering these messages is no easy task. Runes are short, straight, and diagonal lines that make up an alphabet called the “futhark.” All classes of people spoke and wrote this language, in many different dialects. There was no standard spelling, they wrote the individual runic letters by pronouncing the sounds of their regional accents. Some of these inscriptions also bore the influence of other cultures the Vikings interacted with— the runic inscription “love conquers all,” for example, is originally a Latin phrase from the poet Virgil. Many, like the enigmatic Rok runestone, were carved in verse, highlighting the tradition of Old Norse poetry. So even though modern runologists can read runes, their meaning isn’t always obvious. Still, in spite of the remaining mysteries, many inscriptions memorializing the dead and recording local histories have been deciphered— along with some containing magical incantations. The Ramsund runes in Sweden are carved on a rocky outcrop beside a bridge for travelers passing over swampy ground. This causeway was commissioned by a prominent local woman named Sigríðr. She proclaimed both her importance and her family’s power by carving their names in stone, and even associated herself and her family with mythical heroism by carving illustrations of Sigurd the dragon slayer. In the town of Jelling in Denmark, two standing stones from the 10th century memorialize different generations of a royal family. The first was erected by King Gorm the Old in memory of his Queen Thyrvi, and the second by their son, Harald Bluetooth, after Gorm’s death. The stones announce the power of this Viking Age dynasty, and they are among the earliest historical documents of Denmark. They indicate that Denmark was the earliest major Viking Age kingdom, by telling that Harald controlled southern Norway, and that he converted to Christianity. Today, Harald Bluetooth’s initials make up the Bluetooth logo. The 10th century warrior poet Egil was a well-known carver of runes. According to poetic accounts, he once carved runes on a horn filled with poison, causing the horn to shatter. In another story, Egil saves a young girl’s life by placing a piece of whale bone carved with healing runes under her pillow. Norse poetry tells of runic spells, cast to ensure calm seas, safe childbirth and triumphant battles. But the exact nature of these spells isn’t fully understood— many of the inscriptions on swords, axes, and spears are indecipherable. Other objects, like the Lindholm amulet, have inscriptions that could be incantations, riddles, or religious messages. While it’s difficult to pinpoint the end of the Viking era, by 1100 CE their sea-borne expansion had mostly come to an end. However, people continued to speak versions of Old Norse throughout Scandinavia; and runes remained in use in rural areas into the 19th century. Today, many runestones remain standing at their original sites. The inscription on the Danish Glavendrup stone has fearsomely declared for a thousand years: “A warlock be he who damages this stone or drags it in memory of another!” |
How volumetric video brings a new dimension to filmmaking | {0: 'As head of Intel Studios, Diego Prilusky is ushering in the next revolution in visual storytelling: volumetric video, which aims to recreate reality as a cinematic experience.'} | TEDSummit 2019 | I love making movies. Motion pictures have been in existence for more than a hundred years. Filmmaking hasn't changed for the dimensional mindset. Placing the camera in a scene and pressing "record" hasn't changed. Filmmaking is still a frontal experience, and creating the film has the possibility to follow the same direction of the content creation. We still stand in front of a flat image, watching the fiction. There's nothing wrong with it. I love watching movies and going to the theaters. The experiences can be such emotional experiences. The art and craft of emotional experiences within a frame can be so strong to drive a stronger emotion. The question we're asking is, How the experience of motion pictures can exist beyond the flat screen. How can we start creating content for the next generation of content experiences? Traditionally, when we imagine a scene, we look at the frame and the composition. We have to think about how we create depth and parallax using foreground, background elements as the camera moves. With the technology today and devices of VR glasses, AR glasses, smart devices, allowing three-dimensional and full navigation in space, we have the possibility to enable audiences to experience content from multiple perspectives. What we have to think about is how we take this technology, all the capabilities, and enable the experience to move farther away inside the scene. Now we're not talking about video games or computer-generated actors, which look tremendously realistic. We're talking about real actors and real performance, performing onstage. We have to start thinking how we capture the actors and how we capture the real scene in order to immerse inside. Now, we're familiar with the 360-degree video, where you place a camera inside the scene and you can create this beautiful panoramic image all around you, but from the same aspect, filmmaking is still frontal. In order to emerge fully inside the scene, we will need to capture the light from all the possible directions. We will have to surround the scene with an enormous amount of sensors, with all possible capabilities to capture the light and enable us to emerge inside afterwards again. Now, in this setup, there's no more foreground or background or a camera placed in space but hundreds of sensors capturing the light and capturing the motion from all the possible directions. With the new technological advancements, we can start looking at 3D photography, capturing the light from multiple perspectives, enabling us to reconstruct the object. This is like photography in 3D space. Now, with these technological advancements, we can record video not just as a flat image but as a volume. This is what we call "volumetric video," and it has the capability to record every action of the scene as a full three-dimensional volume. Now, what is a voxel? A voxel is like a three-dimensional pixel, but instead of being a flat image square, staying light and colored, it's like a three-dimensional cube in space, with x, y, and z positions. This enables us to create a full capture of the scene from any perspective. Now this renders a fully light-immersive scene from multiple perspectives. This capability requires an insane amount of information to be processed. We will have to capture the light from an enormous amount of cameras to create this information. Now, in order to do such a thing, we would need a setup that would host a numerous amount of cameras installed in a stage and a stage big enough in order to fit a full cinematic experience. Now that sounds like a crazy idea, but that's exactly what we did. For the last three years, we have been building a huge volumetric camera chamber. It's 10,000 square feet of a stage, enabling to capture the action from any location. We have deployed hundreds of cameras, sending a tremendous amount of information to a huge data center powered by Intel supercomputers. The ability to have this 10,000 feet enables us to fit any kind of action, any kind of performance. It is the size of an average Broadway stage. We call it Intel Studios, and it's the largest volumetric stage in the world, with the objective of enabling and exploring the next generation of this immersive media filmmaking. Now, to test these ideas, we were thinking about what we can do as the first scene to try it out. So we chose the Western scene. We brought horses, set designers, dirt, everything needed to create the full scene of a Western. But this time, there was no camera inside. There was nothing really moving besides all the cameras installed outside. The challenge of the actors was tremendous. They have to perform a flawless action visible from all the directions. There's no possibility to hide a punch or not show the action. Everything is captured and everything is seen. The output of the capture — this is our future capture — opened our eyes for the immense capabilities. It was like a full 3D scan of the entire scene. We were able to move around and travel in the space. The thing about this, it's not anymore about perceiving the light emitted from a screen but now traveling inside the light, traveling inside the scene. This obviously opens possibilities for an enormous amount of storytelling and methodologies of creation. This is the possibilities of your personal narrative, the possibility of creating your own story inside, or maybe following other stories. Let's take a look at one of the last renders and see. (Music) What you're seeing here is full volumetric video, and there's no physical camera in the scene. (Music) We have the full control (Music, sounds of combat) of space and time. (Music, sounds of combat) Now, again, no physical camera was here. Everything was captured surrounding. Now, this is very nice, but what if we wanted to see the scene, maybe, from the eyes of the horse? Well, we can do that as well. (Horse galloping) So what you're seeing right now is the same action, but this time, we're watching exactly from the eyes of the horse. The possibilities are, well, unlimited. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So this is all great for creators and storytellers. It really opens a huge canvas for a different type of storytelling and moviemaking. But what about the audience? How can the audience experience this differently? In order to [create] our explorations, we partnered with Paramount Pictures in order to explore immersive media in a Hollywood movie production. Together with the director Randal Kleiser, we reimagined the iconic movie of 1978, "Grease." Some of you know it, some of you don't. A 40-year-old movie, amazing experience. And our goal was really to look at how we can take this iconic action and dance and bring it deeper into the experience, bring it deeper into the audience. Imagine that you can not just watch the movie but get inside it and dance with the actors and dance with the performance. Now we're breaking, really, the traditional 2D mindset of thinking, and bringing a much richer possibility of moviemaking and content creation. But why watch it on the screen? Let's try to bring these actors here on the stage. So they're not going to really come — I'm going to use an iPad. (Laughter) Sorry. I'm going to use an iPad in order to bring in augmented reality. Now, obviously, these devices have their own limitations in terms of the data-computing process, so we have to reduce the amount of resolution. So what I'm doing now, I'm placing here a marker, so I'll be able to position exactly where I want everyone to appear. OK. I think we have them here. (Applause) John Travolta, or — (Laughter) a version of him. Let's take a look. (Video) Female: Hey. Male: And that is how it's done. Female: Your turn. Male: Hey, guys! Check this out. (Song: "You're the one that I want") Danny: Sandy! Sandy: Tell me about it, stud. (Singing) I got chills. They're multiplying And I'm losing control 'Cause the power you're supplying It's electrifying! (Video ends) (Applause and cheers) Diego Prilusky: Thank you. (Applause and cheers) So as you can see, we can watch and experience content in the traditional way or in an immersive way. Really, the possibilities are open. We're not trying to change or replace movies. We're enhancing them. The technologies enable new possibilities to start thinking beyond the flat screen. We're in immersive and really exciting times in filmmaking. We're at the threshold of a new era. We're opening the gates for new possibilities of immersive storytelling, and exploration and defining what immersive media filmmaking means. We're really just at the beginning, and we invite you all to join us. Thank you. (Applause) |
The real story of the Black Panther Party | {0: 'Dr. Curtis Austin is an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University.'} | TEDxOhioStateUniversity | Good afternoon. I've been known as many things over the course of my life. I've been known as a son, a brother, a husband, an educator. But in 2008, I became known as a felon. And I became known as a felon through a very curious set of circumstances. I was teaching at a university in Mississippi at the time, teaching the History of the Civil Rights Movement, and I needed a car. So, I did what most people would do. I went on the Internet and I found a car. This car I found was in Des Moines, Iowa. So I was going to fly to Des Moines and drive the car back. A few weeks before that, I'd had a book signing, and I actually ran out of books at this book signing, but people wanted the books, so they gave me cash, and wrote me checks, and said, "The next time you come through town just bring the books with you." And I said, "OK." I'd do that. I knew that when I was driving this car back from Iowa, I was going to have to pass through this town, so, I took the books with me. I packed my stuff up, went to the airport, checked in, made my way through security. And then I hear my name over the intercom. "Curtis Austin, return to the check-in counter." And so I do. I get back to the check-in counter, and there's this bevy of airport police and TSA agents surrounding my bag, just hovering over my bag. And they've got these books, and they're looking at these books. And the book has this picture on the cover. It's a book about the Black Panther Party. And they're flummoxed. They're taken aback, you know? They've got this black man, he's got a one-way ticket to Iowa, no clothes, no toiletries, and all these books. And so they said, "Well, we're going to have to call the FBI." I said, "Whoa! The FBI? Why?" He says, "Well, that's what we do in situations like this." And that's what they did. They called the FBI. And the FBI came to the airport. TSA and airport security escorted me upstairs, put me in a room, and this FBI agent came in the room and began to interrogate me, but he had this book. He was going through this book, and then he'd ask me questions, he'd look in the book and ask me more questions, and this interrogation went on for hours. And I finally worked up the nerve to say, "Am I under arrest?" And he said, "No, we're just asking questions here." And I said, "Well, does that mean I can leave?" And he said, "Yeah, you can leave." So that's what I did. I left. I found another flight. I went to Des Moines. I bought the car and drove it back and dropped the books off and went back to work. I didn't think much more about it. I mean, I thought it was bizarre, but I grew up black in Mississippi and so you get used to the bizarre. (Laughter) And I don't think about it anymore until one day I'm talking with my boss, and she says, "Curtis, we have a problem." And I said, "OK, what kind of problem do we have?" She said, "Well, it's come to my attention that you're a felon, and we can't allow felons to teach at the University." A felon?! Wait a minute. This is a classic WTF moment for me, right? (Laughter) I don't know what's going on and she doesn't either, but she says, "I think you should call the FBI." That's what I do. I call the FBI, tell them who I am and why I'm calling, and they look me up on their system and the woman I'm talking to says, "Yeah, it says you're a felon." I said, "Well, what did I do?" She said, "I don't know." I said, "When did I do it?" She said, "I don't know." I said, "Where did I do it?" She said, "I don't know. In fact I don't have any more information. Maybe, if you call the U.S. Attorney's office, they can give you more information. She gave me the number for the U.S. Attorney's office. I called them. They looked me up in their system, and the person I spoke with said, "Yes, It says here you're a felon." And I asked the same set of questions, and got the same exact set of answers. "I don't know." It literally takes me more than two years to get this felony removed from my record. I came to understand that the felony was on my record because I had written a book about the Black Panther Party. Some of you may be familiar with the Black Panther Party. For those of you who are not, it was an organization that started in 1966 in Oakland, California, as an effort to prevent the police brutality and murder of black people. But it also organized around a range of other issues that were affecting the black community, like healthcare, and housing, and full employment, and fairness in the courts. They wanted blacks to be tried by juries of their peers because to that point they were being tried by all whites. While they were organizing around these issues, the press was vilifying them and demonizing them and telling lies about them. In fact, one of the lies is that it was this group of black men who wanted to go out and kill white people. That's what they were about. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is the Black Panther Party, the majority of the people in the Black Panther Party were not men, they were women. And a few years after their party started, the majority of the leadership of the Black Panther Party were women. So, It just wasn't true that there's this group of black men going around and killing white people. Another lie that has been told about this organization is it was racist and anti-white, and they just didn't like white people at all. Well, also not true, and I'll prove that to you. The Panthers would find out what the problems were in their communities and attempt to solve them. For example, they realized that children weren't learning in school, and they weren't learning because they were hungry. So they decided to feed the children. They were going to feed them before school, so they created these free breakfast programs. And the way they created these programs was to go to the grocery stores in their communities, ask the grocery store owners if they would donate milk, and bread, and eggs, and meat, and cereal, other things people eat for breakfast, and these store owners said yes, and they donated these items. All over the country, in every city where there was a chapter of the Black Panther Party, - and there were about 40 - there was a free breakfast program. It's not likely that these white business owners would donate to the Black Panther Party if they were actually racist. Another thing they did in the community to serve the people was they created free health clinics. Again, they went around and found out there were a range of health problems that needed to be attended to. Black people were rather poor, so they couldn't afford to go to doctors, couldn't afford to go to hospitals. So the Panthers went to hospitals and medical schools and asked the doctors and medical students whether they would come to the black community and deal with some of these medical issues. Overwhelmingly, they said yes. Again, all over the country, in cities wherever the Black Panther Party set up chapters, there were these free health clinics; although they were being run by the Black Panther Party, they were peopled by white people, so I don't know how they could be racist and anti-white if their signature programs were actually being supported by fairly wealthy and often middle class white people. One of the people who was very, very good at pulling individuals, white and others, into the Black Panther Party orbit, was a guy by the name of Fred Hampton. Fred Hampton was the leader of the Chicago Chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was a very eloquent speaker. He was very persuasive. Fred Hampton could persuade people that there was actual injustice. More importantly than that, he could persuade people that they should do something to combat that injustice. So in addition to going to these hospitals, and grocery stores, and getting the things they needed for their programs, Fred Hampton also worked with other groups and organizations who were Latino, Asian, Native American, even large groups of poor whites who had moved up from the South or into Chicago from Appalachia. They would work with these organizations and set up the same kinds of programs in their communities. They were very successful at this, but the government didn't like what they were doing, so in addition to vilifying and discrediting them in the press, they began to arrest its members and in very extreme cases, to kill its members. And thats exactly what happened to Fred Hampton. On December 4th, 1969, the Chicago Police Department, the Illinois State Attorney's Office, burst into Fred Hampton's apartment at 4:30 in the morning, while he and everyone else in there were asleep, and just began spraying the place with bullets. It wounded several people. There was a person guarding the door named Mark Clark. They shot him straight through the heart, and he died immediately. They make their way through the house to Fred Hampton's bedroom, find him there, he's asleep, because he's been drugged, but he's asleep next to his girlfriend who's eight and a half months pregnant, and they grab Fred Hampton by his hair and shoot him in the back of the head at point blank range twice, killing him instantly. That's the end of Fred Hampton. So we have to ask ourselves, what is it about this organization that prompt's such an irrational, over the top, and extreme response, that 40 years after the organization has died, a lowly professor like myself can be stopped in an airport, detained for hours, questioned, then labeled a felon for simply writing a book about the organization? Why does Fred Hampton have to pay with his life for simply organizing around issues, that everybody — there's nothing wrong with feeing kids, and taking care of sick people. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be killed by the police. So we have to ask ourselves, what is it about this organization? And I'll tell you. The thing about this organization is that it was actually anti-racist, and it made a point to work with all people whether it was upper and middle class whites, lower class whites, Asians, latinos, Native Americans. Anybody who wanted to help solve these problems, this organization was willing to work with them, and that was the problem. If this interracial organization was not effective, people would not have been so dead set against it. So it wasn't just Fred Hampton who had to pay. It wasn't just me who had to pay with being labeled a felon. You probably saw this a few weeks ago. Beyonce performed at the Super Bowl, at the halftime show, and she and the women who were dancing with her, dressed up in these black leather outfits, these black berets, and they were dressed that way to pay homage to the Black Panther Party. 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party and they were trying to honor this community service organization. But what they got in return was a ton of hate mail. People all over the country are saying they are racist and anti-white, they are cop haters. Police officers has said that they don't want to give her the security she needs at her concerts. Mayors have said they don't want her in their town. Beyonce is racist. Beyonce. I mean, racy maybe? But not racist. (Laughter) So, we just have to keep asking ourselves why are we told these stories about the Black Panther Party, and who benefits from us knowing these lies. I want to encourage you to do your own research about the party, but be careful when you're doing your research because I've been studying this subject for 25 years now, and what I've discovered is that 73% of all the newspaper articles written about the Black Panther Party, were written by the FBI, or people the FBI recruited. So there is all this villainy and misinformation. And we spoke about Fred Hampton a second ago, and I just want to tell you that Fred Hampton and Mark Clark's family actually sued the city of Chicago, the State Attorney's Office, a jury found them guilty, and they paid them almost two million dollars. But that doesn't bring Fred back, and that doesn't stop the villainy. We have to find out the truth about this organization for ourselves, and I encourage you to do that. I also encourage you to question your own biases about what you know about American history. And finally, I want to encourage you to reach out across racial lines and ethnic lines, and do your part in solving the problems that face our country today, because black people can't solve these problems on their own. White people can't solve them on their own. Latino people can't solve them on their own. Unless all of us come together as a people and solve these problems, they will never be solved. So I say to you: power to the people. (Applause) |
What if a single human right could change the world? | {0: 'Kristen Wenz is an emerging leader in the international development community and is regarded as a top global expert on legal identity.'} | We the Future | So, when I was 14, my family was in the process of adopting my little brothers from Ethiopia. And one day my mom asked, "What day should we put for their birthday?" "Uh, the day they were born, obviously?" Ridiculous question. And then my mom said, "Well, Kristen, neither of your little brothers have a birth certificate, so how do you suggest we find out when that was?" Mind blown. Now, 20 years later, I'm still working on it, except instead of trying to solve the mystery of my brothers' missing birth certificates, I try to solve this problem globally. So what do birth certificates have to do with international development? To answer that, we have to look back at the original development agenda, the human rights agenda. So in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for the first time, set a shared vision of basic human rights and dignities that apply to all people in all nations: Article 6, the right to be recognized as a person before the law. Or, a legal identity. For children, this is a birth certificate. And despite this being a universal human right, one billion people today have no record they exist, making it one of the greatest human rights violations of our time, yet nobody seems to know about it. In the face of world poverty and hunger, making sure everyone in the world has a legal identity doesn't really seem important, but in reality it is. See, early in my career, I was working with a social worker in a slum community in Mumbai, and we were following up on a case with this little girl who had contracted polio as a baby and was paralyzed from the waist down. When we arrived at the home, we found her on the floor. Her legs were badly scarred and infected, she was malnourished, she had never gone to school and she had spent most of her life confined to this small, dark room. When we left, I asked the social worker what the case plan was, and she said, "Well first, we have to get her a birth certificate." I was a little taken aback. I said, "Well, don't you think we need to get her some social assistance and a safe place to live and into a school?" She goes, "Exactly, which is why we need to get her a birth certificate." See, without a legal identity, you are not recognized as a person by the government. And a person who doesn't officially exist can't access government services, and the government can only provide services for the number of people they know about. Hence, people are overlooked, for example, by routine immunization services. People without a legal identity are both uncounted and unprotected. They're among the poorest members of society from the most marginalized communities. They're victims of trafficking. Human traffickers know that it's nearly impossible to find someone if there was never a record they existed in the first place. They're victims of exploitation, such as child marriage and child labor. Without a birth certificate, how do you prove a child is still a child? They're among the stateless; birth certificates provide proof of who your parents are and where you were born, the two main factors for acquiring nationality. Of the one billion people in the world without a legal identity, the vast majority are children who were never registered at birth. In the least developed nations, the births of over 60 percent of children have never been recorded. A study across 17 countries in sub-Saharan Africa found that 80 percent of children did not have a birth certificate. Out of the countries that have not yet achieved universal birth registration coverage, in 26 countries, a birth certificate is required to access health care, including vaccines. In 37 countries, it's required to access social assistance intended to bring people out of poverty. And in 59 countries, a birth certificate is required for a child to be enrolled or complete school. A birth certificate is also often required for other forms of legal identity, like a national ID or a passport. And some form of legal identity in almost every country is required to vote, get a SIM card or open a bank account. In fact, of the 1.7 billion people in the world who are unbanked, 20 percent is due to not having a legal identity document. Now, you don't have to be an expert to see that this, times a billion, is a big problem. So it's not surprising that evidence shows that improved birth registration coverage goes hand in hand with improved development outcomes, from poverty alleviation to better health, nutrition, education, economic improvement and safe and orderly migration. In 2015, world leaders came together and promised that they would uphold human rights of all people and leave no one behind in efforts to end poverty, hunger and reduce inequalities. But how are they going to uphold human rights and how do they know if anyone is being left behind if they do not know who they are or where they are in the first place? So what can countries do about this? Now, there's no one-size-fits-all model, because every country context is unique. There are five proven interventions that can be applied to any system. Number one, reduce the distance. Two, remove the cost. Three, simplify the process. Four, remove discrimination. Five, increase demand. Gender discrimination remains a hidden problem, because statistically, there's no difference between registration rates of boys and girls. But the discrimination isn't against the child — it's against the mother. Angola was one of 35 countries that required a father's name or to be present in order for the child's birth to be registered. So in situations where the father is unknown, unwilling or unable to claim paternity, the mothers are legally prevented from registering the births of their own children. So to address this, Angola put a policy in place allowing mothers to register their children as a single parent. In Tanzania, in 2012, only 13 percent of children had a birth certificate. So the government came up with a new system. They put registration centers in existing infrastructure, such as community wards and in health facilities. So they brought the services closer to the people who needed them. They removed the fee. They simplified the process and automated it, so the birth certificate could be issued on the spot. To increase demand, they rolled out a public awareness campaign, letting people know that there's a new process and why it was important to register the births of their children. In just a few years in the districts where the new system was put in place, 83 percent of children now have birth certificates, and they're in the process of rolling this out nationwide. So what can you do? See, I believe we are all united by our humanity. We live on the same earth. We breathe the same air. And while none of us chose to be born or the situation we were born into, we do get to choose how we live. Change occurs when a moment of awareness or a moment of compassion inspires a person to act. And through our collective action, we become the most powerful agents of change. And when the cost of inaction is innocent children are left unprotected, unvaccinated, unable to go to school, growing up to be adults who are unable to find decent work or vote, trapped in a cycle of poverty, exclusion and invisibility, it comes down to us to take this issue out of the darkness and into the light. Because it's not every day you get the opportunity to change the world, but today, you do. Thanks. (Applause) |
Vultures: The acid-puking, plague-busting heroes of the ecosystem | null | TED-Ed | In the grasslands of Mauritania, a gazelle suffering from tuberculosis takes its last breath. Collapsing near a small pool, the animal’s corpse threatens to infect the water. But for the desert’s cleanup crew, this body isn’t a problem: it’s a feast. Weighing up to 10 kilograms and possessing a wingspan of nearly 3 meters, the lappet-faced vulture is the undisputed king of the carcass. This bird’s powerful beak and strong neck easily tear through tough hide and muscle tissue, opening entry points for weaker vultures to dig in. This colossal competition is too dangerous for the tiny Egyptian vulture. With a wingspan of only 180 centimeters, this vulture migrated to Africa from his family nest in Portugal, using thermal updrafts to stay aloft for hours at a time. But upon arrival, he finds himself near the bottom of the pecking order. Fortunately, what he lacks in size, he makes up for in intelligence. A short distance away, he spots an unguarded ostrich nest, full of immense, but impenetrable eggs. Using a large rock, he smashes one open for a well-earned meal— though he’ll circle back to the gazelle once the larger birds are gone. High above the commotion are Ruppell’s Griffon vultures. Soaring at an altitude of over 11,000 meters, these birds fly higher than any other animal. At this height, they can’t see individual carcasses. But the sight of their fellow vultures guides them to the feeding. Their featherless heads help them regulate the sudden rise in temperature as they descend— and keep them clean as they tear into the decaying gazelle. The carcass is stripped clean in hours, well before the rotting meat infects the water supply. And the tuberculosis doesn’t stand a chance at infecting the vultures. These birds have evolved the lowest gastric pH in the animal kingdom, allowing them to digest diseased carrion and waste without becoming sick. In fact, species like the mountain-dwelling bearded vulture have stomachs so acidic, they can digest most bones in just 24 hours. This adaptation helps smaller vultures supplement their diet with dung, while larger vultures can consume diseased meat up to 3 days old. Their acidic stomachs protect them from living animals too: their rancid vomit scares off most predators. These stomachs of steel are essential to removing pathogens like cholera, anthrax, and rabies from the African ecosystem. But while vultures can easily digest natural waste, man-made chemicals are another story. Diclofenac, a common veterinary drug used to treat cattle in India, is fatal to vultures. And because local religious beliefs prohibit eating beef, scavengers often consume cattle carcasses. Since the 1990s, the drug, along with threats from electricity pylons and habitat loss, has contributed to a 95% decline in the region’s vulture population. In nearby Africa, poachers intentionally poison carcasses to prevent the birds’ presence from alerting authorities to their location. One poisoned carcass can kill over 500 vultures. Today, more than 50% of all vulture species are endangered. In regions where vultures have gone extinct, corpses take three times longer to decay. These carcasses contaminate drinking water, while feral dogs and rats carry the diseases into human communities. The Asian and African Vulture Crisis has led to an epidemic of rabies in India, where infections kill roughly 20,000 people each year. Fortunately, some communities have already realized how important vultures are. Conservationists have successfully banned drugs like Diclofenac, while other researchers are working to repopulate vulture communities through breeding programs. Some regions have even opened vulture restaurants where farmers safely dispose of drug-free livestock. With help, vultures will be able to continue their role conserving the health of our planet— transforming death and decay into life. |
Why do people fear the wrong things? | null | TED-Ed | A new drug reduces the risk of heart attacks by 40%. Shark attacks are up by a factor of two. Drinking a liter of soda per day doubles your chance of developing cancer. These are all examples of relative risk, a common way risk is presented in news articles. Risk evaluation is a complicated tangle of statistical thinking and personal preference. One common stumbling block is the difference between relative risks like these and what are called absolute risks. Risk is the likelihood that an event will occur. It can be expressed as either a percentage— for example, that heart attacks occur in 11% of men between the ages of 60 and 79— or as a rate— that one in two million divers along Australia’s western coast will suffer a fatal shark bite each year. These numbers express the absolute risk of heart attacks and shark attacks in these groups. Changes in risk can be expressed in relative or absolute terms. For example, a review in 2009 found that mammography screenings reduced the number of breast cancer deaths from five women in one thousand to four. The absolute risk reduction was about .1%. But the relative risk reduction from 5 cases of cancer mortality to four is 20%. Based on reports of this higher number, people overestimated the impact of screening. To see why the difference between the two ways of expressing risk matters, let’s consider the hypothetical example of a drug that reduces heart attack risk by 40%. Imagine that out of a group of 1,000 people who didn’t take the new drug, 10 would have heart attacks. The absolute risk is 10 out of 1,000, or 1%. If a similar group of 1,000 people did take the drug, the number of heart attacks would be six. In other words, the drug could prevent four out of ten heart attacks— a relative risk reduction of 40%. Meanwhile, the absolute risk only dropped from 1% to 0.6%— but the 40% relative risk decrease sounds a lot more significant. Surely preventing even a handful of heart attacks, or any other negative outcome, is worthwhile— isn’t it? Not necessarily. The problem is that choices that reduce some risks can put you in the path of others. Suppose the heart-attack drug caused cancer in one half of 1% of patients. In our group of 1,000 people, four heart attacks would be prevented by taking the drug, but there would be five new cases of cancer. The relative reduction in heart attack risk sounds substantial and the absolute risk of cancer sounds small, but they work out to about the same number of cases. In real life, everyone’s individual evaluation of risk will vary depending on their personal circumstances. If you know you have a family history of heart disease you might be more strongly motivated to take a medication that would lower your heart-attack risk, even knowing it provided only a small reduction in absolute risk. Sometimes, we have to decide between exposing ourselves to risks that aren’t directly comparable. If, for example, the heart attack drug carried a higher risk of a debilitating, but not life-threatening, side effect like migraines rather than cancer, our evaluation of whether that risk is worth taking might change. And sometimes there isn’t necessarily a correct choice: some might say even a minuscule risk of shark attack is worth avoiding, because all you’d miss out on is an ocean swim, while others wouldn’t even consider skipping a swim to avoid an objectively tiny risk of shark attack. For all these reasons, risk evaluation is tricky at baseline, and reporting on risk can be misleading, especially when it shares some numbers in absolute terms and others in relative terms. Understanding how these measures work will help you cut through some of the confusion and better evaluate risk. |
How to design gender bias out of your workplace | {0: 'Sara Sanford wants us to move from shared stories to shared data to counter gender inequity.'} | TEDxSeattle | A few years ago, I had a corporate feminist dream job. Launching a company's national initiative to recruit more female employees. In the finance sector. But first, I had to get the signed-off support of all department heads. So I spent months perfecting the proposal, presented it and won the support of almost everyone. But in this team, there were two men we'll call Howard and Tom. Howard just would not get back to me. I emailed him about the proposal, I left him voice mails, I'd roll my chair back and forth during meetings, trying to make eye contact with Howard. (Laughter) He'd just take out his phone and start scrolling. And then I started to question myself. Had I been diplomatic enough in that email? Too demanding in that voice mail? Does Howard hate this proposal or am I just overreacting? It's probably just me, I thought. And then one day, I'm walking down the hall and here comes Howard. He's holding a packet of papers, sees me and lights up. He says, "Sara, Tom just emailed this to me, you should take a look. It's a proposal for us to recruit more women." (Laughter) "I think Tom has a really great idea here, and we should all get behind it." Howard proceeds to hand my own proposal back to me. And explains to me the many merits of what I wrote. (Laughter) Howard was never against recruiting more women. But he needed to hear from a man why it was important to hire more women. And as this scene played out, I said nothing. Because I knew somehow that I was a guest in a place that wasn't meant for me. And so instead of questioning my environment, I questioned myself. I wanted to know how so many talented women who worked long hours and started their careers with confidence all became trained in this kind of self-doubt that makes them say, "It's probably just me." How was that still possible? Aren't things getting better? Opportunities for women have increased over the last 50 years. But over the last decade, progress has stalled. Experts have previously identified 2059 as the year the wage gap would close. But in September of this year, these same experts announced that according to the most current data, we'll have to adjust our expectations to the year 2119. (Audience murmurs) One hundred one years from now. Looking beyond the wage gap, women are still underrepresented in leadership, receive less access to senior leaders and are leaving the fastest-growing sectors, such as tech, at 45 percent higher rates than men, citing culture as the primary reason. So what have we been doing to address gender inequality? Why isn't it working? Many businesses think they're addressing the problem, because they provide training. Eight billion dollars worth of training a year, according to studies from the "Harvard Business Review." These same studies also conclude that these trainings don't work and often backfire. Research tracking the hiring and promotion practices of 830 companies over the course of 30 years found that white men who are asked to go to diversity trainings tend to rebel by hiring and promoting fewer women and fewer minorities. The other solution has been to ask women to change their own behavior. To lean in. To sit at the table. Negotiate as often as men. Oh, and get more training. Women currently earn the majority of college degrees, outperform their peers in key leadership skills and are running businesses that outperform the competition. It doesn't look like education or skills or business acumen are the problem. We're already empowered. Enough to make an impact on the businesses that are ready. These approaches fail to address the key systemic problem: Unconscious bias. (Applause) We all have bias, it's OK. It's lodged in our amygdala, it keeps ticking away when we go to work. Bias affects how much I like you, what I believe you're capable of and even how much space I think you take up. Thanks in part to the Me Too movement, awareness of gender bias has spread. But the harassment stories that made headlines are just one piece. You don't have to harass a woman to limit her career. The messages women send me aren't about being harassed. They're being tolerated in the workplace. But they're not being valued. I don't know anyone who has ever said, "You know what I love about my employer? They just tolerate me so well, I feel so tolerated." (Laughter) To break the inertia, we need to take a step beyond Me Too. Beyond just being tolerated as women. Our organization decided to tackle the problem in two ways. First, if we're all biased, our workplaces need to be actively antibiased by design, not by trying to change mindsets one training at a time. So our team began by identifying over 100 cultural levers that can be adjusted to counter the impact of bias. We found that small tweaks can lead to big changes. And they cost a lot less than eight billion dollars. So what do these small tweaks look like? If a woman is asked to state her gender before filling out a job application, or performing a skills-related test, she performs worse than if she were not asked first. So how can businesses avoid activating this self-stereotyping bias? Move the gender check box to the end of the application. Example two. In a national survey that we conducted, men were 50 percent more likely to state they had received multiple, frequent evaluations over the course of the last year. As opposed to one single yearly review. Here's why this matters. "Fortune" magazine reviewed performance evals across industries. And found that criticism like this related to personality, ["Watch your tone!"] but not job-related skills, appeared in 71 of the 94 yearly reviews received by women. Of the 83 reviews received by men, personality criticism showed up twice. But in businesses that conduct much shorter, highly frequent reviews, say, five-minute weekly evaluations focused on specific projects, the personality criticism vanishes. And the perceived performance gap between men and women is nearly nonexistent. While yearly reviews rely on overall impressions, which are like petri dishes for bias, short, objectively focused evaluations eliminate this feelings-based gray area. Now, some businesses are consciously taking these steps to counter the impact of bias, while others just do a good job of advertising. We wanted to find out who is actually getting it right. So we put a poll on Facebook, we asked women in workshops how they were choosing employers where they would be valued. The most common response that we heard? "I Google it." So we googled it. (Laughter) Specifically, we googled "best employers for women in tech." Our results showed three completely different lists. One business shows up as the top employer on one list, doesn't show up at all on another, some lists offer no criteria and some are purchased ads. They're paid for. Employees and employers both want clear benchmarks that go beyond good intentions. The LEED certification gave businesses this clarity around environmental stewardship by outlining the exact steps they need to take for certification. We wanted businesses to have this kind of playbook for gender equity. So for our second act, we took what we had learned from testing these cultural levers, we partnered with the University of Washington and created the first standardized certification for gender equity in US businesses. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) To create this standard, we had to learn what matters and what doesn't. We found out that what matters is not the total percentage of female employees. Or the number of board members that are female. Those are what we call vanity metrics. They can be bought, while the culture inside can still be out of balance. The factors that matter and that should be measured are under the surface. For example, even in organizations where equal percentages of women and men state that they have had access to a mentor, men's mentors are more likely to be in senior positions. Reviewing our survey results, men were twice as likely to state they had been offered an opportunity to shadow someone in a senior role. We're all used to hearing about the wage gap. Hidden opportunity gaps like these are just as influential. So when assessing a company's culture, we measure these gaps between men's and women's experiences. And the smaller the gap, the more equity is center of the culture. We also searched our findings for the tenets of workplace culture that are most important to men and most important to women. We learned that only three factors consistently matter to men, while a dozen matter to women. And they only share one in common. Topping the list for women: Paid family leave, health care for dependents and feeling that their ideas are heard and they're properly credited for them. These are a few of the 188 indicators that determine whether or not an organization meets our quantitative standard for workplace equality. Based on the data that matter. These are the factors to create a culture of equity that lasts. Not just for a month or for a quarter but for years. So where does this leave us? Women in the workforce today are constantly told, "You can be anything you want now. It's up to you." Women of color, for whom the wage gap is even larger, have heard it. The two-thirds of minimum-wage workers who are women have heard it. Workers who don't identify as male or female and hide their identity at work have heard it. If they can hear, "You can be anything you want now, it's up to you," I believe it's time for our businesses to hear it, too. Eliminating workplace bias is a tall order. But we can't afford to let half our people go on being ignored. We've given businesses a framework for real change. Businesses can be anything they want now. It is up to them. Thank you. (Applause) |
Management lessons from Chinese business and philosophy | {0: "Fang Ruan is co-lead of the BCG Henderson Institute in China and a regional leader of the People and Organization practice in Asia-Pacific based in BCG's Hong Kong office."} | TED@BCG Mumbai | I love dumplings. But I seldom have dumplings in a restaurant, because my mom's cooking is the best. One day, I happened to take a bite of Dumpling Xi's dish. To my surprise, they had a flavor of going home. Fresh, chewy and unexpected. In addition to being a dumpling lover, I actually have a full-time job. I am a management consultant, so naturally, I was keen to understand the reasons behind those delicious dumplings. What I didn't expect is that this dumpling triggered my exploration of new ways of management in China. A change that is deeply rooted in ancient Chinese philosophies. But first, let's go back to the dumplings. Gāo Défú founded Dumpling Xi 17 years ago. Today, the company enjoys 500 stores with 8,000 employees. But it wasn't always the case. Three years ago, the demand for his dumplings was soaring due to consumers' craving for healthy food. But the strong growth of online food delivery services had pulled the consumers away from store visits, causing a huge concern for Gāo. If I were to advise Gāo back then, I would go directly with the classical approach, hiring venture managers, providing training on how to integrate online-offline sales, or having some high potentials fully dedicated to the new job, such as a Chief Digital Officer. But Gāo did something totally different. He invented a two-hat model. Instead of recruiting new executives, he invited five successful original heads to take on a second role at headquarters. The catch was, they had to do it while still being the frontline managers. Keep in mind that these people had no formal training or related experience in this field. What they did have, though, was natural strengths and a growth mindset. When Gāo first told me the idea, I said, "Are you sure? I have seldom seen companies as large as yours having part-time senior executives." But Gāo smiled. "This is my dumpling way." Gāo's team was also puzzled. In the first three months, the sales fluctuated, some even dropped by 20 percent. But Gāo didn't blink. The regional heads had to learn new skills while still doing their job. Things like what kinds of dumplings can be sold online, how to digitalize their supply chain. After the transition period, something magical happened. The sales came back. One year later, the company began to launch its fresh and spicy dumplings online. Two years later, more talents with start-up dreams were attracted. More importantly, the company began to translate these individual new capabilities into company policies, and roll them out. A true differentiator compared with his peers. Because most Chinese entrepreneurs are very good at growth strategies. In Chinese, we call it kāi jiāng kuò tǔ, expanding territories, but not so good at what we call zhì guó ān bāng, converting individual best practices into company policies for the long run. The nature of Gāo's approach, such as having tolerance for frontline managers to make mistakes, or having some new ideas not coming from the top, is not common in China. Because they go against our traditions. In the past 2,000 years, Confucianism has been dominant in China, which values seniority and authority. For a nation, this is a time-tested formula to ensure order and harmony. For a company, this ensures precise execution at a large scale. But with business environments constantly changing, internet disrupting traditional industries, new millennials becoming a major workforce, new ways of management emerge. I feel so lucky to study this in such a dynamic age, while at the same time to satisfy my stomach with delicious dumplings. Gāo's two-hat approach is just one example. Another example comes from Miranda Qu, the founder of Xiaohongshu. Xiaohongshu is a thriving internet company with 300 million users. It is an online community where young fans can get together to talk about their favorite soap opera, "Go Go Squid!" Or buy the cool shoes that the lead actress wears in a running scene. From the early days, Qu wanted the whole organization to be ready to spot things that need to change and challenge the authority. But one day, she noticed her interns were calling senior staff "teachers." This may sound innocent, but it signaled a problem to Qu. Because if the teacher phenomenon becomes a norm, it will encourage hierarchy and discourage ownership. This is also something related to Confucian thinking. In Chinese, we call it "benfen." "Ben" means me, myself. "Fen" means the share of the job. "I will just focus on my job and not cross any lines," which is totally the opposite to Qu's thinking. So Qu created a unique initiative called "Signature Program." In the program, each employee chooses an avatar character that pops up alongside digital communication channels. Some common ideas include Captain Hook, Harry Potter and many well-known characters in Chinese literature. The way these characters interact proved to be the answer to Qu's problem. Avatars from the same story would get together to talk about their favorite characters. In the community called "Slam Dunk," people from different cities, different departments, different levels of the organization, they would talk about how these characters inspired them at work. An employee with a signature called Coach Anzai was facing some difficulty in leading a very young team. Other Dunk fans will share the best practices on how to motivate a diversified team and inspire them to work to their full potential. The signature program plays a pivotal role in fostering a collaborative environment at Xiaohongshu. Not only the teacher issue has disappeared, the company has been ranked as one of the most innovative Chinese companies by Forbes in the past two years. Gāo's two-hat approach and Qu's signature program are just two examples of empowering the frontline staff. But these methods may not always be right. Let's take Ping An, for example. Very successful insurance company. The company couldn't adopt such an approach for the whole organization, because, one, the company has 400,000 employees, and the line between innovative chaos and chaotic chaos is very thin. Two, the company has five ecosystems and 10-plus sectors — health care, insurance, real estate, smart city. Very difficult to apply a bottom-up innovation to all. But the company still needs to be innovating. Ma Mingzhe, the founder, positions the headquarters as the steering wheel. Steering innovations and new ideas, cascading them down to its subsidiaries. One of the ideas that headquarters came up with is AI-enabled loss assessment. For a not-so-complicated case, the car owner can take a picture of the damaged car, upload it online. The insurance center can decide a claim amount right away by AI-enabled loss assessment. Facial recognition, ID verification. The car owner can get a payment in a few minutes, which could have taken a few days. So, for companies that [find it] difficult to conduct grassroots innovation, a centralized approach is also an option. The more I see these unconventional management mechanisms — Gāo with two hats, Qu with the signature program and Ma with the steering wheel — the more I ponder where do these mechanisms come from. They're definitely not Confucian. They are very similar to another Asian school of thought, Taoism. Confucianism believes the way to achieve perfection is to organize and regulate things. But Taoism believes in letting things work to their perfection naturally, to support their natural state and to let them transform spontaneously. In other words, leaders should not impose their will. Leaders should act by shaping the context rather than control. Confucianism works best in winning a stable context, whereas Taoism, with its power to shape the context, is more effective in dealing with uncertainty. A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When work is done, people say, "We did it ourselves." Thank you. (Applause) |
How technology has changed what it's like to be deaf | {0: 'A writer and a part-time cyborg, Rebecca Knill embraces the humor in her bionic journey while balancing life as a deaf person with cochlear implants which enable her to hear.'} | TED@WellsFargo | My name is Rebecca, and I'm a cyborg. (Laughter) Specifically, I have 32 computer chips inside my head, which rebuild my sense of hearing. This is called a cochlear implant. You remember the Borg from Star Trek, those aliens who conquered and absorbed everything in sight? Well, that's me. (Laughter) The good news is I come for your technology and not for your human life-forms. (Laughter) Actually, I've never seen an episode of Star Trek. (Laughter) But there's a reason for that: television wasn't closed-captioned when I was a kid. I grew up profoundly deaf. I went to regular schools, and I had to lip-read. I didn't meet another deaf person until I was 20. Electronics were mostly audio back then. My alarm clock was my sister Barbara, who would set her alarm and then throw something at me to wake up. (Laughter) My hearing aids were industrial-strength, sledgehammer volume, but they helped me more than they helped most people. With them, I could hear music and the sound of my own voice. I've always liked the idea that technology can help make the world more human. I used to watch the stereo flash color when the music shifted, and I knew it was just a matter of time before my watch could show me sound, too. Did you know that hearing occurs in the brain? In your ear is a small organ called the cochlea, and the cochlea is lined with thousands of receptors called hair cells. When sound enters your ear, those hair cells, they send electric signals to your brain, and your brain then interprets that as sound. Hair-cell damage is really common: noise exposure, ordinary aging, illness. My hair cells were damaged before I was even born. My mother was exposed to German measles when she was pregnant with me. About five percent of the world has significant hearing loss. By 2050, that's expected to double to over 900 million people, or one in 10. For seniors, it's already one out of three. With a cochlear implant, computer chips do the job for the damaged hair cells. Imagine a box of 16 crayons, and those 16 crayons, in combination, have to make all of the colors in the universe. Same with the cochlear implant. I have 16 electrodes in each of my cochleas. Those 16 electrodes, in combination, send signals to my brain, representing all of the sounds in the universe. I have electronics inside and outside of my head to make that happen, including a small processor, magnets inside my skull and a rechargeable power source. Radio waves transmit sound through the magnets. The number one question that I get about the cochlear implant when people hear about the magnets is whether my head sticks to the refrigerator. (Laughter) No, it does not. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you, thank you. (Applause) I know this, because I tried. (Laughter) Hearing people assume that the Deaf live in a perpetual state of wanting to hear, because they can't imagine any other way. But I've never once wished to be hearing. I just wanted to be part of a community like me. I wanted everyone else to be deaf. I think that sense of belonging is what ultimately connects our stories, and mine felt incomplete. When cochlear implants first got going, back in the '80s, the operation was Frankenstein-monster scary. By 2001, the procedure had evolved considerably, but it still wiped out any natural hearing that you had. The success rate then for speech comprehension was low, maybe 50 percent. So if it didn't work, you couldn't go back. At that time, implants were also controversial in the Deaf culture. Basically, it was considered the equivalent of changing the color of your skin. I held off for a while, but my hearing was going downhill fast, and hearing aids were no longer helping. So in 2003, I made the tough decision to have the cochlear implant. I just needed to stop that soul-sucking cycle of loss, regardless of whether the operation worked, and I really didn't think that it would. I saw it as one last box to check off before I made the transition to being completely deaf, which a part of me wanted. Complete silence is very addictive. Maybe you've spent time in a sensory deprivation tank, and you know what I mean. Silence has mind-expanding capabilities. In silence, I see sound. When I watch a music video without sound, I can hear music. In the absence of sound, my brain fills in the gaps based on the movement I see. My mind is no longer competing with the distraction of sound. It's freed up to think more creatively. There are advantages to having bionic body parts as well. It's undeniably convenient to be able to hear, and I can turn it off any time I want. (Laughter) I'm hearing when I need to be, and the rest of the time, I'm not. Bionic hearing doesn't age, although external parts sometimes need replacement. It would be so cool to just automatically regenerate a damaged part like a real cyborg, but I get mine FedExed from Advanced Bionics. (Laughter) Oh, I get updates downloaded into my head. (Laughter) It's not quite AirDrop — but close. (Laughter) With the cochlear implant, I can stream music from my iPod into my head without earbuds. Recently, I went to a friend's long, tedious concert ... (Laughter) and unknown to anyone else, I listened to the Beatles for three hours instead. (Laughter) (Applause) Technology has come so far so fast. The biggest obstacle I face as a deaf person is no longer a physical barrier. It's the way that people respond to my deafness, the outdated way people respond to my deafness — pity, patronization, even anger — because that just cancels out the human connection that technology achieves. I once had a travel roommate who had a complete temper tantrum, because I didn't hear her knocking on the door when her key didn't work. If I hadn't been there, no problem, she could get another key, but when she saw that I was there, her anger boiled over. It was no longer about a key. It was about deafness not being a good enough reason for her inconvenience. Or the commercial about the deaf man whose neighborhood surprised him with sign language messages from people on the street. Everyone who sent me the video told me they cried, so I asked them, "Well, what if he wasn't deaf? What if his first language was Spanish, and everyone learned Spanish instead? Would you have cried?" And they all said no. They weren't crying because of the communication barrier, they were crying because the man was deaf. But I see it differently. What if the Borg showed up in that video, and the Borg said, "Deafness is irrelevant." Because that's what they say, right? Everything's "irrelevant." And then the Borg assimilated the deaf guy — not out of pity, not out of anger, but because he had a biological distinctiveness that the Borg wanted, including unique language capabilities. I would much rather see that commercial. (Laughter) Why does thinking about ability make people so uncomfortable? You might know a play, later a movie, called "Children of a Lesser God," by Mark Medoff. That play, that title, actually comes from a poem by Alfred Tennyson, and I interpret both the play and title to say that humans who are perceived as defective were made by a lesser God and live an inferior existence, while those made by the real God are a superior class, because God doesn't make mistakes. In World War II, an estimated 275,000 people with disabilities were murdered in special death camps, because they didn't fit Hitler's vision of a superior race. Hitler said that he was inspired by the United States, which had enacted involuntary sterilization laws for "the unfit" in the early 1900s. That practice continued in more than 30 states until the '70s, with the last law finally repealed in 2003. So the world is not that far removed from Tennyson's poem. That tendency to make assumptions about people based on ability comes out in sentences like "You're so special," "I couldn't live like that" or "Thank God that's not me." Changing how people think is like getting them to break a habit. Before the implant, I had stopped using the voice telephone and switched to email, but people kept leaving me voice mail. They were upset that I was unreachable by phone and not returning messages. I continued to tell them my situation. It took them months to adapt. Fast-forward 10 years, and you know who else hated voice mail? Millennials. (Laughter) And you know what they did? They normalized texting for communication instead. Now, when it comes to ignoring voice mail, it no longer matters whether you're deaf or just self-absorbed. (Laughter) (Applause) Millennials changed how people think about messaging. They reset the default. Can I just tell you how much I love texting? Oh, and group texts. I have six siblings — they're all hearing, but I don't think any less of them. (Laughter) And we all text. Do you know how thrilling it is to have a visual means of communication that everyone else actually uses? So I am on a mission now. As a consumer of technology, I want visual options whenever there's audio. It doesn't matter whether I'm deaf or don't want to wake the baby. Both are equally valid. Smart designers include multiple ways to access technology, but segregating that access under "accessibility" — that's just hiding it from mainstream users. In order to change how people think, we need to be more than accessible, we need to be connected. Apple did this recently. On my iPhone, it automatically displays a visual transcript of my voice mail, right next to the audio button. I couldn't turn it off even if I wanted to. You know what else? Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime no longer say "Closed-captioned for the hearing impaired." They say "subtitles," "on" or "off," with a list of languages underneath, including English. Technology has come so far. Our mindset just needs to catch up. "Resistance is futile." (Laughter) You have been assimilated. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
3 ways to uproot a culture of corruption | {0: 'Wanjira Mathai has more than 20 years of experience advocating for social and environmental change on both local and international platforms.'} | We the Future | Have you ever been robbed? Or had something you value forcibly taken from you against your will? It's violating. Feelings of fury, of assault and of helplessness. That's what corruption feels like. Corruption is theft. It is corrosive, it is criminal, it is toxic and it is predatory. Now, I'm from Kenya, and in Kenya, corruption takes different forms. I want to share the story of Karura Forest with you. This is my hometown of Nairobi. I love Nairobi. It's beautiful. But it is a city of paradoxes. It is at once beautiful and challenging. But at the heart of this beautiful city that I call home is Karura Forest, an oasis of green, expansive beauty that would be the envy of any city anywhere. We almost lost Karura Forest to corruption. Word has reached my mother, Wangari Maathai, that Karura Forest is under attack. There was a construction site coming up right in the middle of the forest. Government officials had stolen the forest. They had divided, sold and gifted hundreds of parcels of Karura to their friends and cronies. Now in 1977, my mother founded the Green Belt Movement to plant trees across Kenya, restore green spaces and protect green spaces, much like Karura Forest. She got together her friends and allies, and together, they created what became one of the most successful tree-planting campaigns in the world. It was therefore no surprise that when word got to her that Karura was under attack, they immediately sprang into action. They battled police and hired goons to stop the theft of this forest. But fortunately, there was an uprising of support from the clergy, politicians, students and the general public, all of whom came out to say no to corruption and greed. And pretty soon, that support was too strong and intense for the authorities to subdue. And Karura Forest was saved. In the 2000s, I joined my mother in the Green Belt Movement and witnessed the growth of the movement's advocacy activities, its expansion beyond Kenya and an extremely important growing consensus around the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize that she received — that the environment, democracy and peace were inextricably linked. I also learned that what my mother had faced that many years ago trying to protect Karura Forest was not an isolated incident. The corruption and greed that manifested itself then is alive and well today, from greedy politicians and public servants willing to loot public coffers at their expense. Corruption is everywhere. Now, corruption is devastating to any economy, democracy and the environment. It robs citizens of vital social services and renders human life worthless. When young men are willing to join gangs and brutalize their communities for a small fee, and women are raped on the way to work, and, when they report this, the perpetrators bribe their way out of jail, and when young girls have to sell their bodies to buy sanitary towels, you know the society is broken. In recent years, Kenya has been ranked amongst the top 10 most corrupt countries in the world. Even more frustrating for me is that Kenya loses a third of her national budget to corruption each year. That is six billion dollars. It is totally unacceptable. In a country where anti-corruption efforts have been frustrated and ignored and interfered with, we absolutely need new strategies for dealing with this vice. We cannot complain forever. We either decide that we're going to live with it or we are going to change it. There's some good news. Human beings are not born corrupt. At some point, these behaviors are fostered by a culture that promotes individual gain over collective progress. So if we're going to uproot corruption, we have got to start before it ever takes root. We have got to intervene early. I don't know about your country, but where I come from, youth will lead us into the future. In Kenya today, 80 percent of the population is under the age of 35. But by their own admission, they have conflicting values. Fifty-eight percent of young people in Kenya recently told us they will do anything to make money. An additional 45 percent said corruption is a legitimate tool for doing business. Seventy-three percent said they would not be willing to stand up for what they believe in for fear of retribution. What I learned from my mother a few years ago was this concept of "the power of one" — that each of us can be potent agents of change and that together, we are a force, that if we put our hands together, we can change the situation and no problem is too big. My mother understood this so profoundly that it was at the center of her work. Shifting cultures takes patience, persistence and commitment, and it is extremely slow and deep work. But if we are going to shift a culture, we have got to get that work started. And in the time since her passing, we have established a foundation in her name to do exactly that but to work with young people and children to begin to build character and personal leadership, to inspire purpose and integrity. But fighting corruption is not as easy as saying corruption is bad. Now, here are three strategies that we are employing that we believe can be replicated in any school community. First, we must understand the why: Why does corruption happen in the first place? Do we call it for what it is — theft — or do we gloss over it with other words? When young children are able to model what it looks and feels like to deal with corruption, they are likely, when faced with a dilemma in their future, to model what they've been taught. Second, we need to teach character explicitly. Now, this may seem obvious, but a child who exhibits a growth mindset and a sense of self-control is self-confident. And a self-confident child is likely to stand up for what they believe. Third, we need to build personal leadership in our children early to give them an opportunity to know what it looks like to call corruption out when they see it, what it feels like to stand up and be counted when they're needed and, for me, to make the more and most important connection between human suffering on one hand and corruption, greed and selfishness on the other. We have got to believe in our capacity to bring about the future we want to see, each of us in our small way. Young people must believe that a new reality is possible. Corruption, climate change, ecosystem collapse, biodiversity loss — all these issues need leadership. And in the words of Baba Dioum of Senegal, "In the final analysis, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught." Thank you. (Applause) |
How bumble bees inspired a network of tiny museums | {0: 'Amanda Schochet is the cofounder of MICRO, a fleet of six-foot-tall science museums designed to transform public spaces and increase access to fundamental scientific knowledge.'} | TED@NAS | If you told me five years ago that today I'd be delivering a talk about our individual power to make a difference, I would have cringed. It was my job to study huge global systems. I was a researcher at NASA using satellite data to study the big picture. You can see a lot of things from space, like every ecosystem on Earth being threatened from pretty much every angle and global inequality in air and water safety. These kinds of things would keep me up at night. And then outside of work, I'd use this bird's-eye view while thinking about our huge social structures like education and media and health care, and it looked to me like they were all really struggling, too. So I felt like the world was just trapped in this huge self-amplifying system that was just spiraling towards destruction. And of course I wanted to do something about this, and I felt so small and utterly powerless. But I started to feel a little differently as my perspective shifted from the macro towards the micro. It began with bumblebees. I was using satellite imagery and field research to study these amazing, cute pollinators to see how they were doing in the midst of their own environmental crisis in Southern California. And from the macro view, I saw 22-lane freeways, endless suburban sprawl and water being diverted from parched rivers to grow lawns in the desert. It was pretty grim. But on the ground, there were actually some small opportunities for optimism, these tiny patches of resources known as "habitat fragments." If the right kinds of plants were growing along the edges of a Costco parking lot, and if in the neighborhoods nearby there were native plants in people's gardens, and in the canyons that were too steep for people to put their suburbs in, there were native plants instead of grasses then all of these in-between spaces would actually add up to create a network of habitat fragments. And this network meant that the bees could traverse through the concrete desert feeding from and pollinating the native plants. And these plants that the bees depend on and that the bees sustain are essential. They stabilize our steep hillsides. They provide food and homes to thousands of amazing species of animals, and, critically, they are helping to curb our devastating cycle of wildfires by preventing the growth of those invasive grasses that fuel the vicious flames that we're all too familiar with. It's a really vital and interconnected system, and some people could see how they were a part of it, and so they acted as habitat fragment gardeners. They planted native plants in their yards, and they even were tending to the land in corporate parks and in public canyons. In my research, I could actually see the impact that even one passionate gardener could make. And then, repeated across the region, their habitat fragments were adding up to make a more resilient ecosystem — not a perfect system, not by a long shot, but at least a system that was less likely to totally collapse under impending pressures like further development and drought. So I was looking at the world through this lens when I found myself in the waiting room of a public hospital in Brooklyn with my partner, Charles. We were sitting across from a group of teenagers who were slumped in their chairs and bored out of their minds and just refreshing their phones over and over again. And in a neighborhood with some of the lowest high school graduation rates in the city, this waiting room felt like a social habitat fragment just waiting to happen. So, we did some research to see what kinds of resources could we add to spaces like this one that would make an impact. And we settled on museums. Museums are the most trusted source of public information, more than the media and more than the government, but they also cluster in wealthier neighborhoods. New York has 85 museums in Manhattan, and the Bronx has eight, even though these two boroughs have almost the same size population. And then expensive tickets mean that a lot of people can't go to museums even if they live nearby. And these little injustices, they just go on and on and they add up to create sweeping inequalities in knowledge and empowerment. Across the US, almost 90 percent of visitors to art museums are white, and even at the Smithsonian's network of free museums, almost half of their adult visitors have graduate degrees, which, like, 10 percent of the broader population has. So it became clear to us that even though museums are these amazing educational and social resources, they're not reaching everyone. And a lot of museums are aware of this, and they're trying to change it, but there's all these structural hurdles that are slowing them down. So we set out to create a distributed network of museum habitat fragments. Working from a donated shipping container with the volunteer help of our friends and dozens of very generous scientists from all across the globe, we built our first prototype: the Smallest Mollusk Museum. (Laughter) Mollusks are these tentacled, slimy shape-shifters like oysters and octopuses and the giant squid, and if you've ever seen an alien in a movie, then I'll bet you it was inspired by a mollusk. Their slimy sci-fi vibes make them really fun tour guides for a biology museum, and they can teach us about the systems that we all share, with a wake-up call. Of all the animal extinctions documented since the 1500s, more than 40 percent have been our friends, the mollusks. So we tested this museum across the city to see if it resonated with all kinds of visitors, and it did. People really liked learning from it. So we built a fleet of tiny science museums, each one small enough to fit into preexisting locations with information dense enough that they could still pack a punch. And they're modular, so they can be distributed at a scale that can reach everyone. And then we partnered with libraries and community centers and transit hubs and the public hospitals so that we could transform their in-between spaces into habitat fragments for social learning. And, fittingly, we named our fleet of museums "MICRO." Even though each habitat fragment is small, it provides the essentials. It draws people in so that they can explore and learn together in a social way. And then, distributed across the landscape, we're able to invite people everywhere into conversations around science. When we partnered with a public hospital in the South Bronx, we became the Bronx's first and only science museum. Yeah, that's really weird. (Laughs) (Laughter) And really quickly, families started coming by with their kids and schools started arranging field trips, all to this tiny museum in the front lobby of the public hospital. (Laughter) And the museum became so popular that we started hiring local students to be museum docents, so they could lead tours and activities for all the talented kids. And every spark of curiosity that we're able to fuel and each new fact learned and every new friend made at the museum and every kid who can have a meaningful and important after-school job, it all contributes to a stronger system. So today, I try to keep the MICRO view in mind. I'm always examining how small actions can add up to create shifts at the macro scale of systems. And honestly, I'm seeing a lot of really good things. There are habitat fragments everywhere, nurtured by talented, passionate, strategic individuals in groups of all sizes, who are building towards systems with more equal access to food and employment, health care, housing, political empowerment, education and healthy environments. One by one, together, we're filling gaps, strengthening the systems that we're all a part of. We have to work on the big institutions too, of course. It's just that they're so slow, and we're living in the midst of rapid change. It's a defining feature of our time. So maybe in some cases our small actions can be Band-Aids until the big guys catch up. But without us, what are they going to be catching up to? Am I still scared about the world? Yes. (Laughs) That's why I'm talking to you. The world needs so many more habitat fragments. So, if you've been feeling overwhelmed or powerless lately, then I'm asking you to please try this very small strategy on for size, and let's see how it goes. Step one: zoom in. It's not one huge system that's just barreling unstoppably towards destruction. What we have are many overlapping systems, and the ways that they interact determine everything. Step two: look for the resource gaps, because that's where you can make the biggest difference. And do some research to understand how your ideas are going to interact with the systems that are already on the ground. Step three: find the other habitat fragments. Find out how they can support you and how you can support them, because we're building a network together. And step four: transform your fragment. You might not have the leverage to change multiple systems at once, but there are so many small, meaningful and strategic things that each of us can do. And there are a lot of us, so it will add up. Thank you. (Applause) |
The Tower of Epiphany | {0: 'Alex Rosenthal takes everyday experiences and turns them into mind-bending puzzles.'} | TED-Ed | Ethic and Hedge are on the ground floor of a massive tower. Barriers of energy separate them from their quest’s second goal: the Node of Creation. To reach it, Ethic must use three energy streams to climb the tower. As soon as she steps forward a timer will begin counting down from 60 seconds. At the back of the room there’s a basin made of invisible towers that can hold energy between them. After one minute, a torrent of energy will pour down from above, filling one unit at a time, with a force field preventing it from spilling out the front or back. During the 60 calm seconds, Ethic and Hedge must decide exactly how many units of energy will fall. For each of the three challenges, they must choose the amount that will fill the basin exactly. If they do so, the energy will propel them further upwards. But if they get the amount at all wrong, the energy lift will fail, dropping them. Diagrams on the walls illustrate some examples. This configuration will capture exactly 2 units of energy. This configuration will capture 4— 3 here, and 1 here. And this one will also capture 4, because any energy on the right would spill out. The energy will rain down in such a way that it’ll only overflow if there’s no space that could hold it. Hedge can make one tower of blocks visible at a time and count how tall it is, but he can’t look at the whole structure all at once. How does Ethic program Hedge to figure out exactly how much energy each basin can hold? Pause now to figure it out for yourself. Here’s one way of thinking about what’s happening: each unoccupied cell will hold energy if and only if there is a wall eventually to its left, and a wall eventually to its right. But it would take a long time for Hedge to check this for each individual cell. So what if he were to consider a whole column of blocks at a time? How many units of energy can this hold, for instance? Pause now to figure it out for yourself. Let’s analyze the problem by looking at our example. There are 5 columns of blocks here. The leftmost one can’t hold any energy, because there’s nothing higher than it. The 2nd stack can have 3 units above it, as they would be trapped between these two 4 block stacks. We get 3 units by taking the height where the energy would level off— 4, and subtracting the height of the stack— so that’s 4 minus 1. The 3rd stack is similar— 4 to the left, 4 to the right, and it’s 3 high, so it’ll hold 4 minus 3 equals 1 unit. The 4th stack and 5th stacks have nothing higher than them to the right, so they can’t hold any energy. We can adapt this idea into an algorithm. Considering one column at a time as the point of reference, Hedge can look to the left stack by stack to find the height of the tallest one, look to the right to find the height of the tallest one, and take the smaller of the two as the height the energy can fill up to. If the result is higher than the column in question, subtract the height of the original column, and the result will be the number of units that column can hold. If it's equal to or below the level of the column in question, the energy would spill off. Hedge can apply that to an entire basin with a loop that starts on the left-most column and moves right, one column at a time. For each column, he’ll run the same steps— look all the way left for the tallest, do the same to the right, take the lower height of the two, subtract the original column height, and increase the grand total if that number is positive. His loop will repeat as many times as there are columns. That will work, but it’ll take a long time for a large basin. At every step Hedge repeats the action of looking left and looking right. If there are N stacks, he’ll look at all N stacks N times. Is there a faster way? Here’s one time saver: before doing anything else, Hedge can start on the left, and keep a running tally of what the highest stack is. Here that would be 2, 2 again, since the first was higher, then 4, 4, 4. He can then find the highest right-most stacks by doing the same going right-to-left: 1, 3, 4, 4, 4. In the end he’ll have a table like this in his memory. Now, Hedge can take one more pass to calculate how much energy there will be above every stack with the same equation from before: take the smaller of the stored left and right values, and subtract the height of the current tower. Instead of looking at N stacks N times, he’ll look at N stacks just 3 times— which is what’s called linear time. There are ways to optimize the solution even further, but this is good enough for our heroes. Ethic and Hedge work as one. The first cascade is a breeze, and they rise up the tower. The second is a little tougher. The third is huge, with dozens of stacks of blocks. The timer ticks down towards zero, but Ethic’s program is fast. She gets the wheel in position just in time, and the energy lifts them to the Node of Creation. Like the first, it reveals a vision: memories of years gone by. The world machine changed everything, and Ethic, in her position as chief robotics engineer, grew troubled by what she saw. When the Bradbarrier went up to keep the people in, she knew something was seriously wrong. So she created three artifacts with the ability to restore people’s power, creativity, and memory, and smuggled them to three communities. Before she could tell people how to use them, the government discovered her efforts and sent bots to arrest her and the other programmers. The last thing Ethic used the world machine to create was a robot that would protect the ancient device from the forces of ignorance by enclosing it in a giant maze. She named her creation Hedge. Without warning, the energy lift flickers, then fizzles out. |
Who won the space race? | null | TED-Ed | On October 4, 1957, the world watched in awe and fear as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, into space. This little metal ball, smaller than two feet in diameter, launched a space race between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that would last for eighteen years and change the world as we know it. Sputnik was actually not the first piece of human technology to enter space. That superlative goes to the V-2 rocket used by Germany in missile attacks against Allied cities as a last-ditch effort in the final years of World War II. It wasn't very effective, but, at the end of the war, both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had captured the technology and the scientists that had developed it and began using them for their own projects. And by August 1957, the Soviet's successfully tested the first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7, the same rocket that would be used to launch Sputnik two months later. So, the scary thing about Sputnik was not the orbiting ball itself, but the fact that the same technology could be used to launch a nuclear warhead at any city. Not wanting to fall too far behind, President Eisenhower ordered the Navy to speed up its own project and launch a satellite as soon as possible. So, on December 6, 1957, excited people across the nation tuned in to watch the live broadcast as the Vanguard TV3 satellite took off and crashed to the ground two seconds later. The Vanguard failure was a huge embarassment for the United States. Newspapers printed headlines like, "Flopnik" and "Kaputnik." And a Soviet delegate at the U.N. mockingly suggested that the U.S. should receive foreign aid for developing nations. Fortunately, the Army had been working on their own parallel project, The Explorer, which was successfully launched in January 1958, but the U.S. had barely managed to catch up before they were surpassed again as Yuri Gargarin became the first man in space in April 1961. Almost a year passed and several more Soviet astronauts completed their missions before Project Mercury succeeded in making John Glenn the first American in orbit in February 1962. By this time, President Kennedy had realized that simply catching up to each Soviet advance a few months later wasn't going to cut it. The U.S. had to do something first, and in May 1961, a month after Gargarin's flight, he announced the goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. They succeeded in this through the Apollo program with Neil Armstrong taking his famous step on July 20, 1969. With both countries' next turning their attention to orbital space stations, there's no telling how much longer the space race could have gone on. But because of improving relations negotiated by Soviet Premier Leonid Breshnev and U.S. President Nixon, the U.S.S.R. and U.S. moved toward cooperation rather than competition. The successful joint mission, known as Apollo-Soyuz, in which an American Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz craft and the two crews met, shook hands, and exchanged gifts, marked the end of the space race in 1975. So, in the end, what was the point of this whole space race? Was it just a massive waste of time? Two major superpowers trying to outdo each other by pursuing symbolic projects that were both dangerous and expensive, using resources that could have been better spent elsewhere? Well, sure, sort of, but the biggest benefits of the space program had nothing to do with one country beating another. During the space race, funding for research and education, in general, increased dramatically, leading to many advances that may not have otherwise been made. Many NASA technologies developed for space are now widely used in civilian life, from memory foam in mattresses to freeze-dried food, to LEDs in cancer treatment. And, of course, the satellites that we rely on for our GPS and mobile phone signals would not have been there without the space program. All of which goes to show that the rewards of scientific research and advancement are often far more vast than even the people pursuing them can imagine. |
The Arctic vs. the Antarctic | {0: 'TED Senior Fellow Camille Seaman photographs big ice and big clouds.'} | TED-Ed | On our planet, we have two polar regions: the Arctic, whose name comes from the Greek Arktikos, of the North, and the Antarctic from Antarktikos, opposite of the North. But there's an easier way to remember them if you just remember what surrounds them. The Arctic, situated in the Northern hemisphere of our planet, is an ocean entirely surrounded by land. On the other side of the world, the Antarctic is a continent entirely surrounded by ocean. So, the Arctic has polar bears but no penguins, and the Antarctic has penguins but no polar bears. Let's talk about the Arctic first. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean surrounded by treeless permafrost. The area can be defined as the region between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole. If you were to stand at the North Pole, everywhere you looked, in all directions, would be south. But standing at the North Pole is difficult to do for very long because it's in the middle of an ocean, covered by constantly shifting, frozen sea ice. If you were to fall into the water at the North Pole, you'd fall into water that's 13,980 feet deep. Above the water, average winter temperatures can be as low as -40 degrees Celsius, and the coldest recorded temperature is approximately -68 degrees Celsius. Despite these incredibly harsh conditions, humans have populated areas in the Arctic for thousands of years. Life in the Arctic includes organisms living in the ice, zooplankton and phytoplankton, fish and marine mammals, birds, land animals, plants, and human societies. Okay, what about Antarctica? Antarctica is Earth's southernmost continent, and it contains the geographic South Pole. It's the fifth largest continent on the planet at nearly twice the size of Australia. Almost 98% of Anarctica is covered by ice at least one mile in thickness. Conditions in Antarctica are some of the most extreme in the entire world. On average, it's the coldest, windiest, driest continent and has the highest average elevation of all the continents. You might think that it snows all the time at the Poles, but Antarctica is so dry, it's considered a desert with annual precipitation of only 200 millimeters along the coast and far less inland. The temperature in Antarctica has reached -89 degrees Celsius. Because it's so harsh and hard to get to, there are no permanent human residents on Antarctica, but anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 people reside throughout the year at the research stations scattered across the continent. Even the most extreme animals fight for survival, and only cold-adapted organisms survive there, including many types of algae, animals, bacteria, fungi, plants, and protista. But why is Antarctica colder than its northern cousin? Well, first, much of the continent is more than three kilometers above sea level, and temperature decreases with elevation. That's why mountaintops have snow on them. Second, remember that the Arctic is really a frozen ocean. The water in the ocean beneath it is warmer than the frozen ground in the Antarctic, and that warmth is transferred through the ice pack. This prevents temperatures in the Arctic regions from reaching the extremes typical of the land surface of Antarctica. Third, the seasons are conspiring against the Antarctic. During the aphelion in July, when the Earth is the farthest away from the Sun, it also happens to be winter in the Antarctic, which creates a double-whammy of cold for the southern pole. But despite being inhospitable, the North and South Pole are a big reason why our planet is the way it is. Both of our polar regions are very important climate controllers. They help moderate the temperature in our temperate zones and give us stable weather. As sea ice in the Arctic declines due to climate change and global warming, weather around the globe becomes increasing more unstable. |
What are stem cells? | null | TED-Ed | Imagine two people are listening to music. What are the odds that they are listening to the exact same playlist? Probably pretty low. After all, everyone has very different tastes in music. Now, what are the odds that your body will need the exact same medical care and treatment as another person's body? Even lower. As we go through our lives, each of us will have very different needs for our own healthcare. Scientists and doctors are constantly researching ways to make medicine more personalized. One way they are doing this is by researching stem cells. Stem cells are cells that are undifferentiated, meaning they do not have a specific job or function. While skin cells protect your body, muscle cells contract, and nerve cells send signals, stem cells do not have any specific structures or functions. Stem cells do have the potential to become all other kinds of cells in your body. Your body uses stem cells to replace worn-out cells when they die. For example, you completely replace the lining of your intestines every four days. Stem cells beneath the lining of your intestines replace these cells as they wear out. Scientists hope that stem cells could be used to create a very special kind of personalized medicine in which we could replace your own body parts with, well, your own body parts. Stem cell researchers are working hard to find ways in which to use stem cells to create new tissue to replace the parts of organs that are damaged by injury or disease. Using stem cells to replace damaged bodily tissue is called regenerative medicine. For example, scientists currently use stem cells to treat patients with blood diseases such as leukemia. Leukemia is a form of cancer that affects your bone marrow. Bone marrow is the spongy tissue inside your bones where your blood cells are created. In leukemia, some of the cells inside your bone marrow grow uncontrollably, crowding out the healthy stem cells that form your blood cells. Some leukemia patients can receive a stem cell transplant. These new stem cells will create the blood cells needed by the patient's body. There are actually multiple kinds of stem cells that scientists can use for medical treatments and research. Adult stem cells or tissue-specific stem cells are found in small numbers in most of your body's tissues. Tissue-specific stem cells replace the existing cells in your organs as they wear out and die. Embryonic stem cells are created from leftover embryos that are willingly donated by patients from fertility clinics. Unlike tissue-specific stem cells, embryonic stem cells are pluripotent. This means that they can be grown into any kind of tissue in the body. A third kind of stem cells is called induced pluripotent stem cells. These are regular skin, fat, liver, or other cells that scientists have changed to behave like embryonic stem cells. Like embryonic stem cells, they, too, can become any kind of cell in the body. While scientists and doctors hope to use all of these kinds of stem cells to create new tissue to heal your body, they can also use stem cells to help understand how the body works. Scientists can watch stem cells develop into tissue to understand the mechnanisms that the body uses to create new tissue in a controlled and regulated way. Scientists hope that with more research, they can not only develop specialized medicine that is specific to your body but also better understand how your body functions, both when it's healthy and when it's not. |
Comma story | null | TED-Ed | Commas are tricky things, especially when subordinates and conjunctions are involved. If you can remember a few basic rules, a simple law of physics, and some common scenarios, you will be able to use commas correctly. I like to think of the different parts of our sentence as characters. Let's meet a few of them: the tiny conjunctions, the mighty subordinates, and the clever comma. Conjunctions are small and nimble. They are words that connect clauses, words, and phrases. You can easily remember the conjunctions by remembering the acronym FANBOYS. The conjunctions are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. Because they're so small, more often than not, they require the help of a comma but not always. Subordinates, on the other hand, are the WWE heavyweight champions of sentences. They are words that connect two unequal things, dependent and independent clauses. Subordinates make it very clear what is being prioritized in a sentence. Commonly used subordinates are although, because, before, however, unless, and even though. Because subordinates are all about power, they can do a lot of heavy lifting by themselves. But, of course, sometimes even the strongest among us needs some help from our clever friends. Because our clever comma is so nice, she often roams her neighborhood looking for some community service to do. Today, as soon as she leaves her house, she sees a subordinate lifting the weight of two complete sentences, one on each arm. Bartheleme loves engaging in political debate even though he usually loses. The comma asks the subordinate if he needs help. Well, we know that subordinates are the WWE heavyweight champions of sentences. They can easily hold the weight of these two complete sentences because they are distributed evenly on both arms. So, when the comma asks if it can help, the subordinate is appalled at the idea of needing assistance. No thanks, maybe next time! So, the comma continues on. Soon, she seems a couple of subordinates attempting to lift the weight of sentences directly in front of themselves. Even though Bartheleme loves to sing, he never sings in front of others. The comma asks the subordinates if they need help. They might not want to admit it, but this time the subordinates do need help. Complete sentences weigh quite a bit. Simple physics tells us that it's easier to balance heavy objects if the weight is evenly distributed. So, while the subordinates are quite capable of balancing two complete sentences when carrying the weight on both sides, they're having trouble picking just one up. The comma rushes over to help the struggling subordinates, but how will she help? When subordinates begin sentences, the comma will place herself directly after the first thought or complete sentence. After helping the subordinates, our comma heroine continues on and spots a conjunction holding the weight of two complete sentences. Bartheleme was accepted into the University of Chicago, and he is on the waitlist for Stanford University. The comma asks the conjunction if he needs help. Of course he does! Hurry! The comma rushes and places itself before the conjunction. Fanboys aren't as militant as subordinates. For this reason, the commas don't have to fall in line behind the fanboys. Fanboys are courteous creatures. They allow the comma to go ahead of them. Helping others is hard work! On her way home, our comma sees a conjunction holding up the weight of a complete sentence and a fragment sentence. Bartheleme is going to major in molecular biology or interpretive dance. The now-exhausted comma asks the conjunction if he needs help lifting the items. This is one of the rare occassions where a conjunction doesn't need the help of a comma. The conjunction assures the comma that help isn't needed, which is good for the comma because by now, all it wants to do is go home and rest up for another day of vigilant sentence constructing. |
Urbanization and the evolution of cities across 10,000 years | null | TED-Ed | Today ,more than half of all people in the world live in an urban area. By mid-century, this will increase to 70%. But as recently as 100 years ago, only two out of ten people lived in a city, and before that, it was even less. How have we reached such a high degree of urbanization, and what does it mean for our future? In the earliest days of human history, humans were hunter-gatherers, often moving from place to place in search of food. But about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors began to learn the secrets of selective breeding and early agricultural techniques. For the first time, people could raise food rather than search for it, and this led to the development of semi-permanent villages for the first time in history. "Why only semi-permanent?" you might ask. Well, at first, the villages still had to relocate every few years as the soil became depleted. It was only with the advent of techniques like irrigation and soil tilling about 5,000 years ago that people could rely on a steady and long-term supply of food, making permanent settlements possible. And with the food surpluses that these techniques produced, it was no longer necessary for everyone to farm. This allowed the development of other specialized trades, and, by extension, cities. With cities now producing surplus food, as well as tools, crafts, and other goods, there was now the possibility of commerce and interaction over longer distances. And as trade flourished, so did technologies that facilitated it, like carts, ships, roads, and ports. Of course, these things required even more labor to build and maintain, so more people were drawn from the countryside to the cities as more jobs and opportunities became available. If you think modern cities are overcrowded, you may be surprised to learn that some cities in 2000 B.C. had population densities nearly twice as high as that of Shanghai or Calcutta. One reason for this was that transportation was not widely available, so everything had to be within walking distance, including the few sources of clean water that existed then. And the land area of the city was further restricted by the need for walls to defend against attacks. The Roman Empire was able to develop infrastructure to overcome these limitations, but other than that, modern cities as we know them, didn't really get their start until the Industrial Revolution, when new technology deployed on a mass scale allowed cities to expand and integrate further, establishing police, fire, and sanitation departments, as well as road networks, and later electricity distribution. So, what is the future of cities? Global population is currently more than 7 billion and is predicted to top out around 10 billion. Most of this growth will occur in the urban areas of the world's poorest countries. So, how will cities need to change to accommodate this growth? First, the world will need to seek ways to provide adequate food, sanitation, and education for all people. Second, growth will need to happen in a way that does not damage the land that provides us with the goods and services that support the human population. Food production might move to vertical farms and skyscrapers, rooftop gardens, or vacant lots in city centers, while power will increasingly come from multiple sources of renewable energy. Instead of single-family homes, more residences will be built vertically. We may see buildings that contain everything that people need for their daily life, as well as a smaller, self-sufficient cities focused on local and sustainable production. The future of cities is diverse, malleable, and creative, no longer built around a single industry, but reflecting an increasingly connected and global world. |
Inside your computer | null | TED-Ed | Do you remember when you first realized that your computer was more than just a monitor and keyboard? That between the mouse click and the video playing, there was something that captured your intention, understood it, and made it real? What is that something? Is it gremlins? Let's imagine that we can shrink down to the size of an electron and inject ourselves into a click of a mouse. If you took your mouse apart, you'd see that it's really a very simple machine. It has a couple buttons and a system for detecting motion and distance. You might have an optical mouse that makes these measurements with lights and sensors, but older ones did this with a hard rubber ball and some plastic wheels. Same concept. When you click the button on your mouse, it sends a message to the computer with information about its position. When your mouse click is received, it's handled by the basic input/output subsystem. This subsystem acts like the eyes and ears and mouth and hands of the computer. Basically, it provides a way for the computer to interact with its environment. But it also acts like a buffer to keep the CPU from being overwhelmed by distractions. In this case, the I/O subsystem decides that your mouse click is pretty important so it generates an interrupt to the CPU. "Hey, CPU! Got a click here." The CPU, or central processing unit, is the brains of the whole computer. Just like your brain doesn't take up your whole body, the CPU doesn't take up the whole computer, but it runs the show all the same. And the CPU's job, its whole job, is fetching instructions from memory and executing them. So, while you're typing, typing, typing, maybe really fast, like 60 words a minute, the CPU is fetching and executing billions of instructions a second. Yes, billions every second: instructions to move your mouse around on the screen, to run that clock widget on your desktop, play your internet radio, manage the files you're editing on the hard drive, and much, much more. Your computer's CPU is one heck of a multitasker! "But oh my gosh there's a very important mouse click coming through now! Let's drop everything now and deal with that!" There are programs for everything that the CPU does. A special program for the mouse, for the clock widget, for the internet radio, and for dealing with letters sent by the keyboard. Each program was initially written by a human in a human-readable programming language, like Java, C++, or Python. But human programs take up a lot of space and contain a lot of unnecessary information to a computer, so they are compiled and made smaller and stored in bits of ones and zeros in memory. The CPU realizes that it needs instructions for how to deal with this mouse click, so it looks up the address for the mouse program and sends a request to the memory subsystem for instructions stored there. Each instruction in the mouse device driver is duly fetched and executed. And that's not nearly the end of the story! Because the CPU learns that the mouse was clicked when the cursor was over a picture of a button on the monitor screen, and so, the CPU asks memory for the monitor program to find out what that button is. And then the CPU has to ask memory for the program for the button, which means that the CPU needs the monitor program again to show the video associated with the button, and so it goes. And let's just say there are a lot of programs involved before you even see the button on the screen light up when you clicked it. So, just the simple task of clicking your mouse means visiting all of the critical components of your computer's architecture: peripherals, the basic input-output system, the CPU, programs, and memory, and not one gremlin. |
What is dyslexia? | null | TED-Ed | Take a moment to read the following. How was that? Frustrating? Slow? What were those sentences about? They're actually a simulation of the experience of dyslexia, designed to make you decode each word. Those with dyslexia experience that laborious pace every time they read. When most people think of dyslexia, they think of seeing letters and words backwards, like seeing "b" as "d" and vice versa, or they might think people with dyslexia see "saw" as "was". The truth is people with dyslexia see things the same way as everyone else. Dyslexia is caused by a phonological processing problem, meaning people affected by it have trouble not with seeing language but with manipulating it. For example, if you heard the word cat and then someone asked you, "Remove the 'c'," what word would you have left? At. This can be difficult for those with dyslexia. Given a word in isolation, like fantastic, students with dyslexia need to break the word into parts to read it: fan, tas, tic. Time spent decoding makes it hard to keep up with peers and gain sufficient comprehension. Spelling words phonetically, like s-t-i-k for stick and f-r-e-n-s for friends is also common. These difficulties are more widespread and varied than commonly imagined. Dyslexia affects up to one in five people. It occurs on a continuum. One person might have mild dyslexia while the next person has a profound case of it. Dyslexia also runs in families. It's common to see one family member who has trouble spelling while another family member has severe difficulty decoding even one syllable words, like catch. The continuum and distribution of dyslexia suggests a broader principle to bear in mind as we look at how the brains of those with dyslexia process language. Neurodiversity is the idea that because all our brains show differences in structure and function, we shouldn't be so quick to label every deviation from "the norm" as a pathological disorder or dismiss people living with these variations as "defective." People with neurobiological variations like dyslexia, including such creative and inventive individuals as Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Whoopi Goldberg, Steven Spielberg, and Cher, clearly have every capacity to be brilliant and successful in life. So, here's the special way the brains of those with dyslexia work. The brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is generally in charge of language and, ultimately, reading, while the right typically handles spatial activities. fMRI studies have found that the brains of those with dyslexia rely more on the right hemisphere and frontal lobe than the brains of those without it. This means, when they read a word, it takes a longer trip through their brain and can get delayed in the frontal lobe. Because of this neurobiological glitch, they read with more difficulty. But those with dyslexia can physically change their brain and improve their reading with an intensive, multi-sensory intervention that breaks the language down and teaches the reader to decode based on syllable types and spelling rules. The brains of those with dyslexia begin using the left hemisphere more efficiently while reading, and their reading improves. The intervention works because it locates dyslexia appropriately as a functional variation in the brain, which, naturally, shows all sorts of variations from one person to another. Neurodiversity emphasizes this spectrum of brain function in all humans and suggests that to better understand the perspectives of those around us, we should try not only to see the world through their eyes but understand it through their brains. |
How to set the table | null | TED-Ed | Have you ever helped set a table and found yourself wondering where to place the forks? Or sat down to eat a restaurant and wondered which utensils to use? Well, here's some simple, traditional etiquette tips on how to set a table. What would happen if you set a table like this? It doesn't look good, and you have to clean up the mess before you can even start. Let's try another way. To start, use a placemat or tablecloth, but not both, so the dishes aren't directly on the table. This is more about looks than etiquette, but it's rare to see nothing under a plate unless you're eating at a picnic table. Set out any flowers, candlesticks, or other decorations you like. Candles are usually only lit at night. Start with utensils for the main course, putting your dinner fork on the left and your dinner knife on the right-hand side since these are the hands we use them with. Here's a helpful tip: You always eat outside-in, so to set for salad, we'll put the salad fork to the outside of the dinner fork and the salad knife to the outside of the dinner knife. We'll have salad first, then our main course. Notice, too, that the knife blades are both pointed toward the plate. This is an old tradition from a time when dinner knives were quite sharp, and it was a sign of politeness and nonaggression to keep them pointed away from other diners. We might have some soup, and since soup usually comes first, the soup spoon goes outside the knives since we use our right hand to hold it. Here's another tip: Only set the table with what you'll need. If you're not eating soup, don't set a soup spoon. Now, for dessert, we'll have ice cream so we'll place the dessert up top since we don't need it for a little while. Notice that the bowl of the spool is pointing to the left. This way, when it's time to eat, you just slide it down and it's in the right spot. If you were having cake, you'd set a fork and flip it 180 degrees so it would be right side-up on the left instead. Next we'll anchor our setting with the plate. You can also serve from the kitchen then bring them to the table. The bread plate goes up and to the left of the setting, and the butter knife goes on the plate at an angle, again, with the blade pointing in. There's only one spot left, and that's for the drinks. Set the wine glass to the upper right, and then place the water glass to the left of it at an angle. If you're like me and can never remember which goes where, think water, wine, w-a, w-i; a, i; they go left to right in alphabetical order. Another tip: To remember left and right with the bread and the drinks, think B-M-W like the car. B, your bread plate, is on the left; M, your meal, is in the middle, and W, your water, is on the right. Lastly, the napkin traditionally goes to the left of the forks, though it's okay to put it underneath them, too. For a fancier meal like this one that takes up a lot of space, we'll put it in the middle. Now we're ready to eat. Hopefully these tips will be helpful the next time you're asked to help set the table or sit down at a fancy meal. Enjoy! |
Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man of math | null | TED-Ed | This image of the Vitruvian Man, taken from Leonardo's sketches, has become one of the most recognizable symbols of the Renaissance. But why? It's a simple pen and ink drawing, right? Wrong! Let's start to answer this question with a math problem. I know how to calculate the area of a circle. I take the value for pi and multiply it by the radius squared. I also know how to take the area of a square. I multiply the base by itself. But how can I take the area of a circle and create a square with an equal area? This is a problem often called "squaring a circle" that was first proposed in the ancient world. And like many ideas of the ancient world, it was given new life during the Renaissance. As it turns out, this problem is impossible to solve because of the nature of pi, but that's another story. Leonardo's sketch, which is influenced by the writings of the Roman architect, Vitruvius, places a man firmly at the center of a circle and a square. Vitruvius claimed the navel is the center of the human body and that if one takes a compass and places the fixed point on the navel, a circle can be drawn perfectly around the body. Additionally, Vitruvius recognized that arm span and height have a nearly perfect correspondence in the human body, thus placing the body perfectly inside a square as well. Leonardo used the ideas of Vitruvius to solve the problem of squaring a circle metaphorically using mankind as the area for both shapes. Leonardo wasn't just thinking about Vitruvius, though. There was an intellectual movement in Italy at the time called Neoplatonism. This movement took an old concept from the 4th century developed by Plato and Aristotle, called "The Great Chain of Being." This belief holds that the universe has a hierarchy resembling a chain, and that chain starts at the top with God, then travels down through the angels, planets, stars, and all lifeforms before ending with demons and devils. Early in this philosophic movement, it was thought that mankind's place in this chain was exactly in the center. Because humans have a mortal body accompanied by an immortal soul, we divide the universe nicely in half. Around the time Leonardo sketched the Vitruvian Man, however, a Neoplatonist named Pico Della Mirandola had a different idea. He pried mankind off the chain and claimed that humans have a unique ability to take any position they want. Pico claimed that God desired a being capable of comprehending the beautiful and complicated universe he had created. This led to the creation of mankind, which he placed at the center of the universe with the ability to take whatever form he pleases. Mankind, according to Pico, could crawl down the chain and behave like an animal or crawl up the chain and behave like a god, it's our choice. Looking back at the sketch, we can see that by changing the position of the man, he can fill the irreconcilable areas of a circle and a square. If geometry is the language the universe is written in, then this sketch seems to say we can exist within all its elements. Mankind can fill whatever shape he pleases geometrically and philosophically as well. In this one sketch, Leonardo was able to combine the mathematics, religion, philosophy, architecture, and artistic skill of his age. No wonder it has become such an icon for the entire time period. |
What you need to know about stalkerware | {0: 'Eva Galperin is director of cybersecurity for the online security organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, safeguarding the privacy of vulnerable populations.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | I want you to travel back in time with me, to the before time, to 2017. I don't know if you can remember it, dinosaurs were roaming the earth. I was a security researcher, I had spent about five or six years doing research on the ways in which APTs, which is short for advanced persistent threats, which stands for nation-state actors, spy on journalists and activists and lawyers and scientists and just generally people who speak truth to power. And I'd been doing this for a while when I discovered that one of my fellow researchers, with whom I had been doing this all this time, was allegedly a serial rapist. So the first thing that I did was I read a bunch of articles about this. And in January of 2018, I read an article with some of his alleged victims. And one of the things that really struck me about this article is how scared they were. They were really frightened, they had, you know, tape over the cameras on their phones and on their laptops, and what they were worried about was that he was a hacker and he was going to hack into their stuff and he was going to ruin their lives. And this had kept them silent for a really long time. So, I was furious. And I didn't want anyone to ever feel that way again. So I did what I usually do when I'm angry: I tweeted. (Laughter) And the thing that I tweeted was that if you are a woman who has been sexually abused by a hacker and that hacker has threatened to break into your devices, that you could contact me and I would try to make sure that your device got a full, sort of, forensic look over. And then I went to lunch. (Laughter) Ten thousand retweets later, (Laughter) I had accidentally started a project. So every morning, I woke up and my mailbox was full. It was full of the stories of men and women telling me the worst thing that had ever happened to them. I was contacted by women who were being spied on by men, by men who were being spied on by men, by women who were being spied on by women, but the vast majority of the people contacting me were women who had been sexually abused by men who were now spying on them. The one particularly interesting case involved a man who came to me, because his boyfriend had outed him as gay to his extremely conservative Korean family. So this is not just men-spying-on-women issue. And I'm here to share what I learned from this experience. What I learned is that data leaks. It's like water. It gets in places you don't want it. Human leaks. Your friends give away information about you. Your family gives away information about you. You go to a party, somebody tags you as having been there. And this is one of the ways in which abusers pick up information about you that you don't otherwise want them to know. It is not uncommon for abusers to go to friends and family and ask for information about their victims under the guise of being concerned about their "mental health." A form of leak that I saw was actually what we call account compromise. So your Gmail account, your Twitter account, your Instagram account, your iCloud, your Apple ID, your Netflix, your TikTok — I had to figure out what a TikTok was. If it had a login, I saw it compromised. And the reason for that is because your abuser is not always your abuser. It is really common for people in relationships to share passwords. Furthermore, people who are intimate, who know a lot about each other, can guess each other's security questions. Or they can look over each other's shoulders to see what code they're using in order to lock their phones. They frequently have physical access to the phone, or they have physical access to the laptop. And this gives them a lot of opportunity to do things to people's accounts, which is very dangerous. The good news is that we have advice for people to lock down their accounts. This advice already exists, and it comes down to this: Use strong, unique passwords for all of your accounts. Use more strong, unique passwords as the answers to your security questions, so that somebody who knows the name of your childhood pet can't reset your password. And finally, turn on the highest level of two-factor authentication that you're comfortable using. So that even if an abuser manages to steal your password, because they don't have the second factor, they will not be able to log into your account. The other thing that you should do is you should take a look at the security and privacy tabs for most of your accounts. Most accounts have a security or privacy tab that tells you what devices are logging in, and it tells you where they're logging in from. For example, here I am, logging in to Facebook from the La Quinta, where we are having this meeting, and if for example, I took a look at my Facebook logins and I saw somebody logging in from Dubai, I would find that suspicious, because I have not been to Dubai in some time. But sometimes, it really is a RAT. If by RAT you mean remote access tool. And remote access tool is essentially what we mean when we say stalkerware. So one of the reasons why getting full access to your device is really tempting for governments is the same reason why getting full access to your device is tempting for abusive partners and former partners. We carry tracking devices around in our pockets all day long. We carry devices that contain all of our passwords, all of our communications, including our end-to-end encrypted communications. All of our emails, all of our contacts, all of our selfies are all in one place, often our financial information is also in this place. And so, full access to a person’s phone is the next best thing to full access to a person's mind. And what stalkerware does is it gives you this access. So, you may ask, how does it work? The way stalkerware works is that it's a commercially available program, which an abuser purchases, installs on the device that they want to spy on, usually because they have physical access or they can trick their target into installing it themselves, by saying, you know, "This is a very important program you should install on your device." And then they pay the stalkerware company for access to a portal, which gives them all of the information from that device. And you're usually paying something like 40 bucks a month. So this kind of spying is remarkably cheap. Do these companies know that their tools are being used as tools of abuse? Absolutely. If you take a look at the marketing copy for Cocospy, which is one of these products, it says right there on the website that Cocospy allows you to spy on your wife with ease, "You do not have to worry about where she goes, who she talks to or what websites she visits." So that's creepy. HelloSpy, which is another such product, had a marketing page in which they spent most of their copy talking about the prevalence of cheating and how important it is to catch your partner cheating, including this fine picture of a man who has clearly just caught his partner cheating and has beaten her. She has a black eye, there is blood on her face. And I don't think that there is really a lot of question about whose side HelloSpy is on in this particular case. And who they're trying to sell their product to. It turns out that if you have stalkerware on your computer or on your phone, it can be really difficult to know whether or not it's there. And one of the reasons for that is because antivirus companies often don't recognize stalkerware as malicious. They don't recognize it as a Trojan or as any of the other stuff that you would normally find that they would warn you about. These are some results from earlier this year from VirusTotal. I think that for one sample that I looked at I had something like a result of seven out of 60 of the platforms recognized the stalkerware that I was testing. And here is another one where I managed to get 10, 10 out of 61. So this is still some very bad results. I have managed to convince a couple of antivirus companies to start marking stalkerware as malicious. So that all you have to do if you're worried about having this stuff on your computer is you download the program, you run a scan and it tells you "Hey, there's some potentially unwanted program on your device." It gives you the option of removing it, but it does not remove it automatically. And one of the reasons for that is because of the way that abuse works. Frequently, victims of abuse aren't sure whether or not they want to tip off their abuser by cutting off their access. Or they're worried that their abuser is going to escalate to violence or perhaps even greater violence than they've already been engaging in. Kaspersky was one of the very first companies that said that they were going to start taking this seriously. And in November of this year, they issued a report in which they said that since they started tracking stalkerware among their users that they had seen an increase of 35 percent. Likewise, Lookout came out with a statement saying that they were going to take this much more seriously. And finally, a company called Malwarebytes also put out such a statement and said that they had found 2,500 programs in the time that they had been looking, which could be classified as stalkerware. Finally, in November I helped to launch a coalition called the Coalition Against Stalkerware, made up of academics, people who are doing this sort of thing on the ground — the practitioners of helping people to escape from intimate partner violence — and antivirus companies. And our goal is both to educate people about these programs, but also to convince the antivirus companies to change the norm in how they act around this very scary software, so that soon, if I get up in front of you and I talk to you about this next year, I could tell you that the problem has been solved, and all you have to do is download any antivirus and it is considered normal for it to detect stalkerware. That is my hope. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
How to turn climate anxiety into action | {0: 'Dr. Renée Lertzman is a researcher, educator and engagement strategist who uses psychological insights to unlock action on global climate and environmental crises.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | It's deeply painful to face what's happening on our planet right now. From forests burning, ocean plastic, species just gone each day, displacement. It's easy to feel totally overwhelmed. Maybe a bit helpless. Powerless. Angry. On fire. Numb. Disconnected. Perhaps all of the above. These messy and complicated feelings, they make total sense. I wish that someone had said this to me 30 years ago. I was a college freshman taking environmental studies, which is basically a semester of really bad news about all the ways that humans have profoundly damaged our beautiful earth. And I felt like I had been dropped into a dark tunnel, given no tools to get out and yet expected to carry on with my everyday life as if things were normal. But once you're exposed to that kind of information, things are not normal anymore. And I was anxious, I was terrified, no one was talking about this, and I almost dropped out of school, for real. But instead, I signed up for a field study in California, and we were backpacking together as a small group for two months, which I know sounds very intense. And it was, but what I found is that we talked a lot. We talked about how we were feeling about the world, openly and honestly, and no one told me at any point to be more positive or more hopeful. Not once. And surprisingly, I found myself feeling better. I actually felt like I could face these issues that had seemed so insurmountable more head on. And I had this epiphany: What if by understanding ourselves and one another, we could find our way through this crisis in a new and different way? You know, what if psychology actually held a missing key to unlocking action on the greatest challenges facing our planet right now? So when I got back from the field study, I focused on clinical psychology, and I researched the relationships between trauma and grief and creativity. And the paradox at the heart of, I think, all of this is how do we stay present with what's really painful, how do we stay connected in the face of what's threatening and overwhelming and scary? And it turns out that psychology knows a lot about these things. Truly, a lot. But I wasn't hearing any of this being referenced in my environmental studies class, or the climate action meetings I started going to, or the international conferences, where everyone is asking: Why aren't we acting faster, and what's it going to take? And so this has become my mission of sorts, which is that I take insights from psychology and I translate them into resources and tools to support those working on the frontlines to turn things around. And that means for anyone, by the way. We're all on the frontlines right now. And it's my belief, after years of straddling these worlds between environment and climate and psychology, that this actually is a missing ingredient in our work that can exponentially accelerate our capacities to be creative and resilient and capable and skillful and courageous and all those things that the world is needing from us right now. So I'm going to share three concepts with you that I found particularly game-changing and how I make sense of this moment for us as humans. And the first is something called our window of tolerance. So Dr. Dan Siegel has described us all as having a window. How much stress can we tolerate while staying connected and what clinicians would call "integrated." Integrated, where we can actually be in touch with our thoughts and feelings and not just get kind of co-opted. And we all have a threshold. And what happens when we experience stress beyond what we can tolerate? We tend to go into the edges of our window. And on one hand, we might go into a sort of collapse, what's called a chaotic response, which looks like depression, despair, kind of a shutting down. And on the other side of this window is a more rigid response: denial, anger, rigid. And so when that happens, we actually lose our capacity to be integrated, resilient, adaptive, all those things that we want to be. And this is totally normal, but it's happening all around the world right now, right? We're all vacillating between these different feelings and emotions. And so with something like climate change, with every new scientific report, documentary, connecting the dots between, you know, what we're doing and the impact it's having, it can collectively be pushing us outside of our window of tolerance. And we lose that capacity, right? So, over the years, I've interviewed hundreds of people from all backgrounds and political affiliations, from the Midwest US to China, and I talked to people about how are we feeling about what's happening. Not what opinions or beliefs. What are we feeling about what's going on with your local environment, with your water, your soil, the big picture. And what I hear from people almost across the board, I'm telling you, is a bind. People tell me at some point in the conversation, "I care very deeply about what's happening, I'm incredibly freaked out. I'm scared, I love this land, I love the birds," whatever that is, "But I feel like my actions are insignificant. And I don't know where to start. And I'm also —" I hear between the lines of what people say — "I'm really scared to change. Really scared of any change, it's so — I can't even think about it, it's like, unthinkable." And this is the second concept, which is something called a double bind. And a double bind is when we feel sort of like, damned if you do, and damned if you don't, and you're just kind of stuck there. It's a very intolerable human experience. And we will do anything we can to get rid of it and just push it away. And so all that care and concern, it's there, it just goes down, it goes underground. But what happens is, it looks like people don't care, it looks like apathy. And so a lot of folks who are seeing the urgency of the situation are like, "We've got to motivate you. We've got to get you psyched." And we become cheerleaders for solutions. Or like, "Here's the facts, this is happening, wake up." And these things are actually not inherently bad, because we need solutions and we need to face the facts. But inadvertently, this can backfire and lead to more numbing and inaction, which is very perplexing for a lot of people. It's like, what the heck is going on, right? And so, this is because of this, you know, it's not really touching what's going on underneath. So imagine that you go see a therapist, and you've got a double bind. You're feeling really stuck, you know you've got to change and the therapist starts shouting at you and saying, "Don’t you see what's happening? If you don't act now, you're going to face terrifying consequences. Don’t you care? What's wrong with you? What's it going to take?" Or you see a therapist and you're feeling actually sad and grief. And this therapist says, "You know, don't think about it too much. Here's some simple things you can do. Simple positive things." And sends you on your way. So if it were me, I would fire this therapist immediately, because a good therapist practices something called attunement. I love this concept so much. Attunement, right, the word "to tune." And attunement is when we're feeling in sync, when we feel understood and we feel accepted for exactly where we are. And we feel that, you know, we're in relationship with the world in a way that makes sense, no one's trying to change us or shame us or judge us. Right? And attunement takes skill. When the stakes are high, let me tell you, it's very hard to want to attune with anything, when we're facing such urgent threats. But the paradox of the moment we're in is that when we are more in tune in our window of tolerance, we are so much more capable of solving problems, being creative, being adaptive, being flexible, being our brilliant selves, right? So what if our climate and environmental work was informed by these concepts, right, of window of tolerance, lot of double binds and attunement? So it can look like a whole lot of things. So I'm asked all the time, "OK, Renee, this sounds awesome for a clinical context, we don't have time for this." And that is absolutely not true. Because we can bring attunement into every aspect of our work on this issue. And it starts with ourselves. You actually can't do attunement unless you're in touch with yourself, I'm sorry to break it to you. There's no way around it. It's from the inside out. And so it starts with actually tuning in to "how am I feeling?" And being compassionate. I know it's easy to say but really being compassionate, it's like, these are hard issues. This is a hard moment to be a human being, we're waking up. I'm not a bad person. What's going on, bring curiosity into our own experience, which then allows us to attune socially, that's the next way we can apply this, is attuning, whether it's in small groups or one-on-one, campaigning, strategy, classrooms, movie theaters, parks. Where we can give each other permission to just be who we are, and again, this allows us to move into the higher level functioning. The executive function, the prefrontal cortex, when we feel that our nervous system can calm down and we are understood by the other. And the third way is leading with attunement. As leaders and influencers, showing up as human, as real, saying, "You know what? I am really scared. I don't know what all the answers are." Can you imagine leaders saying that? "I don't know. But here we are, and we're all needed. And we're in this together. And we can do this." That's a very different message than just, "We can do this," right. It's like, "Here we are. I'm scared, but this is happening." So here's the thing, all of this work exists, we have the tools to create these conditions that can allow us to show up as our brilliant selves. And I know, without doubt, 100 percent, that each one of us has the capacity to meet these challenges with the ingenuity and brilliance and bravery that we as humans have. We just need to cultivate the conditions together. We need each other. To support each other and allow ourselves to really meet this. That's what we need, so ... Let's take a deep breath. Have compassion for ourselves and one another in this moment, time in history, so we collectively process these painful truths, these difficult realities. Let's do this together. The world is ready for us to do this. And we can do this. Thank you. (Applause) |
The Egyptian myth of Isis and the seven scorpions | null | TED-Ed | A woman in rags emerged from the swamp flanked by seven giant scorpions. Carrying a baby, she headed for the nearest village to beg for food. She approached a magnificent mansion, but the mistress of the house took one look at her grimy clothes and unusual companions and slammed the door in her face. So she continued down the road until she came to a cottage. The woman there took pity on the stranger and offered her what she could: a simple meal and a bed of straw. Her guest was no ordinary beggar. She was Isis, the most powerful goddess in Egypt. Isis was in hiding from her brother Set, who murdered her husband and wanted to murder her infant son, Horus. Set was also a powerful god, and he was looking for them. So to keep her cover, Isis had to be very discreet— she couldn’t risk using her powers. But she was not without aid. Serket, goddess of venomous creatures, had sent seven of her fiercest servants to guard Isis and her son. As Isis and Horus settled into their humble accommodation, the scorpions fumed at how the wealthy woman had offended their divine mistress. They all combined their venom and gave it to one of the seven, Tefen. In the dead of night, Tefen crept over to the mansion. As he crawled under the door, he saw the owner’s young son sleeping peacefully and gave him a mighty sting. Isis and her hostess were soon awakened by loud wailing. As they peered out of the doorway of the cottage, they saw a mother running through the street, weeping as she cradled her son. When Isis recognized the woman who had turned her away, she understood what her scorpions had done. Isis took the boy in her arms and began to recite a powerful spell: "O poison of Tefen, come out of him and fall upon the ground! Poison of Befen, advance not, penetrate no farther, come out of him, and fall upon the ground! For I am Isis, the great Enchantress, the Speaker of spells. Fall down, O poison of Mestet! Hasten not, poison of Mestetef! Rise not, poison of Petet and Thetet! Approach not, poison of Matet!" With each name she invoked, that scorpion’s poison was neutralized. The child stirred, and his mother wept with gratitude and lamented her earlier callousness, offering all her wealth to Isis in repentance. The woman who had taken Isis in watched in awe— she had had no idea who she’d brought under her roof. And from that day on, the people learned to make a poultice to treat scorpion bites, speaking magical incantations just as the goddess had. |
Can you solve the death race riddle? | null | TED-Ed | The night before the Death Race across the Wastelands is set to begin, your uncle, the great inventor Slate Kanoli, got kidnapped by the ruthless No-Side gang. The only way to get him back is to race his Coil Runner against the gang yourself. Win and they’ll give back your uncle. Lose and you’ll forfeit the Coil Runner and all his other creations. As the grueling race gets underway, you find yourself falling further and further behind. Your only chance is to take a shortcut your uncle told you about–– the Flux Ravine gambit. Fortunately, the Coil Runner comes equipped with emergency turbo thrusters. Unfortunately, your uncle was a notorious tinkerer, and the system still had some kinks to work out. Just minor things like the ignition exploding, the reactor leaking, or the oxygen levels depleting— any of which would end your racing career immediately. Before his kidnapping, Uncle Slate determined that each of these critical failures was the ultimate result of a chain reaction originating in the thrusters. He was also certain that while one factor could trigger two different effects, and two factors could each independently lead to the same effect, no effect is caused by two factors in conjunction. However, Uncle Slate never got around to pinpointing which thruster was responsible for which error. All you have are the notes from his test runs: 1. When thrusters B and C are on, the Fuel gauge glows. 2. When thrusters A, B, and D are on, the Fuel gauge glows and the Helium tank rattles. 3. When thrusters C, D, and E are on, the Fuel gauge glows and the Gravitometer spins. 4. When thrusters A, D, and E are on, the Gravitometer spins and the Helium tank rattles. 5. Shortly after the Helium tank rattles and the Gravitometer spins, the Ignition explodes and the Oxygen levels deplete. 6. Shortly after the Fuel gauge glows and the Gravitometer spins, the Reactor leaks. You need to use as many thrusters as possible to give yourself the best chance at clearing the gap, without triggering any of the three catastrophic failures. Which thrusters should you activate? Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 The most important thing to remember here is that even if we know that one thing causes another, the converse is not necessarily true. For example, this panic switch shuts off the coil runner’s engine. But the engine being off doesn’t necessarily mean the panic switch was engaged— the coil runner could be out of fuel, or damaged— or turned off normally. We can, however, conclude that if the engine is running, the panic switch hasn’t been engaged. With that in mind, one way we can start is to work backwards from the three defects that could knock you out of the race. So let’s look at Slate’s last two notes, since they give direct information about those. The Gravitometer spins in both cases, but the results are different. That means the spinning Gravitometer can’t be the cause of any particular malfunction. If it were, the same thing would happen each time. So we can conclude that a glowing Fuel gauge makes the reactor leak, while a rattling Helium tank makes the Ignition explode and depletes the Oxygen levels. Once we know which two errors we need to avoid, we can make a table and use the logic of cause and effect to see which thrusters trigger them. Since the Helium tank is fine during the first test run when thrusters B and C are active, we can assume neither makes it rattle. And from the third run we know that D and E don’t either. That leaves thruster A, which was indeed used in the second and fourth test runs where the Helium tank rattled. Now what causes the glowing Fuel gauge? From the fourth test run we know it can’t be thrusters A, D, or E. So is the culprit, B, C, or each of them separately? The answer can be found in the second and third test runs: the fuel tank glowed in both, but B was activated in one, and C in the other. That means the B and C thrusters each independently make the Fuel tank glow. It looks like the A, B, and C thrusters are off limits. Fortunately, the other two are just enough to clear the jump. You rocket into first place and the gang begrudgingly hands over your uncle. He thanks you profusely, and decides to celebrate your victory with a cup of tea from his latest contraption... |
What we do (and don't) know about the coronavirus | {0: "David Heymann is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He led the World Health Organization's global response to the SARS epidemic in 2003."} | Currently | [As of the morning February 27, 2020, there were at least 82,000 confirmed cases worldwide of the coronavirus and 2,810 deaths from it. TED invited Dr. David Heymann to share the latest findings about the outbreak.] [What happens if you get infected with the coronavirus?] This looks like a very mild disease, like a common cold, in the majority of people. There are certain people who get infected and have very serious illness; among them are health workers. It's a very serious infection in them, as they get a higher dose than normal people, and at the same time, they have no immunity. So in the general population, it's likely that the dose of virus that you receive when you are infected is much less than the dose that a health worker would receive, health workers having more serious infections. So your infection would be less serious, hopefully. So that leaves the elderly and those with comorbidities to really be the ones that we have to make sure are taken care of in hospitals. [Who are the people who should be most concerned about this?] Well, the most concerned are people who are, first of all, in developing countries and who don't have access to good medical care and may not have access at all to a hospital, should an epidemic occur in their country. Those people would be at great risk, especially the elderly. Elderly in all populations are at risk, but especially those who can't get to oxygen. In industrialized countries, it's the very elderly who have comorbidities, who have diabetes, who have other diseases, who are at risk. The general population doesn't appear to be at great risk. [What pre-existing medical conditions put people at higher risk?] First of all, pulmonary disease existing as a comorbidity is also important. In general, the elderly are at greater risk, especially those over 70, because their immune systems are not as effective as they might have once been, and they are more susceptible to infections. In addition, in some instances in China, there's been a coinfection with influenza and at the same time, there have been some bacterial superinfections on the pneumonias that are occurring. [Where can we find up-to-date information?] The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta keeps track and has updates on a regular basis on its website. Also, the World Health Organization in Geneva, which is coordinating many of the activities going on internationally, also has a website with daily updates. It's our responsibility to get that information as individuals, so we understand and can make sure that we can contribute in our own way to prevention of major spread. [You led the global response to the SARS outbreak in 2003. How does this outbreak compare?] That's the same problem with all new infections. This is an infection that's coming to humans who have never been exposed to this virus before. They don't have any antibody protection, and it's not clear whether their immune system can handle this virus or not. This is a virus that usually finds itself in bats or in other animals, and all of a sudden, it's in humans. And humans just don't have experience with this virus. But gradually, we are beginning to learn a lot, as we did with SARS. And you know, there are certainly a larger number of deaths than there were with SARS. But when you divide that by a denominator of persons who are infected, there are many, many more persons infected than there were with SARS. The case fatality ratio, that is the ratio of deaths to the numbers of cases in SARS, was about 10 percent. With the current coronavirus, COVID-19, it is two percent or probably less. So it's a much less virulent virus, but it's still a virus that causes mortality, and that's what we don't want entering human populations. [Have we responded adequately at border crossings, such as airports?] It's clearly understood that airports or any land borders cannot prevent a disease from entering. People in the incubation period can cross that border, can enter countries and can then infect others when they become sick. So borders are not a means of preventing infections from entering a country by checking temperatures. Borders are important because you can provide to people arriving from areas that might be at risk of having had infection, provide them with an understanding, either a printed understanding or a verbal understanding, of what the signs and symptoms are of this infection, and what they should do if they feel that they might be infected. [What's the timeline for a vaccine?] Vaccines are under development right now, there's a lot of research going on. That research requires first that the vaccine be developed, then that it be studied for safety and effectiveness in animals, who are challenged with the virus after they are vaccinated, and then it must go into human studies. The animal studies have not yet begun, but will soon begin for certain vaccines. And it's thought that by the end of the year, or early next year, there may be some candidate vaccines that can then be studied for licensing by regulatory agencies. So we're talking about at least a year until there's vaccine available that can be used in many populations. [What questions about the outbreak are still unanswered?] It's clear we know how it transmits, we don't know how easily it transmits in humans, in communities or in unenclosed areas. We know, for example, that in the enclosed area of a cruise ship, it spread very easily. We need to better understand how it will spread once it gets into more open areas where people are exposed to people who might be sick. [What about the global response could be improved?] A major problem in the world today is that we look at outbreaks in developing countries as something that we need to go and stop. So when there's an outbreak of Ebola, we think "How can we go and stop this outbreak in the country?" We don't think about "How can we help that country strengthen its capacity, so that it can detect and respond to infections?" So we haven't invested enough in helping countries develop their core capacity in public health. What we've done is invested in many mechanisms globally, which can provide support to other countries to go and help stop outbreaks. But we want to see a world where every country can do its best to stop its own outbreaks. [Will we see more emerging disease outbreaks in the future?] Today, there are over seven billion people. And when those people come into the world, they demand more food, they demand a whole series of things and they live closer together. In fact, we're an urban world, where people live in urban areas. And at the same time, we're growing more animals, and those animals are contributing food to humans as well. So what we see is that that animal-human interface is becoming closer and closer together. And this intensive agriculture of animals and this intensive increase in human populations living together on the same planet is really a melting pot where outbreaks can occur and do occur. We will eventually have more and more of these outbreaks. So an emerging infection today is just a warning of what will happen in the future. We have to make sure that that technical collaboration in the world is there to work together to make sure that we can understand these outbreaks when they occur and rapidly provide the information necessary to control them. [Is the worst behind us?] I can't predict with accuracy. So all I can say is that we must all be prepared for the worst-case scenario. And at the same time, learn how we can protect ourselves and protect others should we become a part of that epidemic. [To learn more, visit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention World Health Organization] |
When local news dies, so does democracy | {0: 'Chuck Plunkett advocates for greater public awareness and support of quality local news.'} | TEDxMileHigh | I've been a journalist for more than 23 years, at the "Arkansas Democrat-Gazette," the "Pittsburgh Tribune Review" and most recently, "The Denver Post." (Applause) When I started at "The Denver Post" in 2003, it was among the country's 10 largest newspapers, with an impressive subscriber base and nearly 300 journalists. At the time, I was in my 30s. Any ambitious journalist that age aspires to work for one of the big national papers, like "The New York Times" or "The Wall Street Journal." But I was simply blown away by my first few weeks at "The Denver Post," and I thought, "This is going to be my paper. I can make a career right here." Well, seven years passed, we were sold to a hedge fund, Alden Global Capital. Within a few years — (Laughs) (Laughter) Some of you know this story. (Laughter) Within a few years, buyouts ordered by past and present owners would reduce the newsroom by nearly half. And I understood. The rule of thumb used to be that 80 percent of a newspaper's revenue came from pricy print ads and classifieds. With emerging giants like Google and Facebook and Craigslist, those advertizing dollars were evaporating. The entire industry was undergoing a massive shift from print to digital. Alden's orders were to be digital first. Take advantage of blogs, video and social media. They said that one day, the money we made online would make up for the money we lost in print. But that day never came. In 2013, we won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Aurora theater shooting. Alden ordered that more journalists be cut. Again, and again, and again, and again. We were forced to say goodbye to talented, hardworking journalists we considered not just friends but family. Those of us left behind were stretched impossibly thin, covering multiple beats and writing rushed articles. Inside a windowless meeting room in March of 2018, we learned that 30 more would have to go. This paper that once had 300 journalists would now have 70. And it didn't make sense. Here, we'd won multiple Pulitzer Prizes. We shifted our focus from print to digital, we hit ambitious targets and email from the brass talked up the Post's profit margins, which industry experts pegged at nearly 20 percent. So if our company was so successful and so profitable, why was our newsroom getting so much smaller and smaller? I knew that what was happening in Colorado was happening around the country. Since 2004, nearly 1,800 newsrooms have closed. You've heard of food deserts. These are news deserts. They are communities, often entire counties, with little to zero news coverage whatsoever. Making matters worse, many papers have become ghost ships, pretending to sail with a newsroom but really just wrapping ads around filler copy. More and more newsrooms are being sold off to companies like Alden. And in that meeting, their intentions couldn't have been clearer. Harvest what you can, throw away what's left. So, working in secret with a team of eight writers, we prepared a special Sunday Perspective section on the importance of local news. (Laughter) The Denver rebellion launched like a missile, and went off like a hydrogen bomb. [In An Extraordinary Act Of Defiance, Denver Post Urges Its Owner To Sell The Paper] ['Denver Post' Editorial Board Publicly Calls Out Paper's Owner] [On The Denver Post, vultures and superheroes] (Applause and cheers) Clearly, we weren't alone in our outrage. But as expected, I was forced to resign. (Laughter) And a year later, nothing's changed. "The Denver Post" is but a few lone journalists doing their admirable best in this husk of a once-great paper. Now, at least some of you are thinking to yourself, "So what?" Right? So what? Let this dying industry die. And I kind of get that. For one thing, the local news has been in decline for so long that many of you may not even remember what it's like to have a great local paper. Maybe you've seen "Spotlight" or "The Paper," movies that romanticize what journalism used to be. Well, I'm not here to be romantic or nostalgic. I'm here to warn you that when local news dies, so does our democracy. And that should concern you — (Applause and cheers) And that should concern you, regardless of whether you subscribe. Here's why. A democracy is a government of the people. People are the ultimate source of power and authority. A great local newsroom acts like a mirror. Its journalists see the community and reflect it back. That information is empowering. Seeing, knowing, understanding — this is how good decisions are made. When you have a great local paper, you have journalists sitting in on every city council meeting. Listening in to state house and senate hearings. Those important but, let's face it, sometimes devastatingly boring committee hearings. (Laughter) Journalists discover the flaws and ill-conceived measures and those bills fail, because the public was well-informed. Readers go to the polls and they know the pros and cons behind every ballot measure, because journalists did the heavy lifting for them. Even better, researchers have found that reading a local paper can mobilize 13 percent of nonvoters to vote. Thirteen percent. (Applause) That's the number that can change the outcome of many elections. When you don't have a great local paper, voters are left stranded at the polls, confused, trying to make their best guess based on a paragraph of legalese. Flawed measures pass. Well-conceived but highly technical measures fail. Voters become more partisan. Recently in Colorado, our governor's race had more candidates than anyone can remember. In years past, journalists would have thoroughly vetted, scrutinized, fact-checked, profiled, debated every contender in the local paper. "The Denver Post" did its best. But in the place of past levels of rigorous reporting and research, the public is increasingly left to interpret dog-and-pony-show stump speeches and clever campaign ads for themselves. With advertizing costing what it does, electability comes down to money. So by the end of the primaries, the only candidates left standing were the wealthiest and best-funded. Many experienced and praise-worthy candidates never got oxygen, because when local news declines, even big-ticket races become pay-to-play. Is it any surprise that our new governor was the candidate worth more than 300 million dollars? Or that billionaire businessmen like Donald Trump and Howard Schultz can seize the political stage? I don't think this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they talked about free and fair elections. (Applause and cheers) Now this is exactly why we can't just rely on the big national papers, like "The Journal" and "The Times" and "The Post." Those are tremendous papers, and we need them now, my God, more than ever before. But there is no world in which they could cover every election in every county in the country. No. The newsroom best equipped to cover your local election ought to be your local newsroom. If you're lucky and still have one. When election day is over, a great local paper is still there, waiting like a watchdog. When they're being watched, politicians have less power, police do right by the public, even massive corporations are on their best behavior. This mechanism that for generations has helped inform and guide us no longer functions the way it used to. You know intimately what the poisoned national discourse feels like, what a mockery of reasoned debate it has become. This is what happens when local newsrooms shutter and communities across the country go unwatched and unseen. Until we recognize that the decline of local news has serious consequences for our society, this situation will not improve. A properly staffed local newsroom isn't profitable, and in this age of Google and Facebook, it's not going to be. If newspapers are vital to our democracy, then we should fund them like they're vital to our democracy. (Applause and cheers) We cannot stand by and let our watchdogs be put down. We can't let more communities vanish into darkness. It is time to debate a public funding option before the fourth estate disappears, and with it, our grand democratic experiment. We need much more than a rebellion. It is time for a revolution. Thank you. (Applause and cheers) |
Art that reveals how technology frames reality | {0: "Jiabao Li augments human sensation with her wearables and interactive installations, raising questions about technology's influence on perception, identity and emotion."} | TEDWomen 2019 | I'm an artist and an engineer. And lately, I've been thinking a lot about how technology mediates the way we perceive reality. And it's being done in a superinvisible and nuanced way. Technology is designed to shape our sense of reality by masking itself as the actual experience of the world. As a result, we are becoming unconscious and unaware that it is happening at all. Take the glasses I usually wear, for example. These have become part of the way I ordinarily experience my surroundings. I barely notice them, even though they are constantly framing reality for me. The technology I am talking about is designed to do the same thing: change what we see and think but go unnoticed. Now, the only time I do notice my glasses is when something happens to draw my attention to it, like when it gets dirty or my prescription changes. So I asked myself, "As an artist, what can I create to draw the same kind of attention to the ways digital media — like news organizations, social media platforms, advertising and search engines — are shaping our reality?" So I created a series of perceptual machines to help us defamiliarize and question the ways we see the world. For example, nowadays, many of us have this kind of allergic reaction to ideas that are different from ours. We may not even realize that we've developed this kind of mental allergy. So I created a helmet that creates this artificial allergy to the color red. It simulates this hypersensitivity by making red things look bigger when you are wearing it. It has two modes: nocebo and placebo. In nocebo mode, it creates this sensorial experience of hyperallergy. Whenever I see red, the red expands. It's similar to social media's amplification effect, like when you look at something that bothers you, you tend to stick with like-minded people and exchange messages and memes, and you become even more angry. Sometimes, a trivial discussion gets amplified and blown way out of proportion. Maybe that's even why we are living in the politics of anger. In placebo mode, it's an artificial cure for this allergy. Whenever you see red, the red shrinks. It's a palliative, like in digital media. When you encounter people with different opinions, we will unfollow them, remove them completely out of our feeds. It cures this allergy by avoiding it. But this way of intentionally ignoring opposing ideas makes human community hyperfragmented and separated. The device inside the helmet reshapes reality and projects into our eyes through a set of lenses to create an augmented reality. I picked the color red, because it's intense and emotional, it has high visibility and it's political. So what if we take a look at the last American presidential election map through the helmet? (Laughter) You can see that it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or a Republican, because the mediation alters our perceptions. The allergy exists on both sides. In digital media, what we see every day is often mediated, but it's also very nuanced. If we are not aware of this, we will keep being vulnerable to many kinds of mental allergies. Our perception is not only part of our identities, but in digital media, it's also a part of the value chain. Our visual field is packed with so much information that our perception has become a commodity with real estate value. Designs are used to exploit our unconscious biases, algorithms favor content that reaffirms our opinions, so that every little corner of our field of view is being colonized to sell ads. Like, when this little red dot comes out in your notifications, it grows and expands, and to your mind, it's huge. So I started to think of ways to put a little dirt, or change the lenses of my glasses, and came up with another project. Now, keep in mind this is conceptual. It's not a real product. It's a web browser plug-in that could help us to notice the things that we would usually ignore. Like the helmet, the plug-in reshapes reality, but this time, directly into the digital media itself. It shouts out the hidden filtered voices. What you should be noticing now will be bigger and vibrant, like here, this story about gender bias emerging from the sea of cats. (Laughter) The plug-in could dilute the things that are being amplified by an algorithm. Like, here in this comment section, there are lots of people shouting about the same opinions. The plug-in makes their comments super small. (Laughter) So now the amount of pixel presence they have on the screen is proportional to the actual value they are contributing to the conversation. (Laughter) (Applause) The plug-in also shows the real estate value of our visual field and how much of our perception is being commoditized. Different from ad blockers, for every ad you see on the web page, it shows the amount of money you should be earning. (Laughter) We are living in a battlefield between reality and commercial distributed reality, so the next version of the plug-in could strike away that commercial reality and show you things as they really are. (Laughter) (Applause) Well, you can imagine how many directions this could really go. Believe me, I know the risks are high if this were to become a real product. And I created this with good intentions to train our perception and eliminate biases. But the same approach could be used with bad intentions, like forcing citizens to install a plug-in like that to control the public narrative. It's challenging to make it fair and personal without it just becoming another layer of mediation. So what does all this mean for us? Even though technology is creating this isolation, we could use it to make the world connected again by breaking the existing model and going beyond it. By exploring how we interface with these technologies, we could step out of our habitual, almost machine-like behavior and finally find common ground between each other. Technology is never neutral. It provides a context and frames reality. It's part of the problem and part of the solution. We could use it to uncover our blind spots and retrain our perception and consequently, choose how we see each other. Thank you. (Applause) |
How a miniaturized atomic clock could revolutionize space exploration | {0: 'Jill Seubert navigates spacecraft throughout the solar system, exploring with robots where humans cannot yet go.'} | TEDxUCLA | Six months ago, I watched with bated breath as NASA's InSight lander descended towards the surface of Mars. Two hundred meters, 80 meters, 60, 40, 20, 17 meters. Receiving confirmation of successful touchdown was one of the most ecstatic moments of my life. And hearing that news was possible because of two small cube sets that went along to Mars with InSight. Those two cube sets essentially livestreamed InSight's telemetry back to Earth, so that we could watch in near-real time as that InSight lander went screaming towards the surface of the red planet, hitting the atmosphere of Mars at a top speed of about 12,000 miles per hour. Now, that event was livestreamed to us from over 90 million miles away. It was livestreamed from Mars. Meanwhile, the two Voyager spacecraft — now, these are these two almost unbelievably intrepid explorers. They were launched the same year that all of us here were being introduced to Han Solo for the first time. And they are still sending back data from interstellar space over 40 years later. We are sending more spacecraft further into deep space than ever before. But every one of those spacecraft out there depends on its navigation being performed right here at Earth to tell it where it is and, far more importantly, where it is going. And we have to do that navigation here on Earth for one simple reason: spacecraft are really bad at telling the time. But if we can change that, we can revolutionize the way we explore deep space. Now, I am a deep space navigator, and I know you're probably thinking, "What is that job?" Well, it is an extremely unique and also very fun job. I steer spacecraft, from the moment they separate from their launch vehicle to when they reach their destination in space. And these destinations — say Mars for example, or Jupiter — they are really far away. To put my job in context for you: it's like me standing here in Los Angeles and shooting an arrow, and with that arrow, I hit a target that's the size of a quarter, and that target the size of a quarter is sitting in Times Square, New York. Now, I have the opportunity to adjust the course of my spacecraft a few times along that trajectory, but in order to do that, I need to know where it is. And tracking a spacecraft as it travels through deep space is fundamentally a problem of measuring time. You see, I can't just pull out my ruler and measure how far away my spacecraft is. But I can measure how long it takes a signal to get there and back again. And the concept is exactly the same as an echo. If I stand in front of a mountain and I shout, the longer it takes for me to hear my echo back at me, the further away that mountain is. So we measure that signal time very, very accurately, because getting it wrong by just a tiny fraction of a second might mean the difference between your spacecraft safely and gently landing on the surface of another planet or creating yet another crater on that surface. Just a tiny fraction of a second, and it can be the difference between a mission's life or death. So we measure that signal time very, very accurately here on Earth, down to better than one-billionth of a second. But it has to be measured here on Earth. There's this great imbalance of scale when it comes to deep space exploration. Historically, we have been able to send smallish things extremely far away, thanks to very large things here on our home planet. As an example, this is the size of a satellite dish that we use to talk to these spacecraft in deep space. And the atomic clocks that we use for navigation are also large. The clocks and all of their supporting hardware can be up to the size of a refrigerator. Now, if we even want to talk about sending that capability into deep space, that refrigerator needs to shrink down into something that can fit inside the produce drawer. So why does this matter? Well, let's revisit one of our intrepid explorers, Voyager 1. Voyager 1 is just over 13 billion miles away right now. As you know, it took over 40 years to get there, and it takes a signal traveling at the speed of light over 40 hours to get there and back again. And here's the thing about these spacecraft: they move really fast. And Voyager 1 doesn't stop and wait for us to send directions from Earth. Voyager 1 keeps moving. In that 40 hours that we are waiting to hear that echo signal here on the Earth, Voyager 1 has moved on by about 1.5 million miles. It's 1.5 million miles further into largely uncharted territory. So it would be great if we could measure that signal time directly at the spacecraft. But the miniaturization of atomic clock technology is ... well, it's difficult. Not only does the clock technology and all the supporting hardware need to shrink down, but you also need to make it work. Space is an exceptionally harsh environment, and if one piece breaks on this instrument, it's not like we can just send a technician out to replace the piece and continue on our way. The journeys that these spacecraft take can last months, years, even decades. And designing and building a precision instrument that can support that is as much an art as it is a science and an engineering. But there is good news: we are making some amazing progress, and we're about to take our very first baby steps into a new age of atomic space clocks. Soon we will be launching an ion-based atomic clock that is space-suitable. And this clock has the potential to completely flip the way we navigate. This clock is so stable, it measures time so well, that if I put it right here and I turned it on, and I walked away, I would have to come back nine million years later for that clock's measurement to be off by one second. So what can we do with a clock like this? Well, instead of doing all of the spacecraft navigation here on the Earth, what if we let the spacecraft navigate themselves? Onboard autonomous navigation, or a self-driving spacecraft, if you will, is one of the top technologies needed if we are going to survive in deep space. When we inevitably send humans to Mars or even further, we need to be navigating that ship in real time, not waiting for directions to come from Earth. And measuring that time wrong by just a tiny fraction of a second can mean the difference between a mission's life or death, which is bad enough for a robotic mission, but just think about the consequences if there was a human crew on board. But let's assume that we can get our astronauts safely to the surface of their destination. Once they're there, I imagine they'd like a way to find their way around. Well, with this clock technology, we can now build GPS-like navigation systems at other planets and moons. Imagine having GPS on the Moon or Mars. Can you see an astronaut standing on the surface of Mars with Olympus Mons rising in the background, and she's looking down at her Google Maps Mars Edition to see where she is and to chart a course to get where she needs to go? Allow me to dream for a moment, and let's talk about something far, far in the future, when we are sending humans to places much further away than Mars, places where waiting for a signal from the Earth in order to navigate is just not realistic. Imagine in this scenario that we can have a constellation, a network of communication satellites scattered throughout deep space broadcasting navigation signals, and any spacecraft picking up that signal can travel from destination to destination to destination with no direct tie to the Earth at all. The ability to accurately measure time in deep space can forever change the way we navigate. But it also has the potential to give us some pretty cool science. You see, that same signal that we use for navigation tells us something about where it came from and the journey that it took as it traveled from antenna to antenna. And that journey, that gives us data, data to build better models, better models of planetary atmospheres throughout our solar system. We can detect subsurface oceans on far-off icy moons, maybe even detect tiny ripples in space due to relativistic gravity. Onboard autonomous navigation means we can support more spacecraft, more sensors to explore the universe, and it also frees up navigators — people like me — to work on finding the answers to other questions. And we still have a lot of questions to answer. We know such precious little about this universe around us. In recent years, we have discovered nearly 3,000 planetary systems outside of our own solar system, and those systems are home to almost 4,000 exoplanets. To put that number in context for you: when I was learning about planets for the first time as a child, there were nine, or eight if you didn't count Pluto. But now there are 4,000. It is estimated that dark matter makes up about 96 percent of our universe, and we don't even know what it is. All of the science returned from all of our deep space missions combined is just this single drop of knowledge in a vast ocean of questions. And if we want to learn more, to discover more, to understand more, then we need to explore more. The ability to accurately keep time in deep space will revolutionize the way that we can explore this universe, and it might just be one of the keys to unlocking some of those secrets that she holds so dear. Thank you. (Applause) |
What investigating neural pathways can reveal about mental health | {0: 'Kay M. Tye investigates the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social and emotional processes, particularly those relevant to psychiatric disease.'} | TED@NAS | I'm going to start by saying something you think you know to be true. Your brain creates all facets of your mind. So then why do we treat mental and physical illnesses so differently, if we think we know that the mind comes from the brain? As a neuroscientist, I'm often told that I'm not allowed to study how internal states like anxiety or craving or loneliness are represented by the brain, and so I decided to set out and do exactly that. My research program is designed to understand the mind by investigating brain circuits. Specifically, how does our brain give rise to emotion. It's really hard to study feelings and emotions, because you can't measure them. Behavior is still the best and only window into the emotional experience of another. For both animals and people, yes, self-report is a behavioral output. Motivated behaviors fall into two general classes: seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. The ability to approach things that are good for you and avoid things that are bad for you is fundamental to survival. And in our modern-day society, trouble telling the difference can be labeled as a mental illness. If I was having car trouble, and I took my car to the mechanic, the first thing they do is look under the hood. But with mental health research, you can't just pop open the hood with the press of a button. So this is why we do experiments on animals. Specifically, in my lab, mice. To understand the brain, well, we need to study brains. And for the first time, we actually can. We can pop open the hood. We can look inside and do an experiment and see what comes out. Technology has opened new windows into the black box that is our minds. The development of optogenetic tools has allowed us unprecedented control over specific neurons in the brain and how they talk to each other by firing electrical signals. We can genetically engineer neurons to be light sensitive and then use light to control how neurons fire. This can change an animal's behavior, giving us insight into what that neural circuit can do. Want to know how scientists figure this out? Scientists developed optogenetic tools by borrowing knowledge from other basic science fields. Algae are single-celled organisms that have evolved to swim towards light. And when blue light shines onto the eyespot of an algae cell, a channel opens, sending an electrical signal that makes little flagella flap and propels the algae towards sunlight. If we clone this light-sensitive part of the algae and then add it to neurons through genetic modification, we can make neurons light-sensitive, too. Except, with neurons, when we shine light down an optical fiber deep into the brain, we change how they send electrical signals to other neurons in the brain and thus change the animal's behavior. With the help of my colleagues, I pioneered the use of optogenetic tools to selectively target neurons that are living in point A, sending messages down wires aimed at point B, leaving neighboring neurons going other places unaffected. This approach allowed us to test the function of each wire within the tangled mess that is our brain. A brain region called the amygdala has long been thought to be important for emotion, and my laboratory discovered that the amygdala resembles a fork in the road where activating one path can drive positive emotion and approach, and activating another path can drive negative emotion and avoidance. I'm going to show you a couple of examples — a taste of raw data — of how we can use optogenetics to target specific neurons in the brain and get very specific changes in behavior. Anxiety patients have abnormal communication between two parts of the amygdala, but in people, it's hard to know if this abnormality is cause or effect of the disease. We can use optogenetics to target the same pathway in a mouse, and see what happens. So this is the elevated plus maze. It's a widely used anxiety test that measures the amount of time that the mouse spends in the safety of the closed arms relative to exploring the open arms. Mice have evolved to prefer enclosed spaces, like the safety of their burrows, but to find food, water, mates, they need to go out into the open where they're more vulnerable to predatory threats. So I'm sitting in the background here, and I'm about to flip the switch. And now, when I flip the switch and turn the light on, you can see the mouse begins to explore the open arms of the maze more. And in contrast to drug treatments for anxiety, there's no sedation, no locomotor impairment, just coordinated, natural-looking exploration. So not only is the effect almost immediate, but there are no detectable side effects. Now, when I flip the switch off, you can see that the mouse goes back to its normal brain function and back to its corner. When I was in the lab and I was taking these data, I was all by myself, and I was so excited. I was so excited, I did one of these quiet screams. (Silently) Aah! (Laughter) Why was I so excited? I mean, yeah, theoretically, I knew that the brain controlled the mind, but to flip the switch with my hand and see the mouse change its behavioral state so rapidly and so reversibly, it was really the first time that I truly believed it. Since that first breakthrough, there have been a number of other discoveries. Finding specific neural circuits that can elicit dramatic changes in animal behavior. Here's another example: compulsive overeating. We can eat for two reasons. Seeking pleasure, like tasty food, or avoiding pain, like being hungry. How can we find a treatment for compulsive overeating without messing up the hunger-driven feeding that we need to survive? The first step is to understand how the brain gives rise to feeding behavior. This fully-fed mouse is just exploring a space completely devoid of any food. Here we're using optogenetics to target neurons living in the hypothalamus, sending messages down wires aimed at the midbrain. When I turn the light on, right here, you can see that the mouse immediately begins licking the floor. (Laughter) This seemingly frenzied behavior is about to escalate into something I find really incredible. It's kind of trippy, actually. Ready? It's right here. See, he picks up his hands as if he is eating a piece of food, but there's nothing there, he's not holding anything. So this circuit is sufficient to drive feeding behavior in the absence of hunger, even in the absence of food. I can't know for sure how this mouse is feeling, but I speculate these neurons drive craving based on the behaviors we elicit when we target this pathway. Turn the light back off — animal's back to normal. When we silence this pathway, we can suppress and reduce compulsive overeating without altering hunger-driven feeding. What did you take away from these two videos that I just showed you? That making a very specific change to neural circuits in the brain can have specific changes to behavior. That every conscious experience that we have is governed by cells in our brain. I am the daughter of a physicist and a biologist, who literally met on the boat coming to America in pursuit of an education. So naturally, since there was "no pressure" to be a scientist ... (Laughter) as a college student, I had to decide whether I wanted to focus on psychology, the study of the mind, or neuroscience, the study of the brain. And I chose neuroscience, because I wanted to understand how the mind is born out of biological tissue. But really, I've come full circle to do both. And now my research program bridges the gap between the mind and the brain. Research from my laboratory suggests that we can begin to tie specific neural circuits to emotional states. And we have found a number of circuits that control anxiety-related behavior, compulsive overeating, social interaction, avoidance and many other types of motivated behaviors that may reflect internal emotional states. We used to think of functions of the mind as being defined by brain regions. But my work shows that within a given brain region, there are many different neurons doing different things. And these functions are partly defined by the paths they take. Here's a metaphor to help illustrate how these discoveries change the way that we think about the brain. Let's say that the brain is analogous to the world and that neurons are analogous to people. And we want to understand how information is transmitted across the planet. Sure, it's useful to know where a given person is located when recording what they're saying. But I would argue that it's equally important to know who this person is talking to, who is listening and how the people listening respond to the information that they receive. The current state of mental health treatment is essentially a strategy of trial and error. And it is not working. The development of new drug therapies for mental health disorders has hit a brick wall, with scarcely any real progress since the 1950s. So what does the future hold? In the near future, I expect to see a mental health treatment revolution, where we focus on specific neural circuits in the brain. Diagnoses will be made based on both behavioral symptoms and measurable brain activity. Further in the future, by combining our ability to make acute changes to the brain and get acute changes to behavior with our knowledge of synaptic plasticity to make more permanent changes, we could push the brain into a state of fixing itself by reprogramming neural circuits. Exposure therapy at the circuit level. Once we switch the brain into a state of self-healing, this could potentially have long-lasting effects with no side effects. I can envision a future where neural circuit reprogramming represents a potential cure, not just a treatment. OK, but what about right now? If from this very moment forward, each and every one of you left this talk and truly believed that the mind comes entirely from cells in your brain, then we could immediately get rid of negative perceptions and stigmas that prevent so many people from getting the mental health support that they need. Mental health professionals, we're always thinking about what's the next new treatment. But before we can apply new treatments, we need people to feel comfortable seeking them. Imagine how dramatically we could reduce the rates of suicides and school shootings if everyone who needed mental health support actually got it. When we truly understand exactly how the mind comes from the brain, we will improve the lives of everyone who will have a mental illness in their lifetime — half the population — as well as everyone else with whom they share the world. Thank you. (Applause) |
How one woman put man on the moon | null | TED-Ed | At roughly 4pm on July 20, 1969, mankind was just minutes away from landing on the surface of the moon. But before the astronauts began their final descent, an emergency alarm lit up. Something was overloading the computer, and threatened to abort the landing. Back on Earth, Margaret Hamilton held her breath. She'd led the team developing the pioneering in-flight software, so she knew this mission had no room for error. But the nature of this last-second emergency would soon prove her software was working exactly as planned. Born 33 years earlier in Paoli, Indiana, Hamilton had always been inquisitive. In college, she studied mathematics and philosophy, before taking a research position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pay for grad school. Here, she encountered her first computer while developing software to support research into the new field of chaos theory. Next at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Hamilton developed software for America’s first air defense system to search for enemy aircraft. But when she heard that renowned engineer Charles Draper was looking for help sending mankind to the moon, she immediately joined his team. NASA looked to Draper and his group of over 400 engineers to invent the first compact digital flight computer, the Apollo Guidance Computer. Using input from astronauts, this device would be responsible for guiding, navigating and controlling the spacecraft. At a time when unreliable computers filled entire rooms, the AGC needed to operate without any errors, and fit in one cubic foot of space. Draper divided the lab into two teams, one for designing hardware and one for developing software. Hamilton led the team that built the on-board flight software for both the Command and Lunar Modules. This work, for which she coined the term “software engineering," was incredibly high stakes. Human lives were on the line, so every program had to be perfect. Margaret’s software needed to quickly detect unexpected errors and recover from them in real time. But this kind of adaptable program was difficult to build, since early software could only process jobs in a predetermined order. To solve this problem, Margaret designed her program to be “asynchronous,” meaning the software's more important jobs would interrupt less important ones. Her team assigned every task a unique priority to ensure that each job occurred in the correct order and at the right time— regardless of any surprises. After this breakthrough, Margaret realized her software could help the astronauts work in an asynchronous environment as well. She designed Priority Displays that would interrupt astronaut’s regularly scheduled tasks to warn them of emergencies. The astronaut could then communicate with Mission Control to determine the best path forward. This marked the first time flight software communicated directly— and asynchronously— with a pilot. It was these fail safes that triggered the alarms just before the lunar landing. Buzz Aldrin quickly realized his mistake— he’d inadvertently flipped the rendezvous radar switch. This radar would be essential on their journey home, but here it was using up vital computational resources. Fortunately, the Apollo Guidance Computer was well equipped to manage this. During the overload, the software restart programs allowed only the highest priority jobs to be processed— including the programs necessary for landing. The Priority Displays gave the astronauts a choice— to land or not to land. With minutes to spare, Mission Control gave the order. The Apollo 11 landing was about the astronauts, Mission Control, software and hardware all working together as an integrated system of systems. Hamilton’s contributions were essential to the work of engineers and scientists inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s goal to reach the Moon. And her life-saving work went far beyond Apollo 11— no bugs were ever found in the in-flight software for any crewed Apollo missions. After her work on Apollo, Hamilton founded a company that uses its unique universal systems language to create breakthroughs for systems and software. In 2003, NASA honored her achievements with the largest financial award they’d ever given to an individual. And 47 years after her software first guided astronauts to the moon, Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for changing the way we think about technology. |
How women are revolutionizing Rwanda | {0: 'Agnes Binagwaho helped rebuild the Rwandan health care system and continues to fight for positive change in global health.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | I came back to my home of Rwanda two years after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. The country was devastated. The children I was caring for in the hospitals were dying from treatable conditions, because we didn't have equipment or medicine to save them. I was tempted to pack my bag and run away. But I debated with myself. And because I'm really dedicated to social justice and equity, and there were only five pediatricians in total for millions of children in Rwanda, I decided to stay. But among the people who have motivated my decision to stay, there were some fantastic women of Rwanda, some women who had faced the genocide and survived it. They had to overcome unbelievable pain and suffering. Some of them were raising children conceived through rape. Others were dying slowly with HIV and forgave the perpetrators, who voluntarily infected them using HIV and rape as a weapon. So, they inspired me. If they can do that, I can stay and try to do my best. Those ladies were really activists of peace and reconciliation. They show us a way to rebuild a country for our children and grandchildren to have, one day, a place they can call home, with pride. And you can ask yourself where this shift of mindset has brought our country. Today in Rwanda, we have the highest percentage of women in parliament. (Applause) Wait till I tell you the percentage — sixty-one percent. (Applause) Today, we have the best campaign for the vaccination of children with, among our success, 93 percent of our girls vaccinated against HPV — (Applause) to protect them against cervical cancer. In this country, it's 54. (Laughter) We have reduced child mortality by 75 percent, maternal mortality by 80 percent. In early 2000s, there were nine women who were dying every day around delivery and pregnancy. Today, it's around two. It's an unfinished agenda. We still have a long way to go. Two is still too much. But, do I believe that those results are because we had a big number of women in power positions? I do. (Laughter) There is — yes — (Applause) there is a study in the developing world that shows that if you improve the status of women, you improve the status of the community where they live. Up to 47 percent of decrease in child mortality. And even in this country where we are now, it's true. There is a study by a lady called Patricia Homan, who projected that if women and men were at parity in state legislatures, there would be a drop of 14.5 percent in child mortality — in America! So we know that women, when they use their skills in leadership positions, they enhance the entire population they are in charge of. And imagine what would happen if women were at parity with men all over the world. What a huge benefit we could expect. Hmm? Oh, yeah. (Applause) Because in general, we have a different style of leadership: more inclusive, more empathetic, more caring for little children. And this makes the difference. Unfortunately, this ideal doesn't exist in the world, and the difference between men and women in leadership positions is too big. Gender inequity is the norm in the majority of professions, even in global health. I have learned that if we focus on women's education, we improve their life positively as well as the well-being of their community. This is why now I dedicate my life to education. And this is totally aligned with my sense of equity and my pursuit of social justice, because if you want to increase access to health services, you need first to increase access to health education. So with friends and partners, we are building a beautiful university in the rural north of Rwanda. We educate our students to provide quality, equitable, holistic care to everyone, leaving no one out, focusing on the vulnerable, especially women and children, who are historically the last to be served. We transform them into leaders and give them managerial skills and advocacy skills for them to be smooth changemakers in the society where they will be, so that they can build health systems that allow them to care about the vulnerable where they are. And it's really transformative. Because currently, medical education, for example, is given in institutions based in cities, focused on quality health services and skills, clinical skills, to be given in institutions. We also focus on quality clinical skills but with biosocial approach to the condition of patient, for care to be given in communities where the people live, with hospitalization only when necessary. And also, after four to seven years of clinical education in cities, young graduates don't want to go back to rural area. So this is why we have built the University of Global Health Equity, an initiative of Partners in Health, called UGHE, in the rural north of Rwanda. (Applause) Our students are meant to go and change the world. They will come from all over — it's a global university — and will get the medical education for free at one condition: they have to serve the vulnerable across the world during six to nine years. They will keep the salary for themselves and their families but turn the education we give in quality clinical services, especially for the vulnerable. And doing so, they sign an agreement at the start that they will do that, a binding agreement. We don't want money. We have to go and mobilize the money. But they will turn this in quality service delivery for all. For this, of course, we need a strong gender equity agenda. And in all our classes, master's course, minimum of 50 percent of women. (Applause) And I'm proud to say that for the medical school that started five months ago, we have enrolled 70 percent girls. (Applause) This is a statement against the current inequity for women to access medical education in our continent. I believe in women's education. This is why I applaud African ladies who go all over the world to increase their education, their skills and their knowledge. But I hope they will bring that back to Africa to build the continent and make the continent a strong continent, because I'm sure a stronger Africa will make the world stronger. (Applause) Twenty-three years ago, I went back to Rwanda, to a broken Rwanda, that now is still a poor country but shining with a bright future. And I am full of joy to have come back, even if some days were very difficult, and even if some days I was depressed, because I didn't find a solution and people were dying, or things were not moving enough. But I'm so proud to have contributed to improve my community. And this makes me full of joy. So, African women from the diaspora, if you hear me, never forget your homeland. And when you are ready, come back home. I did so. It has fulfilled my life. So, come back home. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's a squillo, and why do opera singers need it? | null | TED-Ed | Gripped with vengeful passion, The Queen of the Night tears across the stage. She begins to sing her titular aria, one of the most famous sections from Mozart’s beloved opera, "The Magic Flute." The orchestra fills the hall with music, but the queen’s voice soars above the instruments. Its melody rings out across thousands of patrons, reaching seats 40 meters away— all without any assistance from a microphone. How is it possible that this single voice can be heard so clearly, above the strains of dozens of instruments? The answer lies in the physics of the human voice, and the carefully honed technique of an expert opera singer. All the music in this opera house originates from the vibrations created by instruments— whether it’s the strings of a violin or the vocal folds of a performer. These vibrations send waves into the air, which our brains interpret as sound. The frequency of these vibrations–– specifically, the number of waves per second–– is how our brains determine the pitch of a single note. But in fact, every note we hear is actually a combination of multiple vibrations. Imagine a guitar string vibrating at its lowest frequency. This is called the fundamental, and this low pitch is what our ears mostly use to identify a note. But this lowest vibration triggers additional frequencies called overtones, which layer on top of the fundamental. These overtones break down into specific frequencies called harmonics, or partials— and manipulating them is how opera singers work their magic. Every note has a set of frequencies that comprise its harmonic series. The first partial vibrates at twice the frequency of the fundamental. The next partial is three times the fundamental’s frequency, and so on. Virtually all acoustic instruments produce harmonic series, but each instrument’s shape and material changes the balance of its harmonics. For example, a flute emphasizes the first few partials, but in a clarinet’s lowest register, the odd-numbered partials resonate most strongly. The strength of various partials is part of what gives each instrument its unique sonic signature. It also affects an instrument’s ability to stand out in a crowd, because our ears are more strongly attuned to some frequencies than others. This is the key to an opera singer’s power of projection. An operatic soprano— the highest of the four standard voice parts— can produce notes with fundamental frequencies ranging from 250 to 1,500 vibrations per second. Human ears are most sensitive to frequencies between 2,000 and 5,000 vibrations per second. So if the singer can bring out the partials in this range, she can target a sensory sweet spot where she’s most likely to be heard. Higher partials are also advantageous because there’s less competition from the orchestra, whose overtones are weaker at those frequencies. The result of emphasizing these partials is a distinctive ringing timbre called a singer’s squillo. Opera singers work for decades to create their squillo. They can produce higher frequencies by modifying the shape and tension in their vocal folds and vocal tract. And by shifting the position of their tongues and lips, they accentuate some overtones while dampening others. Singers also increase their range of partials with vibrato— a musical effect in which a note slightly oscillates in pitch. This creates a fuller sound that rings out over the instruments’ comparatively narrow vibratos. Once they have the right partials, they employ other techniques to boost their volume. Singers expand their lung capacity and perfect their posture for consistent, controlled airflow. The concert hall helps as well, with rigid surfaces that reflect sound waves towards the audience. All singers take advantage of these techniques, but different vocal signatures demand different physical preparation. A Wagnerian singer needs to build up stamina to power through the composer’s four-hour epics. While bel canto singers require versatile vocal folds to vault through acrobatic arias. Biology also sets some limits— not every technique is feasible for every set of muscles, and voices change as singers age. But whether in an opera hall or a shower stall, these techniques can turn un-amplified voices into thundering musical masterpieces. |
What happens when a Silicon Valley technologist works for the government | {0: 'An early employee at Google, Matt Cutts works to modernize the US government as an administrator at U.S. Digital Service (USDS).'} | TED2019 | Hi everybody. My name is Matt Cutts, and I worked at Google for almost 17 years. As a distinguished engineer there, I was pretty close to the top of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Then I decided to follow some inspiring folks and do a short tour at the US Digital Service. That's the group of geeks that helped rescue HealthCare.gov when that website went down hard in 2013. Yeah. So I signed up for a three-to-six-month tour, and almost three years later, I'm still in Washington DC, working for the federal government, because the government really needs technologists right now. At my old job, every room had videoconferencing integrated with calendars, power cables were built right into the furniture. When I moved to a government agency, I had to call a person to set up a phone conference. And when we moved to a new office, we didn't have furniture for a while, so we set up the phone on a trash can. One of the things that surprised me, whenever I moved to DC, is how much the government still has to deal with paper. This is a facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where people were worried that the building might be structurally unsound from the weight of all that paper. Yeah. Paper has some downsides. Here's a pop quiz: If your last name starts with H or higher, H or higher, would you raise your hand? Wow. I have some bad news: Your veteran records might have been destroyed in a fire in 1973. (Laughter) Yeah. Paper processes are also slower and more prone to errors. If you're a veteran and you're applying for your health benefits using a paper form, you might have to wait months for that form to be processed. We replaced that with a web form, and now most veterans find out if they can get access to their health benefits in 10 minutes. (Applause) Here's another launch that I'm proud of. We worked with the Small Business Administration to move one of their systems from paper to digital. So this is a picture from before, and this is afterwards. Same cubicles, same people, just a better system for everyone. At one point, we wanted to celebrate modernizing a different system, and so we went to a local grocery store and we said, "Can you make a cake and decorate it with the form that we've digitized?" And the grocery store got really weirded out by that request. They wanted a letter on official government letterhead. Well, we work for the government, so we wrote a letter that said, "You can use this public-domain form on a cake for celebratory purposes." (Laughter) Which led to bad jokes about filling forms out in triplicake. Yes, dad jokes in government. Now I've talked a lot about paper, but we also bring up computer systems that go down. We bring in modern technology practices, like user-centered design and the cloud, and we also help improve procurement. It turns out government buys software the same way that it buys chairs and brownies and tanks: from government regulations that are over 1,000 pages long. So yes, there's some stuff that's messed up in government right now. But if you think Silicon Valley is the savior in this story, (Laughs) you've got another thing coming. Some of the best and brightest minds in technology are working on meal-delivery start-ups and scooters and how to deliver weed to people better. Is that really the most important thing to work on right now? Silicon Valley likes to talk about making the world a better place. But you feel your impact in a much more visceral way in government. This is somebody whose dad passed away. He hunted me down on Twitter to say that a system that we had improved worked well for him during a tough time. Those tough times are when government needs to work well and why we need innovation in government. Now I have a confession to make. When I came to DC, I sometimes used words like bureaucrat. These days, I'm much more likely to use words like civil servant. Like Francine, who can make you cry. Or at least, she made me cry, because she's so inspiring. I am also deeply, fiercely proud of my colleagues. They will work through illogical situations and put in late nights to get to the right result. The government can't pay huge salary bonuses, so we ended up making our own awards. Our mascot is a crab named Molly. And so that award is actually a crab-shaped purse, screwed into sheet metal. These days, I believe less in silver bullets that are going to fix everything. I believe more in the people who show up to help. If you're looking for something deeply meaningful — and full disclosure, sometimes incredibly frustrating — here's what you need to know. There is something difficult and messy and vital and magical happening when civil servants partner with technologists at the city and state and national level. You don't have to do it forever. But you can make a difference in public service right now. Thank you. (Applause) |
The gender-fluid history of the Philippines | {0: 'France Villarta, a communications consultant for Wells Fargo, is passionate about exploring the intersectionality of gender, politics and culture.'} | TED@WellsFargo | I was an eight-year-old kid in the mid-1990s. I grew up in southern Philippines. At that age, you're young enough to be oblivious about what society expects from each of us but old enough to be aware of what's going on around you. We lived in a one-bedroom house, all five of us. Our house was amongst clusters of houses made mostly of wood and corrugated metal sheets. These houses were built very close to each other along unpaved roads. There was little to no expectation of privacy. Whenever an argument broke out next door, you heard it all. Or, if there was a little ... something something going on — (Laughter) you would probably hear that, too. (Laughter) Like any other kid, I learned what a family looked like. It was a man, a woman, plus a child or children. But I also learned it wasn't always that way. There were other combinations that worked just as well. There was this family of three who lived down the street. The lady of the house was called Lenie. Lenie had long black hair, often in a ponytail, and manicured nails. She always went out with a little makeup on and her signature red lipstick. Lenie's other half, I don't remember much about him except that he had a thing for white sleeveless shirts and gold chains around his neck. Their daughter was a couple years younger than me. Now, everybody in the village knew Lenie. She owned and ran what was the most popular beauty salon in our side of town. Every time their family would walk down the roads, they would always be greeted with smiles and occasionally stopped for a little chitchat. Now, the interesting thing about Lenie is that she also happened to be a transgender woman. She exemplified one of the Philippines' long-standing stories about gender diversity. Lenie was proof that oftentimes we think of something as strange only because we're not familiar with it, or we haven't taken enough time to try and understand. In most cultures around the world, gender is this man-woman dichotomy. It's this immovable, nonnegotiable, distinct classes of individuals. We assign characteristics and expectations the moment a person's biological sex is determined. But not all cultures are like that. Not all cultures are as rigid. Many cultures don't look at genitalia primarily as basis for gender construction, and some communities in North America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific Islands, including the Philippines, have a long history of cultural permissiveness and accommodation of gender variances. As you may know, the people of the Philippines were under Spanish rule for over 300 years. That's from 1565 to 1898. This explains why everyday Filipino conversations are peppered with Spanish words and why so many of our last names, including mine, sound very Spanish. This also explains the firmly entrenched influence of Catholicism. But precolonial Philippine societies, they were mostly animists. They believed all things had a distinct spiritual essence: plants, animals, rocks, rivers, places. Power resided in the spirit. Whoever was able to harness that spiritual power was highly revered. Now, scholars who have studied the Spanish colonial archives also tell us that these early societies were largely egalitarian. Men did not necessarily have an advantage over women. Wives were treated as companions, not slaves. And family contracts were not done without their presence and approval. In some ways, women had the upper hand. A woman could divorce her husband and own property under her own name, which she kept even after marriage. She had the prerogative to have a baby or not and then decide the baby's name. But the real key to the power of the precolonial Filipino woman was in her role as "babaylan," a collective term for shamans of various ethnic groups. They were the community healers, specialists in herbal and divine lore. They delivered babies and communicated with the spirit world. They performed exorcisms and occasionally, and in defense of their community, they kicked some ass. (Laughter) And while the babaylan was a female role, there were also, in fact, male practitioners in the spiritual realm. Reports from early Spanish chroniclers contain several references to male shamans who did not conform to normative Western masculine standards. They cross-dressed and appeared effeminate or sexually ambiguous. A Jesuit missionary named Francisco Alcina said that one man he believed to be a shaman was "so effeminate that in every way he was more a woman than a man. All the things the women did he performed, such as weaving blankets, sewing clothes and making pots. He danced also like they did, never like a man, whose dance is different. In all, he appeared more a woman than a man." Well, any other juicy details in the colonial archives? Thought you'd never ask. (Laughter) As you may have deduced by now, the manner in which these precolonial societies conducted themselves didn't go over so well. All the free-loving, gender-variant-permitting, gender equality wokeness clashed viciously with the European sensibilities at the time, so much so that the Spanish missionaries spent the next 300 years trying to enforce their two-sex, two-gender model. Many Spanish friars also thought that the cross-dressing babaylan were either celibates like themselves or had deficient or malformed genitals. But this was pure speculation. Documents compiled between 1679 and 1685, called "The Bolinao Manuscript," mentions male shamans marrying women. The Boxer Codex, circa 1590, provide clues on the nature of the male babaylan sexuality. It says, "Ordinarily they dress as women, act like prudes and are so effeminate that one who does not know them would believe they are women. Almost all are impotent for the reproductive act, and thus they marry other males and sleep with them as man and wife and have carnal knowledge." Carnal knowledge, of course, meaning sex. Now, there's an ongoing debate in contemporary society about what constitutes gender and how it should be defined. My country is no exception. Some countries like Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Nepal and Canada have begun introducing nonbinary options in their legal documents, such as their passports and their permanent resident cards. In all these discussions about gender, I think it's important to keep in mind that the prevailing notions of man and woman as static genders anchored strictly on biological sex are social constructs. In my people's case, this social construct is an imposition. It was hammered into their heads over hundreds of years until they were convinced that their way of thinking was erroneous. But the good thing about social constructs is they can be reconstructed to fit a time and age. They can be reconstructed to respond to communities that are becoming more diverse. And they can be reconstructed for a world that's starting to realize we have so much to gain from learning and working through our differences. When I think about this subject, I think about the Filipino people and an almost forgotten but important legacy of gender equality and inclusivity. I think about lovers who were some of the gentlest souls I had known but could not be fully open. I think about people who have made an impact in my life, who showed me that integrity, kindness and strength of character are far better measures of judgment, far better than things that are beyond a person's control such as their skin color, their age or their gender. As I stand here today, on the shoulders of people like Lenie, I feel incredibly grateful for all who have come before me, the ones courageous enough to put themselves out there, who lived a life that was theirs and in the process, made it a little easier for us to live our lives now. Because being yourself is revolutionary. And to anyone reeling from forces trying to knock you down and cram you into these neat little boxes people have decided for you: don't break. I see you. My ancestors see you. Their blood runs through me as they run through so many of us. You are valid, and you deserve rights and recognition just like everyone else. Thank you. (Applause) |
How menopause affects the brain | {0: 'Researcher Lisa Mosconi studies the brains of living patients with cutting-edge brain-imaging technology -- and uses the data to understand how brain health plays out differently in women than in men.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | Women are works of art. On the outside as on the inside. I am a neuroscientist, and I focus on the inside, especially on women's brains. There are many theories on how women's brains differ from men's brains, and I've been looking at brains for 20 years and can guarantee that there is no such thing as a gendered brain. Pink and blue, Barbie and Lego, those are all inventions that have nothing to do with the way our brains are built. That said, women's brains differ from men's brains in some respects. And I'm here to talk about these differences, because they actually matter for our health. For example, women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder or depression, not to mention headaches and migraines. But also, at the core of my research, women are more likely than men to have Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia on the planet, affecting close to six million people in the United States alone. But almost two thirds of all those people are actually women. So for every man suffering from Alzheimer's there are two women. So why is that overall? Is it age? Is it lifespan? What else could it be? A few years ago, I launched the Women's Brain Initiative at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, exactly to answer those questions. And tonight, I'm here with some answers. So it turns out our brains age differently, and menopause plays a key role here for women. Now most people think of the brain as a kind of black box, isolated from the rest of the body. But in reality, our brains are in constant interaction with the rest of us. And perhaps surprisingly, the interactions with the reproductive system are crucial for brain aging in women. These interactions are mediated by our hormones. And we know that hormones differ between the genders. Men have more testosterone, women have more estrogens. But what really matters here is that these hormones differ in their longevity. Men's testosterone doesn't run out until late in life, which is a slow and pretty much symptom-free process, of course. (Laughter) Women's estrogens, on the other hand, start fading in midlife, during menopause, which is anything but symptom-free. We associate menopause with the ovaries, but when women say that they're having hot flashes, night sweats, insomnia, memory lapses, depression, anxiety, those symptoms don't start in the ovaries. They start in the brain. Those are neurological symptoms. We're just not used to thinking about them as such. So why is that? Why are our brains impacted by menopause? Well, first of all, our brains and ovaries are part of the neuroendocrine system. As part of the system, the brain talks to the ovaries and the ovaries talk back to the brain, every day of our lives as women. So the health of the ovaries is linked to the health of the brain. And the other way around. At the same time, hormones like estrogen are not only involved in reproduction, but also in brain function. And estrogen in particular, or estradiol, is really key for energy production in the brain. At the cellular level, estrogen literally pushes neurons to burn glucose to make energy. If your estrogen is high, your brain energy is high. When your estrogen declines though, your neurons start slowing down and age faster. And studies have shown that this process can even lead to the formation of amyloid plaques, or Alzheimer's plaques, which are a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. These effects are stronger in specific brain regions, starting with the hypothalamus, which is in charge of regulating body temperature. When estrogen doesn't activate the hypothalamus correctly, the brain cannot regulate body temperature correctly. So those hot flashes that women get, that's the hypothalamus. Then there's the brain stem, in charge of sleep and wake. When estrogen doesn't activate the brain stem correctly, we have trouble sleeping. Or it's the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, close to the hippocampus, the memory center of the brain. When estrogen levels ebb in these regions, we start getting mood swings perhaps and forget things. So this is the brain anatomy of menopause, if you will. But let me show you what an actual woman's brain can look like. So this is a kind of brain scan called positron emission tomography or PET. It looks at brain energy levels. And this is what you want your brain to look like when you're in your 40s. Really nice and bright. Now this brain belongs to a woman who was 43 years old when she was first scanned, before menopause. And this is the same brain just eight years later, after menopause. If we put them side by side, I think you can easily see how the bright yellow turned orange, almost purple. That's a 30 percent drop in brain energy levels. Now in general, this just doesn't seem to happen to a man of the same age. In our studies with hundreds of people, we show that middle-aged men usually have high brain energy levels. For women, brain energy is usually fine before menopause, but then it gradually declines during the transition. And this was found independent of age. It didn't matter if the women were 40, 50 or 60. What mattered most was that they were in menopause. So of course we need more research to confirm this, but it looks like women's brains in midlife are more sensitive to hormonal aging than just straight up chronological aging. And this is important information to have, because so many women can feel these changes. So many of our patients have said to me that they feel like their minds are playing tricks on them, to put it mildly. So I really want to validate this, because it's real. And so just to clarify, if this is you, you are not crazy. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. It's important. So many women have worried that they might be losing their minds. But the truth is that your brain might be going through a transition, or is going through a transition and needs time and support to adjust. Also, if anyone is concerned that middle-aged women might be underperformers, I'll just quickly add that we looked at cognitive performance, God forbid, right? (Laughter) Let's not do that. But we looked at cognitive performance, and we found absolutely no differences between men and women before and after menopause. And other studies confirm this. So basically, we may be tired, but we are just as sharp. (Laughter) Get that out of the way. That all said, there is something else more serious that deserves our attention. If you remember, I mentioned that estrogen declines could potentially promote the formation of amyloid plaques, or Alzheimer's plaques. But there's another kind of brain scan that looks exactly at those plaques. And we used it to show that middle-aged men hardly have any, which is great. But for women, there's quite a bit of an increase during the transition to menopause. And I want to be really, really clear here that not all women develop the plaques, and not all women with the plaques develop dementia. Having the plaques is a risk factor, it is not in any way a diagnosis, especially at this stage. But still, it's quite an insight to associate Alzheimer's with menopause. We think of menopause as belonging to middle age and Alzheimer's as belonging to old age. But in reality, many studies, including my own work, had shown that Alzheimer's disease starts with negative changes in the brain years, if not decades, prior to clinical symptoms. So for women, it looks like this process starts in midlife, during menopause. Which is important information to have, because it gives us a time line to start looking for those changes. So in terms of a time line, most women go through menopause in their early 50s. But it can be earlier, often because of medical interventions. And the common example is a hysterectomy and/or an oophorectomy, which is the surgical removal of the uterus and/or the ovaries. And unfortunately, there is evidence that having the uterus and, more so, the ovaries removed prior to menopause correlates with the higher risk of dementia in women. And I know that this is upsetting news, and it's definitely depressing news, but we need to talk about it because most women are not aware of this correlation, and it seems like very important information to have. Also, no one is suggesting that women decline these procedures if they need them. The point here is that we really need to better understand what happens to our brains as we go through menopause, natural or medical, and how to protect our brains in the process. So how do we do that? How do we protect our brains? Should we take hormones? That's a fair question, it's a good question. And the shortest possible answer right now is that hormonal therapy can be helpful to alleviate a number of symptoms, like hot flashes, but it's not currently recommended for dementia prevention. And many of us are working on testing different formulations and different dosages and different time lines, and hopefully, all this work will lead to a change in recommendations in the future. Meanwhile, there are other things that we can do today to support our hormones and their effects on the brain that do not require medications but do require taking a good look at our lifestyle. That's because the foods we eat, how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get or don't get, how much stress we have in our lives, those are all things that can actually impact our hormones — for better and for worse. Food, for example. There are many diets out there, but studies have shown that the Mediterranean diet in particular is supportive of women's health. Women on this diet have a much lower risk of cognitive decline, of depression, of heart disease, of stroke and of cancer, and they also have fewer hot flashes. What's interesting about this diet is that it's quite rich in foods that contain estrogens in the form of phytoestrogens or estrogens from plants that act like mild estrogens in our bodies. Some phytoestrogens have been linked to a possible risk of cancer, but not the ones in this diet, which are safe. Especially from flax seeds, sesame seeds, dried apricots, legumes and a number of fruits. And for some good news, dark chocolate contains phytoestrogens, too. So diet is one way to gain estrogens, but it's just as important to avoid things that suppress our estrogens instead, especially stress. Stress can literally steal your estrogens, and that's because cortisol, which is the main stress hormone, works in balance with our estrogens. So if cortisol goes up, your estrogens go down. If cortisol goes down, your estrogens go back up. So reducing stress is really important. It doesn't just help your day, it also helps your brain. So these are just a few things that we can do to support our brains and there are more. But the important thing here is that changing the way we understand the female brain really changes the way that we care for it, and the way that we frame women's health. And the more women demand this information, the sooner we'll be able to break the taboos around menopause, and also come up with solutions that actually work, not just for Alzheimer's disease, but for women's brain health as a whole. Brain health is women's health. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Oh, thank you. |
The meaning of life according to Simone de Beauvoir | null | TED-Ed | At the age of 21, Simone de Beauvoir became the youngest person to take the philosophy exams at France’s most esteemed university. She passed with flying colors. But as soon as she mastered the rules of philosophy, she wanted to break them. She’d been schooled on Plato’s Theory of Forms, which dismissed the physical world as a flawed reflection of higher truths and unchanging ideals. But for de Beauvoir, earthly life was enthralling, sensual, and anything but static. Her desire to explore the physical world to its fullest would shape her life, and eventually, inspire a radical new philosophy. Endlessly debating with her romantic and intellectual partner Jean Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir explored free will, desire, rights and responsibilities, and the value of personal experience. In the years following WWII, these ideas would converge into the school of thought most closely associated with their work: existentialism. Where Judeo-Christian traditions taught that humans are born with preordained purpose, de Beauvoir and Sartre proposed a revolutionary alternative. They argued that humans are born free, and thrown into existence without a divine plan. As de Beauvoir acknowledged, this freedom is both a blessing and a burden. In "The Ethics of Ambiguity" she argued that our greatest ethical imperative is to create our own life’s meaning, while protecting the freedom of others to do the same. As de Beauvoir wrote, “A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied.” This philosophy challenged its students to navigate the ambiguities and conflicts our desires produce, both internally and externally. And as de Beauvoir sought to find her own purpose, she began to question: if everyone deserves to freely pursue meaning, why was she restricted by society’s ideals of womanhood? Despite her prolific writing, teaching and activism, de Beauvoir struggled to be taken seriously by her male peers. She’d rejected her Catholic upbringing and marital expectations to study at university, and write memoirs, fiction and philosophy. But the risks she was taking by embracing this lifestyle were lost on many of her male counterparts, who took these freedoms for granted. They had no intellectual interest in de Beauvoir’s work, which explored women’s inner lives, as well the author’s open relationship and bisexuality. To convey the importance of her perspective, de Beauvoir embarked on her most challenging book yet. Just as she’d created the foundations of existentialism, she’d now redefine the limits of gender. Published in 1949, "The Second Sex" argues that, like our life’s meaning, gender is not predestined. As de Beauvoir famously wrote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” And to “become” a woman, she argued, was to become the Other. De Beauvoir defined Othering as the process of labeling women as less than the men who’d historically defined, and been defined as, the ideal human subjects. As the Other, she argued that women were considered second to men, and therefore systematically restricted from pursuing freedom. "The Second Sex" became an essential feminist treatise, offering a detailed history of women’s oppression and a wealth of anecdotal testimony. "The Second Sex"’s combination of personal experience and philosophical intervention provided a new language to discuss feminist theory. Today, those conversations are still informed by de Beauvoir’s insistence that in the pursuit of equality, “there is no divorce between philosophy and life.” Of course, like any foundational work, the ideas in "The Second Sex" have been expanded upon since its publication. Many modern thinkers have explored additional ways people are Othered that de Beauvoir doesn’t acknowledge. These include racial and economic identities, as well as the broader spectrum of gender and sexual identities we understand today. De Beauvoir’s legacy is further complicated by accusations of sexual misconduct by two of her university students. In the face of these accusations, she had her teaching license revoked for abusing her position. In this aspect and others, de Beauvoir’s life remains controversial— and her work represents a contentious moment in the emergence of early feminism. She participated in those conversations for the rest of her life; writing fiction, philosophy, and memoirs until her death in 1986. Today, her work offers a philosophical language to be reimagined, revisited and rebelled against— a response this revolutionary thinker might have welcomed. |
The dangers of a noisy ocean -- and how we can quiet it down | {0: 'Fueled by a limitless curiosity for science, Nicola Jones writes and edits stories about topics ranging from quantum physics to climate change, from animals to anthropology.'} | TEDSummit 2019 | This is the sound of orcas off the coast of Vancouver. (Whale chirps and squeaks) They make these fantastic sounds not just to communicate, but also sometimes to echolocate, to find their way around and to find food. But that can be tricky sometimes, because, well, here is the sound of a ship passing by, recorded underwater. (Screeching oscillating sound) You know, when we think about marine pollution, I think we usually think about plastics. Maybe toxic chemicals, or even ocean acidification from climate change. As a science journalist who often writes about environmental issues, those are the things that have passed my desk over the past 10 years or so. But as I recently realized when I was writing a feature for the science journal "Nature," noise is another important kind of pollution. One that often gets ignored. You know, maybe you've heard of the dark-skies movement, which aimed to raise awareness of the issue of light pollution and create pockets of unilluminated night, so that people and animals could enjoy more natural cycles of light and dark, night and day. Well, in much the same way, there are people now raising awareness of the issue of noise pollution and trying to create pockets of quiet in the ocean, so that marine life can enjoy a more natural soundscape. This is important. Noise isn't just an irritation. It can cause chronic stress, or even physical injury. It can affect marine life's ability to find food and mates and to listen out for predators and more. Think of all the sounds we inject into the ocean. Perhaps one of the most dramatic is the seismic surveys used to look for oil and gas. Air guns produce loud blasts, sometimes every 10 to 15 seconds, for months on end. And they use the reflections of these sounds to map the ground beneath. It can sound like this. (Explosion sounds) Then, there's the sound of the actual drilling for oil and gas, the construction of things like offshore wind farms, sonar and of course, the nearly constant drone from more than 50,000 ships in the global merchant fleet. Now the natural ocean itself isn't exactly quiet. If you put your head under the water, you can hear cracking ice, wind, rain, singing whales, grunting fish, even snapping shrimp. Altogether, that can create a soundscape of maybe 50 to 100 decibels, depending on where and when you are. But mankind's addition to that has been dramatic. It's estimated that shipping has added three decibels of noise to the ocean every 10 years in recent decades. That might not sound like a lot, but decibels are on a logarithmic scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes. So a small number can actually represent a large change. Three decibels means a doubling of noise intensity in the ocean. A doubling. And that's only an estimate, because no one is actually keeping track of how noisy the ocean is all around the world. There is a body called the International Quiet Ocean Experiment, and one of their missions is to try and plug the hole in that data. So for example, last year, they managed to convince the Global Ocean Observation System to start including noise as one of their essential variables for monitoring, alongside things like temperature and salinity. We do know some things. We know that sonar can be as loud, or nearly as loud, as an underwater volcano. A supertanker can be as loud as the call of a blue whale. The noises we add to the ocean come in all different frequencies and can travel great distances. Seismic surveys off the East Coast of the United States can be heard in the middle of the Atlantic. In the 1960s, they did an experiment where they set off a loud noise off the coast of Perth, Australia, and they detected it as far away as Bermuda, 20,000 kilometers away. So what does all this sound like to marine life, what do they hear? It's kind of difficult to describe. Sound travels further, faster in water than it does in air, and it also packs a different punch. So sound of the same pressure will have a different intensity whether you measure it in the air or underwater. Then there's the fact that whales don't have ears exactly like human ears. Creatures like zooplankton don't even have what you would consider to be ears. So what does this mean, what is the impact on all this marine life? Perhaps the easiest thing for scientists to assess is the effect of acute noise, really loud sudden blasts that might cause physical injury or hearing loss. Beaked whales, for example, can go into panicked dives when exposed to loud noises, which may even give them a condition similar to the bends. In the 1960s, after the introduction of more powerful sonar technologies, the number of incidents of mass whale strandings of beaked whales went up dramatically. And it's not just marine mammals, fish, if they stray too close to the source of a loud sound, their fish bladders may actually explode. The airgun blasts from seismic surveys can mow down a swath of zooplankton, the tiny creatures near the base of the food chain, or can deform scallop larvae while they're developing. Well, what about chronic noise, the more pervasive issue of raising background noise from things like shipping? That can mask or drown out the natural soundscape. Some whales have responded to this by literally changing their tune, a little bit like people shouting to be heard in a noisy nightclub. And some fish will spend more time patrolling their borders and less time caring for their young, as if they're on high alert. Chronic noise can affect people too, of course. Studies have shown that people living near busy airports or really busy highways may have elevated levels of cardiovascular disease. And students living under busy flight paths may do worse on some educational tests. And even while I was researching this subject, they were actually blasting out about three meters of solid granite from the lot across from my home office to make room for a new house, and the constant jittering of the rock hammer was driving me completely insane. And whenever the workers stopped for a moment, I could feel my shoulders relax. This effect has been seen in whales, too. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, international shipping largely ground to a halt for a little while in the waters off the East Coast of the United States. And in that lull, researchers noticed that endangered right whales in that region had fewer chemical markers of stress in their feces samples. As one researcher I spoke to likes to say, "We were stressed, but the whales weren't." Now you have to remember, we have evolved to be a visual species. We really rely on our eyes. But marine life relies on sound the way that we rely on sight. For them, a noisy ocean may be as befuddling and even dangerous as a dense fog is for us. And maybe sometimes that just means being a little more stressed, maybe sometimes it means spending a little less time with the kids. Maybe some species can adapt. But some researchers worry that for endangered species already on the brink, noise may be enough to push them over the edge. So take, for example, the southern resident killer whales that live in the waters off my hometown of Vancouver. There are only 75, maybe 76, animals left in this population. And they're facing a lot of challenges. There are chemical pollutants in these waters, and they are running low on the salmon that they really rely on for food. And then there's noise. When researchers studied these and similar killer whales, they found that they spend between 18 and 25 percent less time feeding in the presence of loud boat noise. And that's a lot for a species that's already struggling to find enough food to thrive. The good news, as I heard from all the researchers I spoke to, is that you can do something relatively easily about ocean noise. Unlike the wicked problems of climate change and ocean acidification, you can just dial down the knob on ocean noise and see almost immediate impacts. So for example, in 2017, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority started asking ships to simply slow down when going through the Haro Strait, where the southern resident killer whales are feeding in late summer. Slower ships are quieter ships. And because it's Canada, you can just ask, it can be voluntary. (Laughter) (Applause) In that 2017 trial, most of the ships complied, adding about half an hour to their travel time, and reducing noise by about 1.2 decibels or 24 percent of noise intensity. This year, they decided to extend the length of time and the area over which they're asking ships to slow down. So hopefully that has a positive impact for these whales. In 2017, the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority also introduced discounts in docking fees for ships that are physically designed to be quieter. You know, weirdly, a lot of the noise from a ship like this comes from the popping of tiny bubbles off the back of its propeller. And you can simply design a ship to do less of that and to be quieter. The International Maritime Organization has published a huge list of ways that boats can be made quieter. And they also have a target of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from global shipping by 50 percent by 2050. And the great news is that these two things go hand in hand. On the whole, a more efficient ship is a quieter ship. People have also invented quieter ways of hammering in the giant posts needed for giant wind turbines, like this one, and gentler ways of doing seismic surveys. And there are some incentives for using quieter technologies. The European Union, for example, has a healthy marine system directive for 2020. And one of the ways that they define a healthy marine system is by how much noise is going in those waters. But on the whole, most waters remain completely unregulated when it comes to ocean noise. But again, most of the scientists I spoke to said that there's real momentum right now in policy circles to pay attention to this issue and maybe do something about this issue. We already know enough to say that quieter seas are healthier seas. But now scientists are really scrambling to come up with the details. Just how quiet do we need to be? And where are the best places to make quiet or preserve quiet? And how best can we hush our noise? And you know, I'm not trying to tell you that noise is the biggest environmental problem on the planet or even in the ocean. But the point is that humankind has a lot of impacts on our environmental system. And these impacts don't act in isolation. They act together, and they multiply. So even for the ones that are not so obvious, we really need to pay attention to them. I'll tell you about one last experiment, just because it's so beautiful. So Rob Williams, one of the researchers who works on southern resident killer whales, also does some work in Bali. And there, they celebrate a Hindu tradition called nyepi, or a day of silence. And this day, apparently, is very strictly observed. No planes take off from the airport, no boats go out fishing, the tourists are gently led off the beach back into their hotel rooms. And Rob Williams put some hydrophones in the water there to see what the impact was, and it was dramatic. Sound levels dropped by six to nine decibels, about the same as in the waters after 9/11. For an "acoustic prospector" like Williams, which is what he calls himself, this silence is golden. Now he and other researchers can go back to this place and see what the fish choose to do with all this additional acoustic real estate. (Soft bubbling) I like to think of them having their own holiday, feasting and finding mates. Celebrating their own spot of calm in an otherwise noisy world. Thank you. (Applause) |
Why it's so hard to talk about the N-word | {0: 'Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor writes, teaches and engages questions on race and racism in the US.'} | TEDxEasthamptonWomen | The minute she said it, the temperature in my classroom dropped. My students are usually laser-focused on me, but they shifted in their seats and looked away. I'm a black woman who teaches the histories of race and US slavery. I'm aware that my social identity is always on display. And my students are vulnerable too, so I'm careful. I try to anticipate what part of my lesson might go wrong. But honestly, I didn't even see this one coming. None of my years of graduate school prepared me for what to do when the N-word entered my classroom. I was in my first year of teaching when the student said the N-word in my class. She was not calling anyone a name. She was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. She came to class with her readings done, she sat in the front row and she was always on my team. When she said it, she was actually making a point about my lecture, by quoting a line from a 1970s movie, a comedy, that had two racist slurs. One for people of Chinese descent and the other the N-word. As soon as she said it, I held up my hands, said, "Whoa, whoa." But she assured me, "It's a joke from 'Blazing Saddles,'" and then she repeated it. This all happened 10 years ago, and how I handled it haunted me for a long time. It wasn't the first time I thought about the word in an academic setting. I'm a professor of US history, it's in a lot of the documents that I teach. So I had to make a choice. After consulting with someone I trusted, I decided to never say it. Not even to quote it. But instead to use the euphemistic phrase, "the N-word." Even this decision was complicated. I didn't have tenure yet, and I worried that senior colleagues would think that by using the phrase I wasn't a serious scholar. But saying the actual word still felt worse. The incident in my classroom forced me to publicly reckon with the word. The history, the violence, but also — The history, the violence, but also any time it was hurled at me, spoken casually in front of me, any time it rested on the tip of someone's tongue, it all came flooding up in that moment, right in front of my students. And I had no idea what to do. So I've come to call stories like mine points of encounter. A point of encounter describes the moment you came face-to-face with the N-word. If you've even been stumped or provoked by the word, whether as the result of an awkward social situation, an uncomfortable academic conversation, something you heard in pop culture, or if you've been called the slur, or witnessed someone getting called the slur, you have experienced a point of encounter. And depending on who you are and how that moment goes down, you might have a range of responses. Could throw you off a little bit, or it could be incredibly painful and humiliating. I've had lots of these points of encounter in my life, but one thing is true. There's not a lot of space to talk about them. That day in my classroom was pretty much like all of those times I had an uninvited run-in with the N-word. I froze. Because the N-word is hard to talk about. Part of the reason the N-word is so hard to talk about, it's usually only discussed in one way, as a figure of speech, we hear this all the time, right? It's just a word. The burning question that cycles through social media is who can and cannot say it. Black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates does a groundbreaking job of defending the African American use of the word. On the other hand, Wendy Kaminer, a white freedom of speech advocate, argues that if we don't all just come and say it, we give the word power. And a lot of people feel that way. The Pew Center recently entered the debate. In a survey called "Race in America 2019," researchers asked US adults if they thought is was OK for a white person to say the N-word. Seventy percent of all adults surveyed said "never." And these debates are important. But they really obscure something else. They keep us from getting underneath to the real conversation. Which is that the N-word is not just a word. It's not neatly contained in a racist past, a relic of slavery. Fundamentally, the N-word is an idea disguised as a word: that black people are intellectually, biologically and immutably inferior to white people. And — and I think this is the most important part — that that inferiority means that the injustice we suffer and inequality we endure is essentially our own fault. So, yes, it is ... Speaking of the word only as racist spew or as an obscenity in hip hop music makes it sounds as if it's a disease located in the American vocal cords that can be snipped right out. It's not, and it can't. And I learned this from talking to my students. So next time class met, I apologized, and I made an announcement. I would have a new policy. Students would see the word in my PowerPoints, in film, in essays they read, but we would never ever say the word out loud in class. Nobody ever said it again. But they didn't learn much either. Afterwards, what bothered me most was that I didn't even explain to students why, of all the vile, problematic words in American English, why this particular word had its own buffer, the surrogate phrase "the N-word." Most of my students, many of them born in the late 1990s and afterwards, didn't even know that the phrase "the N-word" is a relatively new invention in American English. When I was growing up, it didn't exist. But in the late 1980s, black college students, writers, intellectuals, more and more started to talk about racist attacks against them. But increasingly, when they told these stories, they stopped using the word. Instead, they reduced it to the initial N and called it "the N-word." They felt that every time the word was uttered it opened up old wounds, so they refused to say it. They knew their listeners would hear the actual word in their heads. That wasn't the point. The point was they didn't want to put the word in their own mouths or into the air. By doing this, they made an entire nation start to second-guess themselves about saying it. This was such a radical move that people are still mad about it. Critics accuse those of us who use the phrase "the N-word," or people who become outraged, you know, just because the word is said, of being overprincipled, politically correct or, as I just read a couple of weeks ago in The New York Times, "insufferably woke." Right? So I bought into this a little bit too, which is why the next time I taught the course I proposed a freedom of speech debate. The N-word in academic spaces, for or against? I was certain students would be eager to debate who gets to say it and who doesn't. But they weren't. Instead ... my students started confessing. A white student from New Jersey talked about standing by as a black kid at her school got bullied by this word. She did nothing and years later still carried the guilt. Another from Connecticut talked about the pain of severing a very close relationship with a family member, because that family member refused to stop saying the word. One of the most memorable stories came from a very quiet black student from South Carolina. She didn't understand all the fuss. She said everyone at her school said the word. She wasn't talking about kids calling each other names in the hall. She explained that at her school when teachers and administrators became frustrated with an African American student, they called that student the actual N-word. She said it didn't bother her at all. But then a couple of days later, she came to visit me in my office hours and wept. She thought she was immune. She realized that she wasn't. Over the last 10 years, I have literally heard hundreds of these stories from all kinds of people from all ages. People in their 50s remembering stories from the second grade and when they were six, either calling people the word or being called the word, but carrying that all these years around this word, you know. And as I listened to people talk about their points of encounter, the pattern that emerged for me as a teacher that I found most upsetting is the single most fraught site for these points of encounter is the classroom. Most US kids are going to meet the N-word in class. One of the most assigned books in US high schools is Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" in which the word appears over 200 times. And this isn't an indictment of "Huck Finn." The word is in lots of US literature and history. It's all over African American literature. Yet I hear from students that when the word is said during a lesson without discussion and context, it poisons the entire classroom environment. The trust between student and teacher is broken. Even so, many teachers, often with the very best of intentions, still say the N-word in class. They want to show and emphasize the horrors of US racism, so they rely on it for shock value. Invoking it brings into stark relief the ugliness of our nation's past. But they forget the ideas are alive and well in our cultural fabric. The six-letter word is like a capsule of accumulated hurt. Every time it is said, every time, it releases into the atmosphere the hateful notion that black people are less. My black students tell me that when the word is quoted or spoken in class, they feel like a giant spotlight is shining on them. One of my students told me that his classmates were like bobbleheads, turning to gauge his reaction. A white student told me that in the eighth grade, when they were learning "To Kill a Mockingbird" and reading it out loud in class, the student was stressed out at the idea of having to read the word, which the teacher insisted all students do, that the student ended up spending most of the unit hiding out in the bathroom. This is serious. Students across the country talk about switching majors and dropping classes because of poor teaching around the N-word. The issue of faculty carelessly speaking the word has reached such a fevered pitch, it's led to protests at Princeton, Emory, The New School, Smith College, where I teach, and Williams College, where just recently students have boycotted the entire English Department over it and other issues. And these were just the cases that make the news. This is a crisis. And while student reaction looks like an attack on freedom of speech, I promise this is an issue of teaching. My students are not afraid of materials that have the N-word in it. They want to learn about James Baldwin and William Faulkner and about the civil rights movement. In fact, their stories show that this word is a central feature of their lives as young people in the United States. It's in the music they love. And in the popular culture they emulate, the comedy they watch, it's in TV and movies and memorialized in museums. They hear it in locker rooms, on Instagram, in the hallways at school, in the chat rooms of the video games they play. It is all over the world they navigate. But they don't know how to think about it or even really what the word means. I didn't even really understand what the word meant until I did some research. I was astonished to learn that black people first incorporated the N-word into the vocabulary as political protest, not in the 1970s or 1980s but as far back as the 1770s. And I wish I had more time to talk about the long, subversive history of the black use of the N-word. But I will say this: Many times, my students will come up to me and say, "I understand the virulent roots of this word, it's slavery." They are only partially right. This word, which existed before it became a slur, but it becomes a slur at a very distinct moment in US history, and that's as large numbers of black people begin to become free, starting in the North in the 1820s. In other words, this word is fundamentally an assault on black freedom, black mobility, and black aspiration. Even now, nothing so swiftly unleashes an N-word tirade as a black person asserting their rights or going where they please or prospering. Think of the attacks on Colin Kaepernick when he kneeled. Or Barack Obama when he became president. My students want to know this history. But when they ask questions, they're shushed and shamed. By shying away from talking about the N-word, we have turned this word into the ultimate taboo, crafting it into something so tantalizing, that for all US kids, no matter their racial background, part of their coming of age is figuring out how to negotiate this word. We treat conversations about it like sex before sex education. We're squeamish, we silence them. So they learn about it from misinformed friends and in whispers. I wish I could go back to the classroom that day and push through my fear to talk about the fact that something actually happened. Not just to me or to my black students. But to all of us. You know, I think we're all connected by our inability to talk about this word. But what if we explored our points of encounter and did start to talk about it? Today, I try to create the conditions in my classroom to have open and honest conversations about it. One of those conditions — not saying the word. We're able to talk about it because it doesn't come into the classroom. Another important condition is I don't make my black students responsible for teaching their classmates about this. That is my job. So I come prepared. I hold the conversation with a tight rein, and I'm armed with knowledge of the history. I always ask students the same question: Why is talking about the N-word hard? Their answers are amazing. They're amazing. More than anything though, I have become deeply acquainted with my own points of encounter, my personal history around this word. Because when the N-word comes to school, or really anywhere, it brings with it all of the complicated history of US racism. The nation's history and my own, right here, right now. There's no avoiding it. (Applause) |
The tale of the doctor who defied Death | null | TED-Ed | In their ramshackle hut on the edge of the woods, a husband and wife were in despair. The woman had just given birth to their thirteenth child, and the growing family was quickly running out of food and money. The father walked into the woods to ponder their problem. After hours spent wandering through the trees, he encountered two shadowy silhouettes. The first figure appeared to be the man’s God, while the second resembled the Devil. Both figures offered to lighten the man’s burden, and act as Godfather to his most recent child. But the man refused their offer— he wouldn’t entrust his son to those who passed judgment on human life. He ventured deeper into the tangled thicket. Here in the darkest part of the woods, the father made out a third figure. Sunken eyes stared out of its gaunt face, which broke into a crooked smile. This was Death himself, come to offer his services as Godfather. He promised to return when the child came of age, to bring him happiness and prosperity. The father— knowing that all people are equal in the eyes of Death— accepted his offer. Years later, when the child had grown into an ambitious young man, his skeletal Godfather came for his promised visit. In his gnarled hand he held a flask containing the cure for all human ailments. Death had brought this flask for his Godson, promising to make him a successful doctor. But the powerful potion came with very strict rules. If his Godson encountered a sick person and Death was hovering at the top of their bed, the doctor could heal them with just a waft of the antidote’s fumes. But if Death lingered at the foot of the bed, he’d already claimed the patient as his own— and the doctor could do nothing for them. In time, the doctor’s potent potion and uncanny instincts became known throughout the land. He grew rich and famous, casting off the hardships of his early life. When the king fell ill, he summoned the famous physician to treat him. The doctor swept into the palace, ready to show off his skills. But when he entered the king’s chamber, he was dismayed to see Death settled at the foot of the bed. The doctor desperately wanted the glory of saving the king— even if it meant deceiving his Godfather. And so, he swiftly spun the bed around and reversed Death’s position, leaving the doctor free to administer the antidote. Death was livid. He warned his arrogant Godson that if he ever cheated Death again, he would pay for it with his life. Death and the doctor continued their travels. After some time, the king’s messengers came to collect the doctor yet again. The princess was gravely ill, and the king had promised incredible riches to anyone who could cure her. The doctor approached the princesses’ chamber with gold in his eyes. But upon seeing the sleeping princess, his greed fell away. He was so struck by her grace, that he failed to notice Death lurking by her feet. He swiftly healed the princess, but before she could even utter her thanks, Death had dragged his lovesick Godson away. In an instant, the palace dissolved around them. The doctor found himself in an immense cave lined with countless quivering candles, each representing the duration of a life. As punishment for his Godson’s foolish attempt to master mortality, Death whittled his candle down to its wick. Seeing his own dwindling light, the doctor felt the fear he’d often glimpsed in his patients’ eyes. Desperately, he begged Death to transfer his dying light onto a new candle. His Godfather considered the request— but the doctor’s betrayal was too great. He loosened his bony grip, and his Godson’s candle fell to the floor. Death stood motionless, his inscrutable face fixed on the sputtering flame— until all that was left of the doctor was a wisp of smoke. |
¿Cuándo te importa mi silla de ruedas? | {0: 'Rosario Perazolo Masjoan is a disability activist.'} | TEDxCordoba | Right now, the majority of you are wondering something. "What happened to her?" "Why is she in a wheelchair?" I think, subconsciously, people are hoping that I will talk about it. That I say what it is, tell them about it, open up about it. But the truth is, I've already had enough of it. I've had enough of everyone asking me. I've had enough of explaining it to everyone. So what I've decided to do lately is to start making things up. Every time someone has asked what happened, I make up a completely different story. Like I was attacked by a shark, I jumped off a cliff and survived. Or one time, a little boy asked me what had happened, and, very dramatically, I look at him and say to him, "I'm just doing a social experiment to see how people react when confronted with a wheelchair." Very surprised, he looks at me and says, "No way. Really? Let me see. Stand up." The experiment was completely ruined. (Laughter) I believe the problem is not that people are interested in knowing why I am in a wheelchair, that's just simply curiosity. I believe the problem is that they ask me about it before asking my name. For me, starting to use a wheelchair was like discovering a new world. A world that, in reality, was always there. Everyone sees it, but not everyone is familiar with it. For me, it was like a change of outlook, a change of routine. Just like any other big change that can occur in your life, whether it's, I don't know, having a kid, moving to another house, losing a loved one, or changing jobs, it's adapting to a new routine. I didn't stop doing things; I learned to do things differently. I believe - For me, it was like a change in perspective, really. I went from seeing the world from 5' 7" to seeing it from the average height of an 8-year-old kid. The whole world started to be at a different height too. Mirrors, most of all. In 99% of mirrors, the only thing I can see is my forehead. And I come up to here. (Laughter) I discovered that there are things that are made for people like me. When I started to use a wheelchair, I stopped using the women's bathroom. I started going to a third bathroom, that bathroom that's made for people like me. I stopped entering places where everyone else went in, because most times the main entrances are not accessible. And the entrances for people like me are around the corner, the side door, through the utility room or the garage. I discovered the power of a ramp. For me, accessibility literally means opportunity. Whether or not there is a ramp up on the other side of the street, for me, means whether I can or can't cross over. But we live in a world where sometimes not many such opportunities exist. I had to change schools once I started using a wheelchair: the school I'd been attending my whole life had not been adapted in a way that would allow me to keep going to it. Also, one of the things I found the most difficult were the looks. When you're in a wheelchair and you go down the street, everyone is going to look at you. It's inevitable. You can't avoid someone noticing you went out today without combing your hair. You can't avoid not greeting someone that you don't feel like greeting. Everyone is going to look at you, or, on the other hand, avoid looking at you. But one of the things that still surprises me the most is that, sometimes, it's as if I feel the world is trying to save me. It's as if, subconsciously, I go down the street, and people give me saint cards. They invite me to pray to the saints. They recommend doctors. Or they feel the need to give me a message of support. Like, "Everything's going to be fine," (Laughter) "you can do it, if you really want to," (Laughter) or they congratulate my friends for being my friends. (Laughter) I don't get it. (Applause) I believe - Often I don't know how to react to these things because I know people indubitably do it with the best of intentions, But it makes me wonder what a wheelchair is associated with. What the big picture is. Yes, I am in a wheelchair, but ... I'm fine. I'm not worried about my life. I don't want anyone to come and save me. To me, one of the greatest ironies is that it doesn't matter where I am, what I'm doing, whom I'm with, whether I'm in a nightclub dancing the cumbia, people look at me ... and think, "Wow, what genius!" (Laughter) "Wow, what an inspiration!" (Laughter) "What an example!" (Laughter) I could be a serial killer who kills people at night, but, to the world, I'm an example. (Applause) And that makes me wonder: "Why do people train, study, take such great pains to be someone in life?" Better to buy a wheelchair; you become exemplary automatically. (Applause) Sometimes disability is like a taboo. Words are used to name that which is not named. When I sat myself in a wheelchair, automatically, to the world, I became a special person. I became an angel. I became a being of light. (Laughter) And I also came to have different capabilities. I've never really understood these different capabilities, because, I don't want to disappoint them, but I can't fly. (Laughter) I don't have superpowers. I believe the only way I'm differently abled to all of you is that I have a horn. (Horn) (Applause) I don't think any of you have a horn. A disability does not make you better or worse than anyone else. For me, getting used to a wheelchair was a process. A long process. But I always think that it would have been easier if I had met with an environment that had already been adapted, and for it not to have been me who had to adapt to the environment. Everything would have been easier if disability wasn't a taboo or a bad word. If people didn't think being in a wheelchair meant something was wrong. If being able to get a job, using a public convenience, or getting on a bus, did not have to be a privilege. Everything would be easier if people with disabilities could indeed be examples, could indeed be inspirations, but for their ideas, for their talents, for their passions; not for the mere fact that crossing the street is a challenge. I want to live in a world in which I can come here, I can talk to you for an hour about whatever, about whichever, and be able to leave here without any of you still wondering why, with everything that she said, she at no point told us why she is in a wheelchair. Thank you. (Applause) |
How we could change the planet's climate future | {0: 'David Wallace-Wells is a columnist and author of "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming," which explores all the ways climate change will transform human experience on this planet.'} | We the Future | I'm here to talk about climate change, but I'm not really an environmentalist. In fact, I've never really thought of myself as a nature person. I have never gone camping, never gone hiking, never even owned a pet. I've lived my whole life in cities, actually just one city. And while I like to take trips to visit nature, I always thought it was something that was happening elsewhere, far away, with all of modern life a fortress against its forces. In other words, like just about everybody I knew, I lived my life complacent and deluded about the threat from global warming. Which I took to be happening slowly, happening at a distance and representing only a modest threat to the way that I lived. In each of these ways, I was very, very wrong. Now most people, if they were telling you about climate change, will tell you a story about the future. If I was doing that, I would say, "According to the UN, if we don't change course, by the end of the century, we're likely to get about four degrees Celsius of warming." That would mean, some scientists believe, twice as much war, half as much food, a global GDP possibly 20 percent smaller than it would be without climate change. That's an impact that's deeper than the Great Depression, and it would be permanent. But the impacts are actually happening a lot faster than 2100. By just 2050, it's estimated, many of the biggest cities in South Asia and the Middle East will be almost literally unlivably hot in summer. These are cities that today are home to 10, 12, 15 million people. And in just three decades, you wouldn't be able to walk around outside in them without risking heatstroke or possibly death. The planet is now 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than it was before industrialization. That may not sound like a lot, but it actually puts us entirely outside the window of temperatures that enclose all of human history. That means that everything we have ever known as a species, the evolution of the human animal, the development of agriculture, the development of rudimentary civilization and modern civilization and industrial civilization, everything we know about ourselves as biological creatures, as social creatures, as political creatures, all of it is the result of climate conditions we have already left behind. It's like we've landed on an entirely different planet, with an entirely different climate. And we now have to figure out what of the civilization that we've brought with us can endure these new conditions and what can't. And things will get worse from here. Now for a very long time, we were told that climate change was a slow saga. It started with the industrial revolution, and it had fallen to us to clean up the mess left by our grandparents so our grandchildren wouldn't be dealing with the results. It was a story of centuries. In fact, half of all of the emissions that have ever been produced from the burning of fossil fuels in the entire history of humanity have been produced in just the last 30 years. That's since Al Gore published his first book on warming. It's since the UN established its IPCC climate change body. We've done more damage since then than in all the centuries, all the millennia before. Now I'm 37 years old, which means my life contains this entire story. When I was born, the planet's climate seemed stable. Today, we are on the brink of catastrophe. The climate crisis is not the legacy of our ancestors. It is the work of a single generation. Ours. This may all sound like bad news. Which it is, really bad news. But it also contains, I think, some good news, at least relatively speaking. These impacts are terrifyingly large. But they are also, I think, exhilarating. Because they are ultimately a reflection of how much power we have over the climate. If we get to those hellish scenarios, it will be because we have made them happen, because we have chosen to make them happen. Which means we can choose to make other scenarios happen, too. Now that may seem too rosy to believe and the political obstacles are in fact enormous. But it is a simple fact — the main driver of global warming is human action: How much carbon we put into the atmosphere. Our hands are on those levers. And we can write the story of the planet's climate future ourselves. Not just can — but are. Since inaction is a kind of action, we'll be writing that story ourselves whether we like it or not. This is not just any story, all of us holding the future of the planet in our hands. It's the kind of story we used to recognize only in mythology and theology. A single generation that has brought the future of humanity into doubt now tasked with securing a new future. So what would that look like? It could mean solar arrays barnacling the planet, really everywhere you looked. It could mean if we developed better technology, we wouldn't even need to deploy them that broadly, because it's been estimated that just a sliver of the Sahara desert absorbs enough solar power to provide all the world's energy needs. But we'd probably need a new electric grid, one that doesn't lose two-thirds of its power to waste heat, as is today the case in the US. We could use some more nuclear power, perhaps, although it would have to be an entirely different kind of nuclear power, because today's technology simply isn't cost-competitive with renewable energy whose costs are falling so rapidly. We'd need a new kind of plane, because I don't think it's particularly practical to ask the entire world to give up on air travel, especially as so much of the global South is, for the very first time, able to afford it. We need planes that won't produce carbon. We need a new kind of agriculture. Because we probably can't ask people to entirely give up on meat and go vegan, it would mean a new way of raising beef. Or perhaps an old way, since we already know that traditional pasturing practices can turn cattle farms from what are called carbon sources, which produce CO2, into carbon sinks, which absorb them. If you prefer a techno solution, maybe we can grow some of that mean in the lab. Probably, we could also feed some real cattle seaweed, because that cuts their methane emissions by as much as 95 or 99 percent. Probably, we'd have to do all of these things, because as with every aspect of this puzzle, the problem is simply too vast and complicated to solve in any single silver-bullet way. And no matter how many solutions we deploy, we probably won't be able to decarbonize in time. That's the terrifying math that we face. We won't be able to beat climate change, only live with it and limit it. And that means we'd probably need some amount of what are called negative emissions, which take carbon out of the atmosphere as well. Billions of new trees, maybe trillions of new trees. And whole plantations of carbon-capture machines. Perhaps an industry twice or four times the size of today's oil and gas business to undo the damage that was done by those businesses in past decades. We would need a new kind of infrastructure, poured by a different kind of cement, because today, if cement were a country, it would be the world's third biggest emitter. And China is pouring as much cement every three years as the US poured in the entire 20th century. We would need to build seawalls and levees to protect those people living on the coast, many of whom are too poor to build them today, which is why it must mean an end to a narrowly nationalistic geopolitics that allows us to define the suffering of those living elsewhere in the world as insignificant, when we even acknowledge it. This better future won't be easy. But the only obstacles are human ones. That may not be much of a comfort, if you know what I know about human brutality and indifference, but I promise you, it is better than the alternative. Science isn't stopping us from taking action, and neither is technology. We have the tools we need today to begin. Of course, we also have the tools we need to end global poverty, epidemic disease and the abuse of women as well. Which is why more than new tools, we need a new politics, a way of overcoming all those human obstacles — our culture, our economics, our status quo bias, our disinterest in taking seriously anything that really scares us. Our shortsightedness. Our sense of self-interest. And the selfishness of the world's rich and powerful who have the least incentive to change anything. Now, they will suffer too, but not as much as those with the least, who have done the least to produce warming and have benefited the least from the processes that have brought us to this crisis point but will be burdened most in the decades ahead. A new politics would make the matter of managing that burden, where it falls and how heavily, the top priority of our time. No matter what we do, climate change will transform modern life. Some amount of warming is already baked in and is inevitable, which means probably some amount of additional suffering is, too. And even if we take dramatic action and avoid some of these truly terrifying worst-case scenarios, it would mean living on an entirely different planet. With a new politics, a new economics, a new relationship to technology and a new relationship to nature — a whole new world. But a relatively livable one. Relatively prosperous. And green. Why not choose that one? Thank you. (Applause) |
The beautiful, mysterious science of how you hear | {0: 'A. James "Jim" Hudspeth conducts research on hair cells, the sensory receptors of the inner ear.'} | TED@NAS | Can you hear me OK? Audience: Yes. Jim Hudspeth: OK. Well, if you can, it's really amazing, because my voice is changing the air pressure where you sit by just a few billionths of the atmospheric level, yet we take it for granted that your ears can capture that infinitesimal signal and use it to signal to the brain the full range of auditory experiences: the human voice, music, the natural world. How does your ear do that? And the answer to that is: through the cells that are the real hero of this presentation — the ear's sensory receptors, which are called "hair cells." Now, these hair cells are unfortunately named, because they have nothing at all to do with the kind of hair of which I have less and less. These cells were originally named that by early microscopists, who noticed that emanating from one end of the cell was a little cluster of bristles. With modern electron microscopy, we can see much better the nature of the special feature that gives the hair cell its name. That's the hair bundle. It's this cluster of 20 to several hundred fine cylindrical rods that stand upright at the top end of the cell. And this apparatus is what is responsible for your hearing me right this instant. Now, I must say that I am somewhat in love with these cells. I've spent 45 years in their company — (Laughter) and part of the reason is that they're really beautiful. There's an aesthetic component to it. Here, for example, are the cells with which an ordinary chicken conducts its hearing. These are the cells that a bat uses for its sonar. We use these large hair cells from a frog for many of our experiments. Hair cells are found all the way down to the most primitive of fishes, and those of reptiles often have this really beautiful, almost crystalline, order. But above and beyond its beauty, the hair bundle is an antenna. It's a machine for converting sound vibrations into electrical responses that the brain can then interpret. At the top of each hair bundle, as you can see in this image, there's a fine filament connecting each of the little hairs, the stereocilia. It's here marked with a little red triangle. And this filament has at its base a couple of ion channels, which are proteins that span the membrane. And here's how it works. This rat trap represents an ion channel. It has a pore that passes potassium ions and calcium ions. It has a little molecular gate that can be open, or it can be closed. And its status is set by this elastic band which represents that protein filament. Now, imagine that this arm represents one stereocilium and this arm represents the adjacent, shorter one with the elastic band between them. When sound energy impinges upon the hair bundle, it pushes it in the direction towards its taller edge. The sliding of the stereocilia puts tension in the link until the channels open and ions rush into the cell. When the hair bundle is pushed in the opposite direction, the channels close. And, most importantly, a back-and-forth motion of the hair bundle, as ensues during the application of acoustic waves, alternately opens and closes the channel, and each opening admits millions and millions of ions into the cell. Those ions constitute an electrical current that excites the cell. The excitation is passed to a nerve fiber, and then propagates into the brain. Notice that the intensity of the sound is represented by the magnitude of this response. A louder sound pushes the hair bundle farther, opens the channel longer, lets more ions in and gives rise to a bigger response. Now, this mode of operation has the advantage of great speed. Some of our senses, such as vision, use chemical reactions that take time. And as a consequence of that, if I show you a series of pictures at intervals of 20 or 30 per second, you get the sense of a continuous image. Because it doesn't use reactions, the hair cell is fully 1,000 times faster than our other senses. We can hear sounds at frequencies as great as 20,000 cycles per second, and some animals have ever faster ears. The ears of bats and whales, for example, can respond to their sonar pulses at 150,000 cycles a second. But this speed doesn't entirely explain why the ear performs so well. And it turns out that our hearing benefits from an amplifier, something called the "active process." The active process enhances our hearing and makes possible all the remarkable features that I've already mentioned. Let me tell you how it works. First of all, the active process amplifies sound, so you can hear, at threshold, sounds that move the hair bundle by a distance of only about three-tenths of a nanometer. That's the diameter of one water molecule. It's really astonishing. The system can also operate over an enormously wide dynamic range. Why do we need this amplification? The amplification, in ancient times, was useful because it was valuable for us to hear the tiger before the tiger could hear us. And these days, it's essential as a distant early warning system. It's valuable to be able to hear fire alarms or contemporary dangerous such as speeding fire engines or police cars or the like. When the amplification fails, our hearing's sensitivity plummets, and an individual may then need an electronic hearing aid to supplant the damaged biological one. This active process also enhances our frequency selectivity. Even an untrained individual can distinguish two tones that differ by only two-tenths of a percent, which is one-thirtieth of the difference between two piano notes, and a trained musician can do even better. This fine discrimination is useful in our ability to distinguish different voices and to understand the nuances of speech. And, again, if the active process deteriorates, it becomes harder to carry out verbal communication. Finally, the active process is valuable in setting the very broad range of sound intensities that our ears can tolerate, from the very faintest sound that you can hear, such as a dropped pen, to the loudest sound that you can stand — say, a jackhammer or a jet plane. The amplitude of sounds spans a range of one millionfold, which is more than is encompassed by any other sense or by any man-made device of which I'm aware. And again, if this system deteriorates, an affected individual may have a hard time hearing the very faintest sounds or tolerating the very loudest ones. Now, to understand how the hair cell does its thing, one has to situate it within its environment within the ear. We learn in school that the organ of hearing is the coiled, snail-shaped cochlea. It's an organ about the size of a chickpea. It's embedded in the bone on either side of the skull. We also learn that an optical prism can separate white light into its constituent frequencies, which we see as distinct colors. In an analogous way, the cochlea acts as sort of an acoustic prism that splits apart complex sounds into their component frequencies. So when a piano is sounded, different notes blend together into a chord. The cochlea undoes that process. It separates them and represents each at a different position. In this picture, you can see where three notes — middle C and the two extreme notes on a piano — are represented in the cochlea. The lowest frequencies go all the way up to the top of the cochlea. The highest frequencies, down to 20,000 Hz, go all the way to the bottom of the cochlea, and every other frequency is represented somewhere in between. And, as this diagram shows, successive musical tones are represented a few tens of hair cells apart along the cochlear surface. Now, this separation of frequencies is really key in our ability to identify different sounds, because very musical instrument, every voice, emits a distinct constellation of tones. The cochlea separates those frequencies, and the 16,000 hair cells then report to the brain how much of each frequency is present. The brain can then compare all the nerve signals and decide what particular tone is being heard. But this doesn't explain everything that I want to explain. Where's the magic? I told you already about the great things that the hair cell can do. How does it carry out the active process and do all the remarkable features that I mentioned at the outset? The answer is instability. We used to think that the hair bundle was a passive object, it just sat there, except when it was stimulated. But in fact, it's an active machine. It's constantly using internal energy to do mechanical work and enhance our hearing. So even at rest, in the absence of any input, an active hair bundle is constantly trembling. It's constantly twitching back and forth. But when even a weak sound is applied to it, it latches on to that sound and begins to move very neatly in a one-to-one way with it, and by so doing, it amplifies the signal about a thousand times. This same instability also enhances our frequency selectivity, for a given hair cell tends to oscillate best at the frequency at which it normally trembles when it's not being stimulated. So, this apparatus not only gives us our remarkably acute hearing, but also gives us the very sharp tuning. I want to offer you a short demonstration of something related to this. I'll ask the people who are running the sound system to turn up its sensitivity at one specific frequency. So just as a hair cell is tuned to one frequency, the amplifier will now enhance a particular frequency in my voice. Notice how specific tones emerge more clearly from the background. This is exactly what hair cells do. Each hair cell amplifies and reports one specific frequency and ignores all the others. And the whole set of hair cells, as a group, can then report to the brain exactly what frequencies are present in a given sound, and the brain can determine what melody is being heard or what speech is being intended. Now, an amplifier such as the public address system can also cause problems. If the amplification is turned up too far, it goes unstable and begins to howl or emit sounds. And one wonders why the active process doesn't do the same thing. Why don't our ears beam out sounds? And the answer is that they do. In a suitably quiet environment, 70 percent of normal people will have one or more sounds coming out of their ears. (Laughter) I'll give you an example of this. You will hear two emissions at high frequencies coming from a normal human ear. You may also be able to discern background noise, like the microphone's hiss, the gurgling of a stomach, the heartbeat, the rustling of clothes. (Hums, microphone hiss, dampened taps, clothes rustling) This is typical. Most ears emit just a handful of tones, but some can emit as many as 30. Every ear is unique, so my right ear is different from my left, my ear is different from your ear, but unless an ear is damaged, it continues to emit the same spectrum of frequencies over a period of years or even decades. So what's going on? It turns out that the ear can control its own sensitivity, its own amplification. So if you're in a very loud environment, like a sporting event or a musical concert, you don't need any amplification, and the system is turned down all the way. If you are in a room like this auditorium, you might have a little bit of amplification, but of course the public address system does most of the work for you. And finally, if you go into a really quiet room where you can hear a pin drop, the system is turned up almost all the way. But if you go into an ultraquiet room such as a sound chamber, the system turns itself up to 11, it goes unstable and it begins to emit sound. And these emissions constitute a really strong demonstration of just how active the hair cell can be. So in the last minute, I want to turn to another question that might come up, which is: Where do we go from here? And I would say that there are three issues that I would really like to address in the future. The first is: What is the molecular motor that's responsible for the hair cell's amplification? Somehow, nature has stumbled across a system that can oscillate or amplify at 20,000 cycles per second, or even more. That's much faster than any other biological oscillation, and we would like to understand where it comes from. The second issue is how the hair cell's amplification is adjusted to deal with the acoustic circumstances. Who turns the knob to increase or decrease the amplification in a quiet or in a loud environment? And the third issue is one that concerns all of us, which is what we can do about the deterioration of our hearing. Thirty million Americans, and more than 400 million people worldwide, have significant problems on a daily basis with understanding speech in a noisy environment or over the telephone. Many have even worse deficits. Moreover, these deficits tend to get worse with time, because when human hair cells die, they're not replaced by cell division. But we know that nonmammalian animals can replace their cells, and those creatures' cells are dying and being replaced throughout life, so the animals maintain normal hearing. Here's an example from a little zebra fish. The cell at the top will undergo a division to produce two new hair cells. They dance for a little bit, and then settle down and go to work. So we believe that if we can decode the molecular signals that are used by these other animals to regenerate their hair cells, we'll be able to do the same thing for humans. And our group and many other groups are now engaged in research trying to resurrect these amazing hair cells. Thank you for your attention. (Applause) |
Why COVID-19 is hitting us now -- and how to prepare for the next outbreak | {0: 'Alanna Shaikh is a global health consultant who specializes in strengthening health systems. '} | TEDxSMU | I want to lead here by talking a little bit about my credentials to bring this up with you, because, quite honestly, you really, really should not listen to any old person with an opinion about COVID-19. (Laughter) So I've been working in global health for about 20 years, and my specific technical specialty is in health systems and what happens when health systems experience severe shocks. I've also worked in global health journalism; I've written about global health and biosecurity for newspapers and web outlets, and I published a book a few years back about the major global health threats facing us as a planet. I have supported and led epidemiology efforts that range from evaluating Ebola treatment centers to looking at transmission of tuberculosis in health facilities and doing avian influenza preparedness. I have a master's degree in International Health. I'm not a physician. I'm not a nurse. My specialty isn't patient care or taking care of individual people. My specialty is looking at populations and health systems, what happens when diseases move on the large level. If we're ranking sources of global health expertise on a scale of one to 10, one is some random person ranting on Facebook and 10 is the World Health Organization, I'd say you can probably put me at like a seven or an eight. So keep that in mind as I talk to you. I'll start with the basics here, because I think that's gotten lost in some of the media noise around COVID-19. So, COVID-19 is a coronavirus. Coronaviruses are a specific subset of virus, and they have some unique characteristics as viruses. They use RNA instead of DNA as their genetic material, and they're covered in spikes on the surface of the virus. They use those spikes to invade cells. Those spikes are the corona in coronavirus. COVID-19 is known as a novel coronavirus because, until December, we'd only heard of six coronaviruses. COVID-19 is the seventh. It's new to us. It just had its gene sequencing, it just got its name. That's why it's novel. If you remember SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, those were coronaviruses. And they're both called respiratory syndromes, because that's what coronaviruses do — they go for your lungs. They don't make you puke, they don't make you bleed from the eyeballs, they don't make you hemorrhage. They head for your lungs. COVID-19 is no different. It causes a range of respiratory symptoms that go from stuff like a dry cough and a fever all the way out to fatal viral pneumonia. And that range of symptoms is one of the reasons it's actually been so hard to track this outbreak. Plenty of people get COVID-19 but so gently, their symptoms are so mild, they don't even go to a health care provider. They don't register in the system. Children, in particular, have it very easy with COVID-19, which is something we should all be grateful for. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, which means that they transmit from animals to people. Some coronaviruses, like COVID-19, also transmit person to person. The person-to-person ones travel faster and travel farther, just like COVID-19. Zoonotic illnesses are really hard to get rid of, because they have an animal reservoir. One example is avian influenza, where we can abolish it in farmed animals, in turkeys, in ducks, but it keeps coming back every year because it's brought to us by wild birds. You don't hear a lot about it because avian influenza doesn't transmit person-to-person, but we have outbreaks in poultry farms every year all over the world. COVID-19 most likely skipped from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, China. Now for the less basic parts. This is not the last major outbreak we're ever going to see. There's going to be more outbreaks, and there's going to be more epidemics. That's not a maybe. That's a given. And it's a result of the way that we, as human beings, are interacting with our planet. Human choices are driving us into a position where we're going to see more outbreaks. Part of that is about climate change and the way a warming climate makes the world more hospitable to viruses and bacteria. But it's also about the way we're pushing into the last wild spaces on our planet. When we burn and plow the Amazon rain forest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted to farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they've never come into contact with before, and those populations have new kinds of diseases: bacteria, viruses, stuff we're not ready for. Bats, in particular, have a knack for hosting illnesses that can infect people, but they're not the only animals that do it. So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming. We can't stop the outbreaks with quarantine or travel restrictions. That's everybody's first impulse: "Let's stop the people from moving. Let's stop this outbreak from happening." But the fact is, it's really hard to get a good quarantine in place. It's really hard to set up travel restrictions. Even the countries that have made serious investments in public health, like the US and South Korea, can't get that kind of restriction in place fast enough to actually stop an outbreak instantly. There's logistical reasons for that, and there's medical reasons. If you look at COVID-19 right now, it seems like it could have a period where you're infected and show no symptoms that's as long as 24 days. So people are walking around with this virus showing no signs. They're not going to get quarantined. Nobody knows they need quarantining. There's also some real costs to quarantine and to travel restrictions. Humans are social animals, and they resist when you try to hold them into place and when you try to separate them. We saw in the Ebola outbreak that as soon as you put a quarantine in place, people start trying to evade it. Individual patients, if they know there's a strict quarantine protocol, may not go for health care, because they're afraid of the medical system or they can't afford care and they don't want to be separated from their family and friends. Politicians, government officials, when they know that they're going to get quarantined if they talk about outbreaks and cases, may conceal real information for fear of triggering a quarantine protocol. And, of course, these kinds of evasions and dishonesty are exactly what makes it so difficult to track a disease outbreak. We can get better at quarantines and travel restrictions, and we should, but they're not our only option, and they're not our best option for dealing with these situations. The real way for the long haul to make outbreaks less serious is to build the global health system to support core health care functions in every country in the world so that all countries, even poor ones, are able to rapidly identify and treat new infectious diseases as they emerge. China's taken a lot of criticism for its response to COVID-19. But the fact is, what if COVID-19 had emerged in Chad, which has three and a half doctors for every hundred thousand people? What if it had emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which just released its last Ebola patient from treatment? The truth is, countries like this don't have the resources to respond to an infectious disease — not to treat people and not to report on it fast enough to help the rest of the world. I led an evaluation of Ebola treatment centers in Sierra Leone, and the fact is that local doctors in Sierra Leone identified the Ebola crisis very quickly, first as a dangerous, contagious hemorrhagic virus and then as Ebola itself. But, having identified it, they didn't have the resources to respond. They didn't have enough doctors, they didn't have enough hospital beds and they didn't have enough information about how to treat Ebola or how to implement infection control. Eleven doctors died in Sierra Leone of Ebola. The country only had 120 when the crisis started. By way of contrast, Dallas Baylor Medical Center has more than a thousand physicians on staff. These are the kinds of inequities that kill people. First, they kill the poor people when the outbreaks start, and then they kill people all over the world when the outbreaks spread. If we really want to slow down these outbreaks and minimize their impact, we need to make sure that every country in the world has the capacity to identify new diseases, treat them and report about them so they can share information. COVID-19 is going to be a huge burden on health systems. COVID-19 has also revealed some real weaknesses in our global health supply chains. Just-in-time-ordering, lean systems are great when things are going well, but in a time of crisis, what it means is we don't have any reserves. If a hospital — or a country — runs out of face masks or personal protective equipment, there's no big warehouse full of boxes that we can go to to get more. You have to order more from the supplier, you have to wait for them to produce it and you have to wait for them to ship it, generally from China. That's a time lag at a time when it's most important to move quickly. If we'd been perfectly prepared for COVID-19, China would have identified the outbreak faster. They would have been ready to provide care to infected people without having to build new buildings. They would have shared honest information with citizens so that we didn't see these crazy rumors spreading on social media in China. And they would have shared information with global health authorities so that they could start reporting to national health systems and getting ready for when the virus spread. National health systems would then have been able to stockpile the protective equipment they needed and train health care providers on treatment and infection control. We'd have science-based protocols for what to do when things happen, like cruise ships have infected patients. And we'd have real information going out to people everywhere, so we wouldn't see embarrassing, shameful incidents of xenophobia, like Asian-looking people getting attacked on the street in Philadelphia. But even with all of that in place, we would still have outbreaks. The choices we're making about how we occupy this planet make that inevitable. As far as we have an expert consensus on COVID-19, it's this: here in the US, and globally, it's going to get worse before it gets better. We're seeing cases of human transmission that aren't from returning travel, that are just happening in the community, and we're seeing people infected with COVID-19 when we don't even know where the infection came from. Those are signs of an outbreak that's getting worse, not an outbreak that's under control. It's depressing, but it's not surprising. Global health experts, when they talk about the scenario of new viruses, this is one of the scenarios that they look at. We all hoped we'd get off easy, but when experts talk about viral planning, this is the kind of situation and the way they expect the virus to move. I want to close here with some personal advice. Wash your hands. Wash your hands a lot. I know you already wash your hands a lot because you're not disgusting, but wash your hands even more. Set up cues and routines in your life to get you to wash your hands. Wash your hands every time you enter and leave a building. Wash your hands when you go into a meeting and when you come out of a meeting. Get rituals that are based around handwashing. Sanitize your phone. You touch that phone with your dirty, unwashed hands all the time. I know you take it into the bathroom with you. (Laughter) So sanitize your phone and consider not using it as often in public. Maybe TikTok and Instagram can be home things only. Don't touch your face. Don't rub your eyes. Don't bite your fingernails. Don't wipe your nose on the back of your hand. I mean, don't do that anyway because, gross. (Laughter) Don't wear a face mask. Face masks are for sick people and health care providers. If you're sick, your face mask holds in all your coughing and sneezing and protects the people around you. And if you're a health care provider, your face mask is one tool in a set of tools called personal protective equipment that you're trained to use so that you can give patient care and not get sick yourself. If you're a regular healthy person wearing a face mask, it's just making your face sweaty. (Laughter) Leave the face masks in stores for the doctors and the nurses and the sick people. If you think you have symptoms of COVID-19, stay home, call your doctor for advice. If you're diagnosed with COVID-19, remember it's generally very mild. And if you're a smoker, right now is the best possible time to quit smoking. I mean, if you're a smoker, right now is always the best possible time to quit smoking, but if you're a smoker and you're worried about COVID-19, I guarantee that quitting is absolutely the best thing you can do to protect yourself from the worst impacts of COVID-19. COVID-19 is scary stuff, at a time when pretty much all of our news feels like scary stuff. And there's a lot of bad but appealing options for dealing with it: panic, xenophobia, agoraphobia, authoritarianism, oversimplified lies that make us think that hate and fury and loneliness are the solution to outbreaks. But they're not. They just make us less prepared. There's also a boring but useful set of options that we can use in response to outbreaks, things like improving health care here and everywhere; investing in health infrastructure and disease surveillance so that we know when the new diseases come; building health systems all over the world; looking at strengthening our supply chains so they're ready for emergencies; and better education, so we're capable of talking about disease outbreaks and the mathematics of risk without just blind panic. We need to be guided by equity here, because in this situation, like so many, equity is actually in our own self-interest. So thank you so much for listening to me today, and can I be the first one to tell you: wash your hands when you leave the theater. (Applause) |
How can we solve the antibiotic resistance crisis? | null | TED-Ed | Antibiotics: behind the scenes, they enable much of modern medicine. We use them to cure infectious diseases, but also to safely facilitate everything from surgery to chemotherapy to organ transplants. Without antibiotics, even routine medical procedures can lead to life-threatening infections. And we’re at risk of losing them. Antibiotics are chemicals that prevent the growth of bacteria. Unfortunately, some bacteria have become resistant to all currently available antibiotics. At the same time, we’ve stopped discovering new ones. Still, there’s hope that we can get ahead of the problem. But first, how did we get into this situation? The first widely used antibiotic was penicillin, discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming. In his 1945 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Fleming warned that bacterial resistance had the potential to ruin the miracle of antibiotics. He was right: in the 1940s and 50s, resistant bacteria already began to appear. From then until the 1980s, pharmaceutical companies countered the problem of resistance by discovering many new antibiotics. At first this was a highly successful— and highly profitable— enterprise. Over time, a couple things changed. Newly discovered antibiotics were often only effective for a narrow spectrum of infections, whereas the first ones had been broadly applicable. This isn’t a problem in itself, but it does mean that fewer doses of these drugs could be sold— making them less profitable. In the early days, antibiotics were heavily overprescribed, including for viral infections they had no effect on. Scrutiny around prescriptions increased, which is good, but also lowered sales. At the same time, companies began to develop more drugs that are taken over a patient’s lifetime, like blood pressure and cholesterol medications, and later anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications. Because they are taken indefinitely, these drugs more profitable. By the mid-1980s, no new chemical classes of antibiotics were discovered. But bacteria continued to acquire resistance and pass it along by sharing genetic information between individual bacteria and even across species. Now bacteria that are resistant to many antibiotics are common, and increasingly some strains are resistant to all our current drugs. So, what can we do about this? We need to control the use of existing antibiotics, create new ones, combat resistance to new and existing drugs, and find new ways to fight bacterial infections. The largest consumer of antibiotics is agriculture, which uses antibiotics not only to treat infections but to promote the growth of food animals. Using large volumes of antibiotics increases the bacteria’s exposure to the antibiotics and therefore their opportunity to develop resistance. Many bacteria that are common in animals, like salmonella, can also infect humans, and drug-resistant versions can pass to us through the food chain and spread through international trade and travel networks. In terms of finding new antibiotics, nature offers the most promising new compounds. Organisms like other microbes and fungi have evolved over millions of years to live in competitive environments— meaning they often contain antibiotic compounds to give them a survival advantage over certain bacteria. We can also package antibiotics with molecules that inhibit resistance. One way bacteria develop resistance is through proteins of their own that degrade the drug. By packaging the antibiotic with molecules that block the degraders, the antibiotic can do its job. Phages, viruses that attack bacteria but don’t affect humans, are one promising new avenue to combat bacterial infections. Developing vaccines for common infections, meanwhile, can help prevent disease in the first place. The biggest challenge to all these approaches is funding, which is woefully inadequate across the globe. Antibiotics are so unprofitable that many large pharmaceutical companies have stopped trying to develop them. Meanwhile, smaller companies that successfully bring new antibiotics to market often still go bankrupt, like the American start up Achaogen. New therapeutic techniques like phages and vaccines face the same fundamental problem as traditional antibiotics: if they’re working well, they’re used just once, which makes it difficult to make money. And to successfully counteract resistance in the long term, we’ll need to use new antibiotics sparingly— lowering the profits for their creators even further. One possible solution is to shift profits away from the volume of antibiotics sold. For example, the United Kingdom is testing a model where healthcare providers purchase antibiotic subscriptions. While governments are looking for ways to incentivize antibiotic development, these programs are still in the early stages. Countries around the world will need to do much more— but with enough investment in antibiotic development and controlled use of our current drugs, we can still get ahead of resistance. |
A campaign for period positivity | {0: 'After witnessing the stigma related to menstruation, Ananya Grover took action with her classmates. She believes breaking silence is the first step towards period positivity.'} | TED-Ed Weekend | Menstruation. A simple word describing a natural biological process, weighed down by centuries of stigma, has been transformed into something most of us can only speak about in whispers. But why? As I speak to you right now, more than 800 million women around the world are having a period. None of us would exist without it, and yet it remains an "embarrassing" subject to broach. From my experience and that of the women around me, I can tell you that it's exhausting. It's exhausting to carefully take out a brown paper bag hiding a pad, stuffing it into your pocket in the middle of a class and rushing to the washroom as discreetly as possible. It's exhausting to sit through lessons and meetings pretending to be absolutely normal, while internally crying out from intense period cramps. It's exhausting to be dismissively told that you’re PMSing or suffering from "that time of the month," and it's exhausting to continuously fight back against age-old traditions that ask you not to pray, visit temples, cook, touch pickle and the list goes on and on, while you're just trying to bleed and be left in peace. (Laughter) But you know what the worst part is? The worst part is that the things that seem tiring to us are merely the tip of the iceberg, because we in this room are privileged enough to be able to afford sanitary napkins every month, to be able to visit a gynecologist in case of any problem, to be able to tell what's normal and abnormal with our monthly cycle. We have access to water, sanitation and toilets that help us maintain our privacy and hygiene. But what about those who don't? What about 335 million girls around the world who go to school without even having access to water and soap to wash their hands? What about 15-year-old schoolgirls in Kenya who have to sell their bodies to be able to buy sanitary napkins? What about two-thirds of rural high school girls in India who don't even understand what their bodies are going through at menarche? And right now, we are all gathered here in the USA. So what about 64 percent of women in St. Louis, Missouri, who weren't able to afford menstrual hygiene supplies in the previous year? What about the struggles of homeless, transgender, intersex and displaced people who menstruate? What about them? The scale of the problem, stemming in part from the deep-rooted stigma attached to menstruation, is unimaginable. And the desire to voice this frustration led me, along with three other teammates, to initiate a campaign that calls for change, questions the taboos surrounding menstruation and spreads period positivity. The name of our campaign, "Pravahkriti," was born from the message that we want to convey to the world. "Pravah" means "flow," and "kriti" means "a beautiful creation." Because how could the monthly cycle that ultimately gives rise to all creation be anything less than beautiful? Now, as a social issue, menstruation has several facets to it that overlap, reinforce and worsen the situation. So we based our campaign on four fundamental pillars: health, hygiene, awareness and spreading positivity. But how did we actually implement this? Well, we started within the walls of our school classroom. Instead of simply explaining menstruation to children from a textbook or biological standpoint, we adopted an innovative approach. We conducted an activity where students strung together a bracelet consisting of 28 beads signifying the length of the menstrual cycle, out of which four to seven beads were of a different color, demonstrating the days a woman bleeds. And in this way, we not only explained what periods are in a manner that was educational but also approachable and engaging. To offer another example, we explored various ways of alleviating cramps, including preparing some natural remedies in school itself. And we didn't just stop at involving girls in our campaign. In fact, boys were equally involved, and one of our co-team members, as you saw, is also a boy. Through internal conversations where girls could freely share their personal experiences and boys could just ask questions, no matter how "dumb" they might seem, our male volunteers quickly got over their awkwardness, not just supporting but also leading educational sessions. Clearly, starting an inclusive conversation, including members of all genders and listening to and supporting each other, can go a long way. Now, to make our campaign successful, we conducted extensive research, interviewed gynecologists, surveyed people to gauge public opinion on periods and conducted a panel discussion with professionals working in this field. And then we undertook the journey to create change. We organized a stall at Shilpotsav, a local fair, where we distributed sanitary napkin-shaped envelopes and bookmarks containing period-positive messages. We donated hundreds of pads that we had collected through a pad donation drive at school. Interacting with young girls in government and charitable schools, we explained periods to them through a game of hopscotch and distributed period kits that we had made ourselves that consisted of a pad and other items like a paper soap and sanitizer for maintaining hygiene, a piece of dark chocolate just to lift their mood, a sachet of ginger tea and so on. In whatever we did, we strived to think beyond the norm and break barriers, be it by creating a physical period tracker to help girls without access to the internet to record their monthly cycle, or sensitizing the masses by performing street plays, or even developing a video game called "Crimson Crusade" — (Laughter) that introduces both boys and girls to problems faced by menstruating women globally and players progress in the game by defeating menstrual monsters. (Laughter) To sustain this effort, we've installed 10 sanitary napkin dispensers in several schools. Gradually, people's mindsets are changing. But does change come so easily? At a school for the underprivileged, we encountered a girl who had just got her first period but wasn't wearing anything to absorb the flow. Imagine being her, sitting in class feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable, looking down and seeing red, asking your parents for help, asking what was going on with you and being dismissed. Imagine the shame, fear and embarrassment for being "caught" doing something wrong that forces you into living in ignorance and silence at the cost of your health and dignity. While we do our part, our endeavors will only be successful if each one of you internalizes and spreads onward the idea that menstruation is completely normal, if each one of you conveys this message to every person you know. When we can discuss digestion, blood circulation and respiration — all natural, biological processes — why should menstruation be off-limits? And you, too, can help make it less taboo, simply by being more open with male friends and family members, supporting local and international organizations working to improve menstrual hygiene management, making menstrual bracelets with middle school kids in your area or even by playing Crimson Crusade with your friends. Every small steps counts, because brushing this topic under the carpet perpetuates lack of access to sanitary absorbents, ignorance of menstrual health issues, school absenteeism, infection and so much more. I'd like to end with a few lines a volunteer wrote for us: "Let the crimson tide turn. Let there be waves of positivity, thundering applause, villages full of women who bleed with pride. Let there be a scent of education drifting through the oxygen inhaled by men, women and children. Let all know the marvels of menstruation and celebrate Pravahkriti." Thank you. (Applause) |
How can we control the coronavirus pandemic? | {0: 'Adam Kucharski is working to understand how epidemics spread -- and how they can be controlled.', 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | The TED Interview | [How can we control the coronavirus pandemic?] [From infectious disease expert Adam Kucharski] [Question 1: What does containment mean when it comes to outbreaks?] Containment is this idea that you can focus your effort on control very much on the cases and their contacts. So you're not causing disruption to the wider population, you have a case that comes in, you isolate them, you work out who they've come into contact with, who's potentially these opportunities for exposure and then you can follow up those people, maybe quarantine them, to make sure that no further transmission happens. So it's a very focused, targeted method, and for SARS, it worked remarkably well. But I think for this infection, because some cases are going to be missed, or undetected, you've really got to be capturing a large chunk of people at risk. If a few slip through the net, potentially, you're going to get an outbreak. [Question 2: If containment isn't enough, what comes next?] In that respect, it would be about massive changes in our social interactions. And so that would require, of the opportunities that could spread the virus so these kind of close contacts, everybody in the population, on average, will be needing to reduce those interactions potentially by two-thirds to bring it under control. That might be through working from home, from changing lifestyle and kind of where you go in crowded places and dinners. And of course, these measures, things like school closures, and other things that just attempt to reduce the social mixing of a population. [Question 3: What are the risks that we need people to think about?] It's not just whose hand you shake, it's whose hand that person goes on to shake. And I think we need to think about these second-degree steps, that you might think you have low risk and you're in a younger group, but you're often going to be a very short step away from someone who is going to get hit very hard by this. And I think we really need to be socially minded and think this could be quite dramatic in terms of change of behavior, but it needs to be to reduce the impact that we're potentially facing. [Question 4: How far apart should people stay from each other?] I think it's hard to pin down exactly, but I think one thing to bear in mind is that there's not so much evidence that this is a kind of aerosol and it goes really far — it's reasonably short distances. I don't think it's the case that you're sitting a few meters away from someone and the virus is somehow going to get across. It's in closer interactions, and it's why we're seeing so many transmission events occur in things like meals and really tight-knit groups. Because if you imagine that's where you can get a virus out and onto surfaces and onto hands and onto faces, and it's really situations like that we've got to think more about. [Question 5: What kind of protective measures should countries put in place?] I think that's what people are trying to piece together, first in terms of what works. It's only really in the last sort of few weeks we've got a sense that this thing can be controllable with this extent of interventions, but of course, not all countries can do what China have done, some of these measures incur a huge social, economic, psychological burden on populations. And of course, there's the time limit. In China, they've had them in for six weeks, it's tough to maintain that, so we need to think of these tradeoffs of all the things we can ask people to do, what's going to have the most impact on actually reducing the burden. [To learn more, visit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] [World Health Organization] |
How one scientist took on the chemical industry | null | TED-Ed | In 1958, Rachel Carson received a letter describing songbirds suddenly dropping from tree branches. The writer blamed their deaths on a pesticide called DDT that exterminators had sprayed on a nearby marsh. The letter was the push Carson needed to investigate DDT. She had already heard from scientists and conservationists who were worried that rampant use of the pesticide posed a threat to fish, birds, and possibly humans. She began to make inquiries through government contacts from her years working in the United States Bureau of Fisheries. She asked: “what has already silenced the voices of spring?” In 1962, Carson published her findings in "Silent Spring." Her book documented the misuse of chemicals and their toll on nature and human health. "Silent Spring" immediately drew both applause and impassioned dissent— along with vicious personal attacks on the author. How did this mild-mannered biologist and writer ignite such controversy? Carson began her career as a hardworking graduate student, balancing her studies in biology at John Hopkins University with part time jobs. Still, she had to leave school before completing her doctorate to provide for her ailing father and sister. Carson found part time work with the Bureau of Fisheries writing for a radio program on marine biology. Her ability to write materials that could hold the general public’s attention impressed her superiors, and in 1936, she became the second woman to be hired at the Bureau full time. In 1941, she published the first of three books on the ocean, combining science with lyrical meditations on underwater worlds. These explorations resonated with a wide audience. In "Silent Spring," Carson turned her attention to the ways human actions threaten the balance of nature. DDT was originally used during World War II to shield crops from insects and protect soldiers from insect-borne diseases. After the war, it was routinely sprayed in wide swaths to fight pests, often with unforeseen results. One attempt to eradicate fire ants in the southern U.S. killed wildlife indiscriminately, but did little to eliminate the ants. In spite of this and other mishaps, the US Department of Agriculture and chemical companies extolled the benefits of DDT. There was little regulation or public awareness about its potential harm. But Carson showed how the overuse of chemicals led to the evolution of resistant species— which, in turn, encouraged the development of deadlier chemicals. Since DDT does not dissolve in water, she asserted that over time it would accumulate in the environment, the bodies of insects, the tissues of animals who consume those insects, and eventually humans. She suggested that exposure to DDT might alter the structure of genes, with unknown consequences for future generations. The response to "Silent Spring" was explosive. For many people the book was a call to regulate substances capable of catastrophic harm. Others objected that Carson hadn’t mentioned DDT’s role controlling the threat insects posed to human health. Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson demanded to know “why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics?” and dismissed Carson as “probably a Communist.” A lawyer for a pesticide manufacturer alluded to Carson and her supporters as “sinister influences” aiming to paint businesses as “immoral.” In reality, Carson had focused on the dangers of chemicals because they weren’t widely understood, while the merits were well publicized. She rejected the prevailing belief that humans should and could control nature. Instead, she challenged people to cultivate “maturity and mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.” Carson died of cancer in 1964, only two years after the publication of "Silent Spring." Her work galvanized a generation of environmental activists. In 1969, under pressure from environmentalists, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act that required federal agencies to evaluate environmental impacts of their actions. To enforce the act, President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. And in 1972, the EPA issued a partial ban on the use of DDT. Long after her death, Rachel Carson continued to advocate for nature through the lingering impact of her writing. |
A fascinating time capsule of human feelings toward AI | {0: 'Lucy Farey-Jones is obsessed with what makes people embrace or reject new things.'} | TED2019 | I'm here, because I've spent far too many nights lying awake, worrying and wondering who wins in the end. Is it humans or is it robots? You see, as a technology strategist, my job involves behavior change: understanding why and how people adopt new technologies. And that means I'm really frustrated that I know I won't live to see how this all ends up. And in fact, if the youngest person watching this is 14 and the oldest, a robust 99, then together, our collective consciousnesses span just 185 years. That is a myopic pinprick of time when you think of the evolution and the story of life on this planet. Turns out we're all in the cheap seats and none of us will live to see how it all pans out. So at my company, we wanted a way around this. We wanted to see if there was a way to cantilever out, beyond our fixed temporal vantage point, to get a sense of how it all shakes up. And to do this, we conducted a study amongst 1,200 Americans representative of the US census, in which we asked a battery of attitudinal questions around robotics and AI and also captured behavioral ones around technology adoption. We had a big study so that we could analyze differences in gender and generations, between religious and political beliefs, even job function and personality trait. It is a fascinating, time-bound time capsule of our human frailty in this predawn of the robotic era. And I have five minutes to tell you about it. The first thing you should know is that we brainstormed a list of scenarios of current and potential AI robotics. They ran the spectrum from the mundane, so, a robot house cleaner, anyone? Through to the mischievous, the idea of a robot pet sitter, or maybe a robot lawyer, or maybe a sex partner. Through to the downright macabre, the idea of being a cyborg, blending human and robot, or uploading your brain so it could live on after your death. And we plotted people's comfort levels with these various scenarios. There were actually 31 in the study, but for ease, I'm going to show you just a few of them here. The first thing you'll notice, of course, is the sea of red. America is very uncomfortable with this stuff. That's why we call it the discomfort index, not the comfort index. There were only two things the majority of America is OK with. And that's the idea of a robot AI house cleaner and a robot AI package deliverer, so Dyson and Amazon, you guys should talk. There's an opportunity there. It seems we're ready to off-load our chores to our robot friends. We're kind of definitely on the fence when it comes to services, so robot AI lawyer or a financial adviser, maybe. But we're firmly closed to the idea of robot care, whether it be a nurse, a doctor, child care. So from this, you'd go, "It's OK, Lucy, you know what? Go back to sleep, stop worrying, the humans win in the end." But actually not so fast. If you look at my data very closely, you can see we're more vulnerable than we think. AI has a branding problem. So of those folks who said that they would absolutely reject the idea of a personal assistant, 45 percent of them had, in fact, one in their pockets, in terms of a device with Alexa, Google or Siri. One in five of those who were against the idea of AI matchmaking had of course, you guessed it, done online dating. And 80 percent of those of us who refuse the idea of boarding an autonomous plane with a pilot backup had in fact, just like me to get here to Vancouver, flown commercial. Lest you think everybody was scared, though, here are the marvelous folk in the middle. These are the neutrals. These are people for whom you say, "OK, robot friend," and they're like, "Hm, robot friend. Maybe." Or, "AI pet," and they go, "Never say never." And as any decent political operative knows, flipping the ambivalent middle can change the game. Another reason I know we're vulnerable is men — I'm sorry, but men, you are twice as likely than women to believe that getting into an autonomous car is a good idea, that uploading your brain for posterity is fun, and two and a half times more likely to believe that becoming a cyborg is cool, and for this, I blame Hollywood. (Laughter) And this is where I want you to look around the theater and know that one in four men are OK with the idea of sex with a robot. That goes up to 44 percent of millennial men compared to just one in 10 women, which I think puts a whole new twist on the complaint of mechanical sex. (Laughter) Even more astounding than that though, to be honest, is this behavioral difference. So here we have people who have a device with a voice assistant in it, so a smart speaker, a home hub or a smart phone, versus those who don't. And you can see from this graph that the Trojan horse is already in our living room. And as these devices proliferate and our collective defenses soften, we all see how it can end. In fact, this may be as good a time as any to admit I did take my Alexa Dot on vacation with me. Final finding I have time for is generational. So look at the difference just three generations make. This is the leap from silent to boomer to millennial. And what's more fascinating than this is if you extrapolate this out, the same rate of change, just the same pace, not the accelerated one I actually believe will be the case, the same pace, then it is eight generations away when we hear every single American thinking the majority of these things here are normal. So the year 2222 is an astounding place where everything here is mainstream. And lest you needed any more convincing, here is the generation's "excitement level with AI." So not surprisingly, the youngest of us are more excited. But, and possibly the most paradoxical finding of my career, when I asked these people my 3am question, "Who wins in the end?" Guess what. The more excited you are about AI and robotics, the more likely you are to say it's the robots. And I don't think we need a neural net running pattern-recognition software to see where this is all headed. We are the proverbial frogs in boiling water. So if the robots at TED2222 are watching this for posterity, could you send a cyborg, dig me up and tell me if I was right? (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) |
Without farmers, you'd be hungry, naked and sober | {0: 'Eric Sannerud engages with agricultural issues across disciplines and seeks to boost access to farmland for new and young farmers.'} | TEDxStCloud | So what do people usually say when you're about to give a public talk? It's to imagine that your audience is naked. (Laughter) Well, I'm doing a different trick tonight, and I'm going to imagine all of us without farmers, and well, it's not so much different. [Without farmers you'd be hungry, naked and sober] (Laughter) And our farmers do so much more for us than simply feed and clothe and provide us excellent things to drink. Our farmers are an important part of all of our communities, particularly our rural communities. And more than that, they're a strong driver of resilient economics. Think about it this way: When a brewer buys hops from me, grown here in Minnesota, 90 percent of that dollar stays in our state, compared to just 10 percent when they buy it from somewhere else. What that means is a lot. That 90 percent means local jobs. It means tax revenue for better schools and roads. It means support for the co-ops, the mechanics, all the support staff that are needed for a farm to thrive. And they're our best stewards of the land. This quote, I think, exemplifies what our family farmers do for us in stewarding our shared natural resources. "That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected as an extension of ethics." Now, they sure do a lot of good stuff for us. And our family farmers are great, we'd all agree. However, the trends in agriculture today are dire. The average age of a farmer in America, according to the latest agricultural census — 58.3. Of all the farmers, 33 percent are 65 plus. That's a little caricature of my grandpa. (Laughter) He's still farming, and he's much older than 65. But to put that in perspective, another important public service job, teaching, average age of teachers is 42. Our farmers are pretty old in this country. And unfortunately, when they retire, if they retire, we're not really replacing them. Of all the farmers that we added in this country between 2008 and 2012, across the entire United States — see if you can catch this difference — we added 2,000 under the age of 30. I'm one of those. I'll be around to autograph some photos later, if you'd like. (Laughter) But, you know, our farmers are getting older and we're not replacing them — what's going on here? What are we going to do? And I think there's a reason folks aren't coming into it, and that's prices. We're going to go through a couple of slides like this. Milk: This is the average retail price of a gallon of milk in the United States. Four dollars forty-nine cents. How much do you think the farmer gets? Dollar thirty-two. We'll try again with bread. Average retail price of bread in America, three forty-nine. Farmer gets ... Twelve cents. Audience: Oh! And so how are we supposed to have strong local farms in this scenario? What are we supposed to do if there aren't any local farmers left? And this isn't just a farmer problem, it's not just something for the few of us farmers to sort out. This is an all-of-us problem. This is rural and it's urban and it's statewide and it's nationwide. So what do we do about it? I'll tell you that. But first, a story. The green movement, we're all kind of familiar, started in the '60s, planting trees. And now we've come such a long way. Green is part of our day-to-day lives. It's part of the day-to-day lives of Fortune 500 businesses. It's the subject of international treaties, the subject of presidential debates. You and I, we switch our light bulbs, we use reusable bags. We participate in the green movement each and every day. Yet ... and this is how we get to the idea — the food movement, relatively younger, but also somewhat familiar, I imagine. You go to the grocery store, you see a sign that says "Buy local," you go to the farmers market, you go to the co-op, you read books by prominent authors. The food movement to date could be summarized as voting with your fork. The idea is: you pull a dollar out of your wallet — how you spend that dollar affects the food system. It supports farmers close to home. And that's all well and good, but where are we going? How do we get to our renewable-energy moment like the green movement did? And this, I think, is what we need to do. Just voting with our fork is not solving the issues that our farmers are facing. And so we need to do more than that. I believe we must move on from just voting with our fork to voting with our vote. We need to take our dollars and continue to spend them locally. We also need to show up at the ballot box for our farmers. This is bigger than just buying local strawberries once a year at a pick-your-own. This is a year-round effort that we must make together to make the change we need. Changes like fair pricing for farmers. That's quotas, supply management, guaranteed prices. Changes like fair and open trade. That means ending trade wars. And yeah, of course it means voting. Now we all knew that one already, though. For example, it's working. Hey, who's that? (Laughter) Just this year in Minnesota, we've passed a historic, first-in-the-country tax credit. The Beginning Farmer Tax Credit. It incentivizes our transition of land from the existing generation to the next generation. That was done by a handful of us young farmers — we certainly don't have money, you saw that earlier. We don't have political experience. But we showed up, and we made our voices heard. And thanks to the support of farmers and non-farmers alike, we got something incredible done here in this state. If we can do it, anybody can do it. Now, that was all light and fuzzy and feels pretty happy. Skeptics in the audience, you're here. That would be me, if I were here. Skeptics are thinking, "Wow, what do we need to change about our food system?" Farmers are great. We have unlimited food, and it's real cheap, too, isn't that great? Well, unfortunately, in the '80s and the '90s in this country, we went down a path of policy that could be described as "get big or get out." And what "get big or get out" means is you maximize production while minimizing costs. On its face value, that sounds pretty simple. However, that shift turned our farmers from a venerated class and a valued class in our society into a cost to be minimized. That shift made it so that my great-grandfather, who supported the family with six cows, that same dairy, trying to support their family, has to be 600 cows today. Six-thousand-cow dairies are not unheard of. What happens when there's this one dairy farm in an entire county, where there used to be hundreds? The same could be said with corn or beans or field crops. What happens when it takes 10,000 acres for one person to support themselves? When it used to only take 40. We know what happens, we read about it in the news. Broadly determined, rural decline, but schools close, schools consolidate, post offices close, grocery stores close. People leave, the community suffers and goes away. I believe all of us in this audience with ties to rural Minnesota know this story well. This is not a problem that we can solve with farmers markets and good intentions. We have to do more for our farmers. Policy got us into this mess, and policy can get us out. American farmers are only getting older, fewer and poorer, yet they are crucial to our state. They're the vibrancy in our rural communities. They're the drivers of economic growth and stability, and they are our best protectors of our shared resources of land, water and air. So we have to do better for them. So join me, would you? Let's fight for our farmers. You can see it, we're already doing it in Minnesota, having great success. And together, we can do even more. And we must. So we were voting with our fork before, and we want to keep doing that. But if I could have one idea for you to go home with today, it's vote with your vote. And so to that end, on the count of three, I'd like all of us to say it together. Are you ready? OK, one, two, three. Audience: Vote with your vote. Very nice, thank you. I think you got it. (Applause) |
The imaginary king who changed the real world | null | TED-Ed | In 1165, copies of a strange letter began to circulate throughout Western Europe. It spoke of a fantastical realm, containing the Tower of Babel and the Fountain of Youth— all ruled over by the letter’s mysterious author: Prester John. Today, we know that this extraordinary king never existed. But the legend of this mythical kingdom and its powerful ruler would impact the decisions of European leaders for the next 400 years. Prester John’s myth would propel the age of exploration, inspire intercontinental diplomacy, and indirectly begin a civil war. When Prester John’s letter appeared, Europe was embroiled in the Crusades. In this series of religious wars, Europeans campaigned to seize what they regarded as the Christian Holy Land. The Church vilified any faith outside of Christianity, including that of the Jewish and Muslim communities populating the region. Crusaders were eager to find Christian kingdoms to serve as allies in their war. And they were particularly interested in rumors of a powerful Christian king who had defeated an enormous Muslim army in the Far East. In fact, it was a Mongol horde including converted Christian tribes that had routed the army. But news of this victory traveled unreliably. Merchants and emissaries filled gaps in the story with epic poems and Biblical fragments. By the time the story reached Europe, the Mongol horde had been replaced with a great Christian army, commanded by a king who shared the Crusader’s vision of marching on Jerusalem. And when a letter allegedly written by this so-called “Prester John” appeared, European rulers were thrilled. While the letter’s actual author remains unknown, its stereotypes about the East and alignment with European goals indicate it was a Western forgery. But despite the letter’s obvious origins as European propaganda, the appeal of Prester John’s myth was too great for the Crusaders to ignore. Before long, European mapmakers were guessing the location of his mythical kingdom. In the 13th and 14th centuries, European missionaries went East, along the newly revived Silk Road. They weren’t searching for the letter’s author, who would have been over a century old; but rather, for his descendants. The title of Prester John was briefly identified with several Central Asian rulers, but it soon became clear that the Mongols were largely non-Christian. And as their Empire began to decline, Europeans began pursuing alternate routes to the Far East, and new clues to Prester John’s location. At the same time these explorers went south, Ethiopian pilgrims began traveling north. In Rome, these visitors quickly attracted the interest of European scholars and cartographers. Since Ethiopia had been converted to Christianity in the 4th century, the stories of their African homeland fit perfectly into Prester John’s legend. Portuguese explorers scoured Africa for the kingdom, until a mix of confusion and diplomacy finally turned myth into reality. The Ethiopians graciously received their European guests, who were eager to do business with the ruler they believed to be Prester John. Though the Ethiopians were initially confused by the Portuguese’s unusual name for their Emperor, they were savvy enough to recognize the diplomatic capital it afforded them. The Ethiopian diplomats played the part of Prester John’s subjects, and the Portuguese triumphantly announced an alliance with the fabled sovereign— over 350 years after the European letter had begun the search. But this long-awaited partnership was quickly tested. A decade later, the Sultanate of Adal, a regional power supported by the Ottoman Empire, invaded Ethiopia. The Portuguese sent troops that helped Ethiopians win this conflict. But by this time, it was clear that Ethiopia was not the powerful ally Europe had hoped. Worse still, the increasingly intolerant Roman Catholic Church now deemed the Ethiopian sect of Christianity heretical. Their subsequent attempts to convert the people they once revered as ideal Christians would eventually spark a civil war, and in the 1630s, Ethiopia cut ties with Europe. Over the next two centuries, the legend of Prester John slowly faded into oblivion— ending the reign of a king who made history despite having never existed. |
How repaying loans with social service transforms communities | {0: 'As leader of CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education), Angie Murimirwa is determined to remove the considerable hurdles faced by schoolgirls in Africa seeking an education.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | Most of you will know about the challenges faced by my beloved continent, Africa. Too many people are poor. Millions of girls don't have access to school. And there aren't enough jobs for the rapidly growing population. Every day, 33,000 new young people join the search for employment. That's 12 million for three million formal jobs. In sub-Saharan Africa, less than one in four young people are likely to get waged or salaried work. The chances of making a secure living are even slimmer for poor and rural young women. They cannot afford an education. And they do not have the same access to wages, loans or land as men. This leaves entire communities trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, inequality and hopelessness. But I'm not here to narrate the doom and gloom, because we also know that a youthful population presents an opportunity to kick-start economic growth and solve global challenges. And in fact, there is a growing movement in Africa, of educated young women, who are stepping up and using the power of their network and a tool we call social interest to uplift communities. I'm one of the leaders of the organization behind this movement. An organization that also supported me through school. And I have seen social interest multiply the impact of our work. Social interest is a way to pay back interest on a loan through service, rather than dollars. Sharing time and knowledge through mentoring, academic support, business training to others in need. This means the impact of a loan is felt not by one, but by many. Through this system, we've been able to help and send more and more girls to school, support them while they are there, help them start businesses and ultimately, lead in their communities — all while providing funding for the next generation. Social interest can be used to supercharge any movement where the benefits can be paid forward. Let me give you an example. This is Stumai from rural Tanzania. She tragically lost her father when she was just three years old. Leaving a disabled mother to single-handedly raise her and her five siblings. Once Stumai completed primary school, she was about to drop out of school and become one of the 92 percent of girls in sub-Saharan Africa that never finish high school. Instead, she got lucky. She got support from a nonprofit that paid her fees and kept her in school. But upon graduating high school, she faced a daunting challenge of what's next. She knew she had to start her own business to survive. And to help her mother, who had tried so hard to keep her in school by selling her only assets, a stack of corrugated iron sheets she had been saving in the hope of building a better home for her children. Stumai also knew she wouldn’t get a loan from a traditional bank, which generally considers young, rural women like her, without land or assets, unbankable. Through a special group of lending partners, she secured 350 dollars to start a food shop, selling vegetables, oil, rice, tomatoes, onions and beans. Fellow network members helped to train her on basic business skills, like creating a business plan, working out profits, marketing, keeping business records and the value of savings. And the business took off. She repaid the original loan within eight months, and then borrowed 2,000 dollars to start a motorcycle taxi and courier business. Stumai now owns two motorcycles and employs two people. And she has been able to purchase land and build a house, and the business continues to grow from strength to strength. Stumai repaid her interest in social interest. She paid social interest by providing mentoring to girls in a local high school. She volunteered weekly as a learner guide, delivering a life skills and well-being curriculum that helps children gain the confidence to ask questions, care for and support each other, learn about health and nutrition, set goals and learn how to achieve them. Stumai says her greatest reward is witnessing the girls she mentors start to believe in themselves and succeeding. These days, Stumai also trains other learner guides. That's multiplying the number of girls making it through school and into secure livelihoods like she did. Through her business profits, she has been able to support her siblings, three nieces and nephews and other children in her community to go to school. She also regularly supports other network members. For example, a young woman studying for a diploma in community development. In the past two years, Stumai helped her with money for bus fare, for sanitary pads, for soap and encouraged her to keep going. Stumai spends 370 dollars a year supporting the education of others. That's 17 percent of her gross earnings from her motorcycle business. This is the power of social interest. Stumai's example shows that if you help one girl, not only to go to school, but graduate and start a business, she can in turn make a giant difference in the lives of others and her community. Had Stumai paid back interest on her loan in dollars, her success might have been felt by her and her immediate family, but because she paid interest as social interest, the impact was felt by her mentees, her nieces, nephews, her employees and so many others around her. Stumai is just one example of many. Today, we have 7,000 learner guides like Stumai, working across Malawi, Tanzania, Ghana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. And collectively, they've helped children do better in school. The girls we work with are nearly three times less likely to drop out of school, because learner guides make home visits when girls fail to attend school to help them back on track. They also work with communities and district governments to address the challenges children face, including preventing or annulling child marriages, connecting children facing hunger or hardship at home with local support, or running study groups so that children who might be lagging behind in their studies can get supporters and catch up. They act as trusted sisters, friends and guardians. So far, nearly 6,300 network members have borrowed close to three million dollars, with a repayment rate of those loans at consistently above 95 percent. And our 140,000 members, they have invested their own resources to support and send over 937,000 children to primary and secondary school. Every young woman we work with supports, on average, another three children outside of her immediate family to go to school. All without additional money from us. We are building a powerful force. Gaining ever greater momentum as we open the door for more and more girls to go to school, succeed, lead and in turn, support thousands more. This system, supporting those once excluded to transform their lives and then step up for others, can work for more than girls' education. Of course, you need to get your money back if you lend it. But instead of demanding interest in dollars, can you consider using social interest instead? For example, could young people pass on the skills they learned in training colleges? Like Michelle, who teaches brickmaking in rural Zimbabwe. Or Louisa, who is training others on climate-smart agriculture in Malawi. Or Fatima in Ghana, who is training women to help deliver babies where expectant mothers might not be able to make it to the local hospital on time. When I was growing up, an elder in my village in rural Zimbabwe once described the challenges I faced in going to school. She said, "Those who harvest many pumpkins often do not have the clay pots to cook them in." (Laughter) What she meant was that, although I got the best possible results in my exams when I finished elementary school, my talent was of no value if my family could not afford to pay for me to continue my education. Well, with this system, we are not just providing pots, or making a single meal out of the pumpkins. After all, there are hundreds of seeds in a single pumpkin. We are saving the seeds, planting them and nurturing every one of them. And the result? A virtual cycle of prosperity, equality and hope, led by young women. Because together, we are shaking up the world. Pamoja tunaweza — that's Swahili for my network motto: "Together we can!" Thank you. (Applause) |
Go ahead, dream about the future | {0: 'Charlie Jane Anders writes novels and stories about building community, discovering our truest selves and coping with radical change.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | Every science fiction writer has a story about a time when the future arrived too soon. I have a lot of those stories. Like, OK, for example: years ago, I was writing a story where the government starts using drones to kill people. I thought that this was a really intense, futuristic idea, but by the time the story was published, the government was already using drones to kill people. Our world is changing so fast, and there's a kind of accelerating feedback loop where technological change and social change feed on each other. When I was a kid in the 1980s, we knew what the future was going to look like. It was going to be some version of "Judge Dredd" or "Blade Runner." It was going to be neon megacities and flying vehicles. But now, nobody knows what the world is going to look like even in just a couple years, and there are so many scary apparitions lurking on the horizon. From climate catastrophe to authoritarianism, everybody is obsessed with apocalypses, even though the world ends all the time, and we keep going. Don't be afraid to think about the future, to dream about the future, to write about the future. I've found it really liberating and fun to do that. It's a way of vaccinating yourself against the worst possible case of future shock. It's also a source of empowerment, because you cannot prepare for something that you haven't already visualized. But there's something that you need to know. You don't predict the future; you imagine the future. So as a science fiction writer whose stories often take place years or even centuries from now, I've found that people are really hungry for visions of the future that are both colorful and lived in, but I found that research on its own is not enough to get me there. Instead, I use a mixture of active dreaming and awareness of cutting-edge trends in science and technology and also insight into human history. I think a lot about what I know of human nature and the way that people have responded in the past to huge changes and upheavals and transformations. And I pair that with an attention to detail, because the details are where we live. We tell the story of our world through the tools we create and the spaces that we live in. And at this point, it's helpful to know a couple of terms that science fiction writers use all of the time: "future history" and "second-order effects." Now, future history is basically just what it sounds like. It is a chronology of things that haven't happened yet, like Robert A. Heinlein's famous story cycle, which came with a detailed chart of upcoming events going up into the year 2100. Or, for my most recent novel, I came up with a really complicated time line that goes all the way to the 33rd century and ends with people living on another planet. Meanwhile, a second-order effect is basically the kind of thing that happens after the consequences of a new technology or a huge change. There's a saying often attributed to writer and editor Frederik Pohl that "A good science fiction story should predict not just the invention of the automobile, but also the traffic jam." And speaking of traffic jams, I spent a lot of time trying to picture the city of the future. What's it like? What's it made of? Who's it for? I try to picture a green city with vertical farms and structures that are partially grown rather than built and walkways instead of streets, because nobody gets around by car anymore — a city that lives and breathes. And, you know, I kind of start by daydreaming the wildest stuff that I can possibly come up with, and then I go back into research mode, and I try to make it as plausible as I can by looking at a mixture of urban futurism, design porn and technological speculation. And then I go back, and I try to imagine what it would actually be like to be inside that city. So my process kind of begins and ends with imagination, and it's like my imagination is two pieces of bread in a research sandwich. So as a storyteller, first and foremost, I try to live in the world through the eyes of my characters and try to see how they navigate their own personal challenges in the context of the space that I've created. What do they smell? What do they touch? What's it like to fall in love inside a smart city? What do you see when you look out your window, and does it depend on how the window's software interacts with your mood? And finally, I ask myself how a future brilliant city would ensure that nobody is homeless and nobody slips through the cracks. And here's where future history comes in handy, because cities don't just spring up overnight like weeds. They arise and transform. They bear the scars and ornaments of wars, migrations, economic booms, cultural awakenings. A future city should have monuments, yeah, but it should also have layers of past architecture, repurposed buildings and all of the signs of how we got to this place. And then there's second-order effects, like how do things go wrong — or right — in a way that nobody ever anticipated? Like, if the walls of your apartment are made out of a kind of fungus that can regrow itself to repair any damage, what if people start eating the walls? (Laughter) Speaking of eating: What kind of sewer system does the city of the future have? It's a trick question. There are no sewers. There's something incredibly bizarre about the current system we have in the United States, where your waste gets flushed into a tunnel to be mixed with rainwater and often dumped into the ocean. Not to mention toilet paper. A bunch of techies, led by Bill Gates, are trying to reinvent the toilet right now, and it's possible that the toilet of the future could appear incredibly strange to someone living today. So how does the history of the future, all of that trial and error, lead to a better way to go to the bathroom? There are companies right now who are experimenting with a kind of cleaning wand that can substitute for toilet paper, using compressed air or sanitizing sprays to clean you off. But what if those things looked more like flowers than technology? What if your toilet could analyze your waste and let you know if your microbiome might need a little tune-up? What if today's experiments with turning human waste into fuel leads to a smart battery that could help power your home? But back to the city of the future. How do people navigate the space? If there's no streets, how do people even make sense of the geography? I like to think of a place where there are spaces that are partially only in virtual reality that maybe you need special hardware to even discover. Like for one story, I came up with a thing called "the cloudscape interface," which I described as a chrome spider that plugs into your head using temporal nodes. No, that's not a picture of it, but it's a fun picture I took in a bar. (Laughter) And I got really carried away imagining the bars, restaurants, cafés that you could only find your way inside if you had the correct augmented reality hardware. But again, second-order effects: in a world shaped by augmented reality, what kind of new communities will we have, what kind of new crimes that we haven't even thought of yet? OK, like, let's say that you and I are standing next to each other, and you think that we're in a noisy sports bar, and I think we're in a highbrow salon with a string quartet talking about Baudrillard. I can't possibly imagine what might go wrong in that scenario. Like, it's just — I'm sure it'll be fine. And then there's social media. I can imagine some pretty frickin' dystopian scenarios where things like internet quizzes, dating apps, horoscopes, bots, all combine to drag you down deeper and deeper rabbit holes into bad relationships and worse politics. But then I think about the conversations that I've had with people who work on AI, and what I always hear from them is that the smarter AI gets, the better it is at making connections. So maybe the social media of the future will be better. Maybe it'll help us to form healthier, less destructive relationships. Maybe we'll have devices that enable togetherness and serendipity. I really hope so. And, you know, I like to think that if strong AI ever really exists, they'll probably enjoy our weird relationship drama the same way that you and I love to obsess about the "Real Housewives of Wherever." And finally, there's medicine. I think a lot about how developments in genetic medicine could improve outcomes for people with cancer or dementia, and maybe one day, your hundredth birthday will be just another milestone on the way to another two or three decades of healthy, active life. Maybe the toilet of the future that I mentioned will improve health outcomes for a lot of people, including people in parts of the world where they don't have these complicated sewer systems that I mentioned. But also, as a transgender person, I like to think: What if we make advances in understanding the endocrine system that improve the options for trans people, the same way that hormones and surgeries expanded the options for the previous generation? So finally: basically, I'm here to tell you, people talk about the future as though it's either going to be a technological wonderland or some kind of apocalyptic poop barbecue. (Laughter) But the truth is, it's not going to be either of those things. It's going to be in the middle. It's going to be both. It's going to be everything. The one thing we do know is that the future is going to be incredibly weird. Just think about how weird the early 21st century would appear to someone from the early 20th. And, you know, there's a kind of logical fallacy that we all have where we expect the future to be an extension of the present. Like, people in the 1980s thought that the Soviet Union would still be around today. But the future is going to be much weirder than we could possibly dream of. But we can try. And I know that there are going to be scary, scary things, but there's also going to be wonders and saving graces. And the first step to finding your way forward is to let your imagination run free. Thank you. (Applause) |
The weird history of the "sex chromosomes" | {0: 'As a guest host and features producer at WNYC\'s "Radiolab," Molly Webster has investigated everything from international surrogacy to metamorphosis.'} | TED@NAS | OK. So we are going to start in 1891, when a German scientist was looking through a microscope at insect cells. And he saw something kind of funny. At the center of the cells, there was this dark stuff. No one had ever seen it before. And he noticed that as the cells would multiply and divide, it would go into some of the new cells but not the others. He didn't know what it was, so he gave it a really great name. He called it the "X element." (Laughter) And he was like, "We'll just fill in that X later." And then, fast-forward 10 years later, and there is an American scientist, and she is looking through her microscope, also at insect cells. And she sees something funny. There's more of this dark stuff. And it's kind of tiny, it's hanging out near the X element. And eventually, someone was like, "Well, if that one thing's called X, should we call this other thing Y?" And like that, (Snaps fingers) the sex chromosomes had been discovered. So chromosomes, you probably all know what they are, but I will tell you anyways. They're made up of DNA — everything has it, it's the blueprint of life, we've got rats, we've got trees, we've got insects, we've got humans. And in the case of human chromosomes, geneticist Melissa Wilson broke it down for me like this. (Audio) Melissa Wilson: Typically, you'll get one copy of every chromosome from your genetic mom and one copy of every chromosome from your genetic dad, and we have 22 of these that you get one copy from mom and one copy from dad. And then there's a 23rd pair, X and Y. Molly Webster: So while all the other chromosomes are numbered, one through 22, we do not call X and Y 23. I like to think that they are waiting for, like, a LeBron James to come along. But in this instance, they were like, "We're just going to keep the letters, and then we'll give them a title." They called them the sex chromosomes. Now I would wager that in the United States, these are the most well-known chromosomes for one simple fact: that we say X equals "girl," and Y equals "boy" — that they are responsible for sex. And — and I had to learn this — but when I'm talking about "sex" here, I'm talking about the way biology gives us gonads, which are our ovaries and our testes — I'm not talking about gender, which is how we identify. And so, as a reporter at the show — "Radiolab," the audio documentary program I work for — I was like, what's up with these sex chromosomes? You know, that's kind of my job, I think things are weird, and then I get to call people about them and ask questions, and then hopefully they answer. And in this case, a lot of people answered. And in the two years I had of reporting on X and Y, as part of "Gonads," the series on sex and gender I ended up doing for "Radiolab," I found out that these two chromosomes live in a world that is unexpected, a little unsettling; where things that I thought were facts were, like, twisted in ways I hadn't seen before. And the world goes so far beyond the boundaries of sex, I was like, "Maybe we should all talk about this." So, you're you all, we're all going to talk about it. And for me, the true story of X and Y starts with their name. So within years of being discovered, these two little chromosomes had acquired more than 10 different names. There was diplosome and heterochromosome and idiochromosome, and most of the names had to do with their structure, their shape, their size. And then there was "sex chromosome," which they had been given because of the fact that we had started seeing that the X would go with the females, and the Y would often go with the males. But scientists were like, "Do we really want to call them sex chromosomes?" And science historian Sarah Richardson is the one who told me this story. (Audio) Sarah Richardson: For three decades, scientists were like, "You should not call them the sex chromosomes. The X and Y have many functions, and you wouldn't assume that a single chromosome controls a single trait. Imagine calling one chromosome the 'urogenital chromosome,' or the 'liver chromosome.'" MW: Scientists, if you dig into the history — it's really cool, you should — were hesitant to, like, commit to such a specific name and such a powerfully connotated name. There was a fear that it would actually be really limiting — maybe to science, maybe to society — but the fear was in the room. And you can see they ended up getting "sex chromosome" — it's like a pretty juicy title, it popularized genetics, you know? But in the 100-year history since we settled on that name, you can see it starts to get a little complicated. So around 1960 — this is going to be our first stop on the complicated world of the sex chromosomes — so around 1960, we had discovered that you could be XYY. They discovered an XYY man. And to digress a little here, it turns out that the model of "X equals girl and Y equals boy" is really simplistic. You can actually be a whole bunch of different combinations of X and Y, giving you, like, different types of biological sex. You could be two Xs and two Ys together. You could be four Xs, you could be five Xs, you could be XO. And so I thought that was pretty crazy, because I was like, "Wow, this really upends a model of biological sex I think most of us in this room have been taught." So a few years after they realized that you can be XYY, researchers go to a prison in Scotland, and they do genetic analysis of a bunch of the male prisoners. And they find a number of people who are XYY. And according to Sarah: (Audio) SR: They just rushed to publish a theory suggesting that this extra Y chromosome could explain criminality in some men. MW: Yeah. So the logic goes like this: By this point, we're thinking Y is male. We think male is aggressive, so Y must be aggression. If you've got an extra Y, you must be crazy. And like, we went nuts with this theory. We called it the supermale, they started scanning more prisoners, serial killers, boys. And in all seriousness, there was actually a suggestion that we consider aborting XYY fetuses. So in 1980, this theory pretty much toppled, for a number of reasons. One, there had been this really large study that basically showed there was no connection between Y and violence, I think we all saw that coming. And then, there was one other thing. (Audio) SR: Going back and looking at those original findings in that high-security psychiatric institution, they had also found a high number of individuals with an extra X chromosome. So these are XXY, as opposed to XYY. (Audio) MW: Really? (Audio) SR: Yeah. Now, they never claimed that the individuals with an extra X chromosome were superfemales. They never investigated whether they had higher rates of violence. MW: Seems like kind of an oversight. I don't know. But I think it's interesting, because what you see is if you start looking at these chromosomes through the lens of sex, what naturally falls in place behind is we look at them through the lens of gender, and the traits that we associate with gender. So men were violent, and Y explained why they were in prison. The X did not do that, because like, you know, what's X? We don't associate it with violence. And while we don't believe in supermales today — God, I hope we don't — we don't believe in supermales today, there is a very similar conversation that's still happening around inherent violence in boys and biology. So my next stop on the weird world of X and Y, or things feeling a little topsy-turvy, is 1985. The World University Games were set to happen in Japan, and the Spanish hurdler María José Martínez-Patiño was scheduled to run. She was like a hot shot, a rising superstar. And the night before her race, they had her DNA scanned. Now at the time, this was a thing that they were doing, because they were like, "OK, we don't want men covertly racing as women, so we're going to scan the women and make sure all their Xs line up." And so I heard this story from Ruth Padawer who was a New York Times Magazine reporter and she reported on María. (Audio) Ruth Padawer: So they tell her the chromosome test results were abnormal. Although on the outside, she was fully female, she had XY chromosomes and these internal testes. MW: They were like, "We hate to break it to you, María, but you're actually a dude. You can't race with the ladies." (Audio) RP: And so she's thrown off the national team, she's expelled from the athletics residence, she's denied her scholarship, a bunch of her friends dump her, fellow athletes abandon her, she loses her medals, her records are revoked. MW: So it turns out — remember when I told you you can be a bunch of different combinations of X and Y — you can also be XY and be female. You can be XX and male. In María's case, she was something called androgen insensitive. Which means that she did have some sort of internal testes — they were making testosterone — but her body couldn't use it. And so if you thought of testosterone as, like, a superpower, she was not benefiting from it. And so eventually, sports authorities, like, let her back in, but her career was done. And in this instance you see how, if you assign sex to a specific place in the body, or at least, like, this is what I saw, right? If you assign sex to a specific place in the body, it somehow makes us think that we can go into a body, look at a specific place and tell someone we know something more about them than they know about themselves. And that feels terrifying to me. And we don't genetically test female athletes anymore, but you can see very similar conversations happening when we talk about testosterone in sports, you can also see it in suggestions that we take transgender individuals and we genetically analyze them and we tell them who they are. That is real, that is a conversation that has happened recently. The last place that I'll share with you where these chromosomes got complicated for me is this one thing that Melissa told me. (Audio) Wilson: You can't survive without an X chromosome. No matter your gonads, no matter your identity, every single human being has to have an X chromosome, because without one, the rest of your body doesn't develop. MW: Why do we call this the female chromosome? OK, this is something I had never though about, but literally, every single person in this audience has an X chromosome, I'm not lying. Every single person on the planet has an X chromosome, but no one is going around like, "This is the every-person chromosome." You know? Like, somehow it's over here, the Y is over there, and they must be really different, and I'm just like, it would be so much better if it was the every-person chromosome. And not just because I'm like, love you all and I want you all in, but because of what we're overlooking by the fact that we consider it female. Because I'm going to tell you one of the craziest things I found out. Which is, when you think about the X chromosome, of the almost 1,100 genes on the X chromosome, how many do you think have to do with sex and reproduction? Like, get a number in your head. Four percent. That means 96 percent of the rest of that chromosome is doing something that has nothing to do with your gonads. And I guess as all of these, sort of, some of them social stories, some of them scientific stories, some of these facts, started to add up, I just thought, like, why are we calling these the sex chromosomes? Or if we are, like, maybe we all like that name, should we just allow ourselves to think about them a little more broadly? Because if we do, like, what insights would we gain, as people, as scientists? And we're at this point where we're thinking about, like, how do we want to teach science, what do we want to fund, like, who do we want to be as a society, you know? And I just wondered if it wasn't a moment to rethink the biology of X and Y, and at the very least, to remember, like, the footnotes of history, which is that the dude who came up with the phrase "sex chromosome," actually was like, "Hey, everyone, just remember, this is just," and I quote, "a form of shorthand." We should not take it literally. Thank you. (Applause) |
Who was the world's first author? | null | TED-Ed | 4,300 years ago in ancient Sumer, the most powerful person in the city of Ur was banished to wander the vast desert. Her name was Enheduanna. She was the high priestess of the moon god and history’s first known author. By the time of her exile, she had written 42 hymns and three epic poems— and Sumer hadn’t heard the last of her. Enheduanna lived 1,700 years before Sappho, 1,500 years before Homer, and about 500 years before the biblical patriarch Abraham. She was born in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the birthplace of the first cities and high cultures. Her father was King Sargon the Great, history’s first empire builder, who conquered the independent city-states of Mesopotamia under a unified banner. Sargon was a northern Semite who spoke Akkadian, and the older Sumerian cities in the south viewed him as a foreign invader. They frequently revolted to regain their independence, fracturing his new dynasty. To bridge the gap between cultures, Sargon appointed his only daughter, Enheduanna, as high priestess in the empire’s most important temple. Female royalty traditionally served religious roles, and she was educated to read and write in both Sumerian and Akkadian, and make mathematical calculations. The world's first writing started in Sumer as a system of accounting, allowing merchants to communicate over long distances with traders abroad. Their pictogram system of record keeping developed into a script about 300 years before Enheduanna’s birth. This early writing style, called cuneiform, was written with a reed stylus pressed into soft clay to make wedge-shaped marks. But until Enheduanna, this writing mostly took the form of record keeping and transcription, rather than original works attributable to individual writers. Enheduanna’s Ur was a city of 34,000 people with narrow streets, multi-storied brick homes, granaries, and irrigation. As high priestess, Enheduanna managed grain storage for the city, oversaw hundreds of temple workers, interpreted sacred dreams, and presided over the monthly new moon festival and rituals celebrating the equinoxes. Enheduanna set about unifying the older Sumerian culture with the newer Akkadian civilization. To accomplish this, she wrote 42 religious hymns that combined both mythologies. Each Mesopotamian city was ruled by a patron deity, so her hymns were dedicated to the ruling god of each major city. She praised the city’s temple, glorified the god’s attributes, and explained the god’s relationship to other deities within the pantheon. In her writing, she humanized the once aloof gods— now they suffered, fought, loved, and responded to human pleading. Enheduanna’s most valuable literary contribution was the poetry she wrote to Inanna, goddess of war and desire, the divinely chaotic energy that gives spark to the universe. Inanna delighted in all forms of sexual expression and was considered so powerful that she transcended gender boundaries, as did her earthly attendants, who could be prostitutes, eunuchs or cross-dressers. Enheduanna placed Inanna at the top of the pantheon as the most powerful deity. Her odes to Inanna mark the first time an author writes using the pronoun “I,” and the first time writing is used to explore deep, private emotions. After the death of Enheduanna’s father, King Sargon, a general took advantage of the power vacuum and staged a coup. As a powerful member of the ruling family, Enheduanna was a target, and the general exiled her from Ur. Her nephew, the legendary Sumerian king Naram-Sin, ultimately crushed the uprising and restored his aunt as high priestess. In total, Enheduanna served as high priestess for 40 years. After her death, she became a minor deity, and her poetry was copied, studied, and performed throughout the empire for over 500 years. Her poems influenced the Hebrew Old Testament, the epics of Homer, and Christian hymns. Today, Enheduanna’s legacy still exists, on clay tablets that have stood the test of time. |
A camera that can see around corners | {0: 'David Lindell develops next-generation algorithms and systems for imaging the world in 3D.'} | TEDxBeaconStreet | In the future, self-driving cars will be safer and more reliable than humans. But for this to happen, we need technologies that allow cars to respond faster than humans, we need algorithms that can drive better than humans and we need cameras that can see more than humans can see. For example, imagine a self-driving car is about to make a blind turn, and there's an oncoming car or perhaps there's a child about to run into the street. Fortunately, our future car will have this superpower, a camera that can see around corners to detect these potential hazards. For the past few years as a PhD student in the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab, I've been working on a camera that can do just this — a camera that can image objects hidden around corners or blocked from direct line of sight. So let me give you an example of what our camera can see. This is an outdoor experiment we conducted where our camera system is scanning the side of this building with a laser, and the scene that we want to capture is hidden around the corner behind this curtain. So our camera system can't actually see it directly. And yet, somehow, our camera can still capture the 3D geometry of this scene. So how do we do this? The magic happens here in this camera system. You can think of this as a type of high-speed camera. Not one that operates at 1,000 frames per second, or even a million frames per second, but a trillion frames per second. So fast that it can actually capture the movement of light itself. And to give you an example of just how fast light travels, let's compare it to the speed of a fast-running comic book superhero who can move at up to three times the speed of sound. It takes a pulse of light about 3.3 billionths of a second, or 3.3 nanoseconds, to travel the distance of a meter. Well, in that same time, our superhero has moved less than the width of a human hair. That's pretty fast. But actually, we need to image much faster if we want to capture light moving at subcentimeter scales. So our camera system can capture photons at time frames of just 50 trillionths of a second, or 50 picoseconds. So we take this ultra-high-speed camera and we pair it with a laser that sends out short pulses of light. Each pulse travels to this visible wall and some light scatters back to our camera, but we also use the wall to scatter light around the corner to the hidden object and back. We repeat this measurement many times to capture the arrival times of many photons from different locations on the wall. And after we capture these measurements, we can create a trillion-frame-per-second video of the wall. While this wall may look ordinary to our own eyes, at a trillion frames per second, we can see something truly incredible. We can actually see waves of light scattered back from the hidden scene and splashing against the wall. And each of these waves carries information about the hidden object that sent it. So we can take these measurements and pass them into a reconstruction algorithm to then recover the 3D geometry of this hidden scene. Now I want to show you one more example of an indoor scene that we captured, this time with a variety of different hidden objects. And these objects have different appearances, so they reflect light differently. For example, this glossy dragon statue reflects light differently than the mirror disco ball or the white discus thrower statue. And we can actually see the differences in the reflected light by visualizing it as this 3D volume, where we've just taken the video frames and stacked them together. And time here is represented as the depth dimension of this cube. These bright dots that you see are reflections of light from each of the mirrored facets of the disco ball, scattering against the wall over time. The bright streaks of light that you see arriving soonest in time are from the glossy dragon statue that's closest to the wall, and the other streaks of light come from reflections of light from the bookcase and from the statue. Now, we can also visualize these measurements frame by frame, as a video, to directly see the scattered light. And again, here we see, first, reflections of light from the dragon, closest to the wall, followed by bright dots from the disco ball and other reflections from the bookcase. And finally, we see the reflected waves of light from the statue. These waves of light illuminating the wall are like fireworks that last for just trillionths of a second. And even though these objects reflect light differently, we can still reconstruct their shapes. And this is what you can see from around the corner. Now, I want to show you one more example that's slightly different. In this video, you see me dressed in this reflective suit and our camera system is scanning the wall at a rate of four times every second. The suit is reflective, so we can actually capture enough photons that we can see where I am and what I'm doing, without the camera actually directly imaging me. By capturing photons that scatter from the wall to my tracksuit, back to the wall and back to the camera, we can capture this indirect video in real time. And we think that this type of practical non-line-of-sight imaging could be useful for applications including for self-driving cars, but also for biomedical imaging, where we need to see into the tiny structures of the body. And perhaps we could also put similar camera systems on the robots that we send to explore other planets. Now you may have heard about seeing around corners before, but what I showed you today would have been impossible just two years ago. For example, we can now image large, room-sized hidden scenes outdoors and at real-time rates, and we've made significant advancements towards making this a practical technology that you could actually see on a car someday. But of course, there's still challenges remaining. For example, can we image hidden scenes at long distances where we're collecting very, very few photons, with lasers that are low-power and that are eye-safe. Or can we create images from photons that have scattered around many more times than just a single bounce around the corner? Can we take our prototype system that's, well, currently large and bulky, and miniaturize it into something that could be useful for biomedical imaging or perhaps a sort of improved home-security system, or can we take this new imaging modality and use it for other applications? I think it's an exciting new technology and there could be other things that we haven't thought of yet to use it for. And so, well, a future with self-driving cars may seem distant to us now — we're already developing the technologies that could make cars safer and more intelligent. And with the rapid pace of scientific discovery and innovation, you never know what new and exciting capabilities could be just around the corner. (Applause) |
Why isn't the Netherlands underwater? | {0: 'Architect and urban designer Stefan Al believes that architecture is more than just buildings.'} | TED-Ed | In January of 1953, a tidal surge shook the North Sea. The titanic waves flooded the Dutch coastline, killing almost 2,000 people. 54 years later, a similar storm threatened the region. But this time, the Netherlands were ready. As the water swelled, state-of-the-art computer sensors activated emergency protocols. Over the next 30 minutes, a pair of 240-meter steel arms swung shut, protecting the channel ahead. Using 680-tonne ball joints, the barrier moved in rhythm with the shifting wind and waves. By morning, the storm had passed with minimal flooding. The first field activation of the Maeslantkering had been a resounding success. As one of the planet’s largest mobile structures, this storm surge barrier is a marvel of human engineering. But the Maeslantkering is just one part of a massive, interlocking system of water controls known as the Delta Works— the most sophisticated flood prevention project in the world. The Netherlands has a long history with water management. The country lies along the delta of three major European rivers, and nearly a quarter of its territory is below sea level. This geography makes the region extremely prone to flooding. So much so, that some of the earliest Dutch governing bodies were informal “water boards” that coordinated flood protection projects. But after the storms of 1953, the Dutch government took more official measures. They established the Delta Commission, and tasked them with protecting the entire southwestern region. Focusing on densely populated cities, their aim was to reduce the annual odds of flooding below 1 in 10,000— about 100 times as safe as the average coastal city. Accomplishing this lofty goal required various infrastructure projects along the southwestern coast. The first line of defense was to dam the region’s flood-prone estuaries. These large inlets fed many of the country’s rivers into the North Sea, and during storms they allowed flood water to surge inland. Using a series of dams, the Delta Commission transformed these estuaries into expansive lakes that serve as nature preserves and community parks. However, this solution wouldn’t work for the Nieuwe Waterweg. As the lifeblood of the local shipping industry, this passage had to be kept open in safe conditions, and barricaded during storm surges. In 1998, the completed Maeslantkering provided the flexible protection necessary. Alongside additional barriers, like grassy dikes and concrete seawalls, these fortifications made up the bulk of the Delta Works project, which was primarily focused on holding back ocean storms. But in the following decades, the Dutch pursued additional plans to complement the Delta Works and protect against floods further inland. Under the "Room for the River" plan, farms and dikes were relocated away from the shore. This left more space for water to collect in low-lying floodplains, creating reservoirs and habitats for local wildlife. This strategic retreat not only decreased flood risk, but allowed for the redeveloped settlements to be built more densely and sustainably. Perhaps no city embodies the Netherlands' multi-pronged approach to water management as much as Rotterdam, a thriving city almost entirely below sea level. When a storm threatens, densely populated older districts are protected by traditional dikes. Meanwhile, newer districts have been artificially elevated, often sporting green roofs that store rainwater. Numerous structures around the city transform into water storage facilities, including parking garages and plazas which normally serve as theaters and sports arenas. Meanwhile in the harbor, floating pavilions rise with the water level. These are the first of several planned amphibious structures, some of which house water purification systems and solar collectors. These strategies are just some of the technologies and policies that have put the Netherlands at the cutting edge of water management. The country continues to find new ways to make cities more resilient to natural disasters. And as the rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten low-lying cities across the world, the Netherlands offers an exceptional example of how to go with the flow. |
How we must respond to the coronavirus pandemic | {0: "A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he's doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation.", 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.', 2: 'Whitney Pennington Rodgers is an award-winning journalist and media professional.'} | TED Connects | Whitney Pennington Rodgers: Hello and welcome to everyone joining us from around the globe. Thank you for being part of day two of our special series TED Connects. This week, we're bringing you interviews from some of the world's greatest minds to offer tools for us to navigate through and thrive in these really uncertain times. I'm Whitney Pennington Rogers, TED's current affairs curator, and I'll be one of your hosts for today's event. Yesterday, we kicked off this series with an interview from acclaimed psychologist Susan David, who offered us some tips on how to really be our best selves in these trying times. And we're going to switch gears a little bit today from thinking about our own personal mental health to the state of our global public health systems. Chris Anderson: Thank you. I guess we have a pretty exciting guest to introduce. On the other side of the country, let's bring in Bill Gates. Bill, they say the better-known people are, the less you have to intro them. It's great to have you here. How are you doing? Bill Gates: I think this is an unprecedented, really disconcerting time for everyone, with things being shut down, not knowing exactly how long it's going to last, worrying about the health of all the people we care about. You know, I'm lucky that I get to connect up with video conferencing using Teams a lot, so the Foundation is stepping up and there's a lot of great people trying to help with this crisis. But it's scary for everyone. CA: Are you basically stuck at home like many of us watching? BG: Yeah, almost all my meetings are using Teams now, I'm getting used to that. You know, I've gone days without seeing any coworkers. CA: Let's start here, Bill. Five years ago, you stood on the TED stage and you gave this chilling warning that the world was in danger, at some point, of a major pandemic. People watching that talk now, their hair stands up on the back of their neck — it is exactly what we're living through. What happened, did people listen to that warning at all? BG: Basically, no. You know, I was hopeful that with the Zika and Ebola and SARS and MERS, they all reminded us that, particularly in a world where people move around so much, you can get huge devastation. And so the talk was to say, hey, we're not ready for the next pandemic, but in fact, there's advances in science that if we put resources against them, we can be ready. Sadly, very little was done. There were some things — the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, CEPI, was funded by our foundation, Wellcome Trust and a number of governments, to do some of the platform vaccine work, but in the area of diagnostics, antibodies, antivirals, basically doing the disease games that I talked about, where we'd simulate what needed to be done. We hardly did anything, and so now here we have a respiratory virus that is, sadly, fulfilling some of the more negative predictions I made. CA: Last month, you said that this might be the big one. You wrote that this could be the sort of once-in-a-century pandemic that people had been fearing. Is that how you think of it still? BG: Well, it's awful to say this, but we could have a respiratory virus whose case fatality rate was even higher, if this was something like smallpox, you know, that kills 30 percent of people. So this is horrific. But in fact, most people, even who get the COVID disease, are able to survive. So it's quite infectious, way more infectious than MERS or SARS were. It's not as fatal as they were. And yet, the disruption we're seeing, in order to knock it down, is really completely unprecedented. So this is going global, that was — it's respiratory, that was the great fear. How many people end up dying — hopefully, if we do the right things, it won't be a gigantic number. So, you know, we should end up not having the 1918 flu situation. We should be able to do a lot better than that. CA: And that's because of actions that we would take. I mean, left without the right actions, the prospects are pretty deadly. If we knew what we knew in 1919, this thing could take out tens of millions of people around the world. You said — is the key thing here that it's got this sort of a strange combination of being certainly more dangerous than flu — not as dangerous as something like Ebola or SARS, but more dangerous than flu by a factor, but infectious, and also infectious before symptoms have started, is that part of why it's been really hard to respond to? BG: Right. Ebola, you're actually flat on your back before you're very infectious. So you're not at church or in a bus or at a store. With most respiratory viruses like the flu and COVID, at first you only feel a little bit of a fever and a little bit sick, and so there's the possibility you're going about your normal activities and infecting other people. And so human-to-human transmissible respiratory viruses that in the early stage aren't stopping you from doing things, that's kind of a worst case, and that's where, you know, I did a flu simulation in the 2015 talk and showed how quickly it spread. You know, versus 1918, people move around a lot more now than they used to, and so that works against us. Now the medical system that steps up to treat people is also far, far better. CA: But when was it clear to you that unless we acted, this could be a really deadly pandemic? BG: Well, in January it was discussed that there was human-to-human transmission taking place. And so the alarm bells were ringing that this fits the very scary pattern that it will be very difficult to contain. And on January 23, China did their equivalent of the shutdown. Did it in a fairly extreme form. The very good news is that they were able to reduce the infection rates dramatically because of those actions. But it's January where everybody should have been on notice — let's get our act together with testing, let's get going on therapeutics and vaccines, we've got to get organized because we have this novel respiratory virus whose infectiousness and fatality put it in that superscary range. CA: And so, what did happen? Because it's such a mystery to me about the "lost month" of preparations in many countries and certainly in the US, where we are. Were you on the phone to people during early February, late January, early February, saying, "Guys, what's going on, this is a really big deal, what are we doing?" What was happening behind the scenes during that period? BG: Well, you'd like to have government money show up for the key activities. We put out 100 million, we created the Therapeutics Accelerator, there's the period between when we realized it was transmitting and now, where we should have done more. I think the most important thing to discuss today is that in the area of testing, we're still not creating that capacity and applying it to the people most in need. And so we have health workers who are symptomatic, who can't get a test and so they don't know should they go in or not go in, and yet we have lots of tests being given to people who aren't symptomatic. So the testing thing to me, it's got to be organized, it's got to be prioritized, that is super, super urgent. The second thing is the isolation that, you know, various parts, just focusing on the US, some parts are doing that in a fairly strong way and other parts not yet, and it's very hard to do, it's tough on people, it's disastrous for the economy. But the sooner you do it in a tough way, the sooner you can undo it and go back to normal. CA: So we'll come to the isolation part in a minute, but just sticking with the testing thing, I'm just so confused as to why, with more than a month's notice — I mean, there are so many smart epidemiologists in the US, for example, you plug numbers about infectiousness and fatality into any simulation and you see that if you don't do anything, millions of people will die. And there's a month. So what's your explanation, what do you think happened here as to why there was almost no — a month later, there was no viable test in the US. Was this just government complexity, too many chefs in the kitchen, what on earth happened here? BG: Well, we certainly didn't take advantage of the month of February. The good news is that the actual process, the PCR machines, we have a lot in the United States. And so there's models like South Korea, who took advantage of February, built up the testing capacity, and they were able to contact-trace and their infections have gone down, even without the type of shutdown that, because we're late, we're having to do. One thing that is good news just this week is that people had thought to do this test, that you had to have a nurse or doctor shove a swab way up, all the way to the back of your throat, which hurts a lot, but also, you're going to cough and potentially spread the disease to that health care worker. So they have to have protective equipment and change that. We sent data to the FDA this weekend, showing that just an individual, by themselves, swabbing up to the tip of their nose, the accuracy of that test is essentially the same as having a health care worker do it. That helps a lot. We still have to do other things, but that means that you don't have to change protective equipment, you just hand the patient that swab, they do it, put it in the test tube, and if the capacity is right, within 24 hours, you should get that result back. CA: So how do you see that playing out? Are there people going to massively scale those tests and how will ordinary citizens be able to get hold of them? Does it still have to be kind of prescribed by a doctor at some point, or at some point, will you be able to order them off Amazon or something? BG: Well, it's pretty chaotic today, because the government hasn't stepped in to make sure the testing capacity is both increased and it's used for the right cases. There will be a website — and if the federal government doesn't do it, a lot of local governments will have to do it — that you go to, you give your situation, including your symptoms, you're told, based on your work and your symptoms, are you a priority. If so, you're told where there are kiosks you can go to and you'll do the self-swab and just hand it over, or eventually, we'll send the kits to you at home, and then you'll send it back and hear that result. Maybe six months from now, you'll actually have a strip where you perform the test in the home, but for now, they're sending it back for the PCR processing. We can have massive capacity there. And that's how you know. The testing is everything, because that's how you know whether you need to do more shutdown or you're starting to get to the point where you can relieve it. CA: Some people are trying to argue now that, almost, the testing should be dialed back, because the cat is out of the bag, testing is bringing people together and risking infection, you know, forget that, let's just focus on treatment and on isolation strategies. You disagree with that. Testing is still absolutely essential and needs to be scaled dramatically. BG: The two that go together are testing, at very high volume, and the isolation piece. If you're a medical worker, you want to stay and do your job. If you're making sure the electricity, water, food is still available, you want to do your job, and so testing is what indicates to you, do you need to go into isolation and make sure you're not the source of spread. And so, you know, testing is the key thing. South Korea did that in this massive way that everybody should learn from. And so that is paired with the isolation piece. Our goal here is to get to the point where a very small percentage of the population is infected. You know, China, only 0.01 percent of the population was infected. If you let it, if you don't do these things, you're going to get the majority of people infected and that huge overload of the medical system. CA: Whitney has some questions from our online audience. Whitney. WPR: Some of the questions that we're seeing are about how our tech giants and leaders can play a role in isolating this and containing this virus. BG: The tech companies are very involved in making sure that some work can go on. People can stay in touch, you know, they can help with some of the disease modeling, they can help with the visibility of the numbers. It's actually very impressive, you get up there and you can see those numbers. Actually, they're sad numbers, but everybody's able to monitor this thing. Back in 1918, they didn't have this type of visibility, and ability to share best practices. But for a lot of people, the isolation is the key thing. CA: Bill, one of the riddles about this isolation strategy is how long it has to last. A lot of people are concerned that the price of victory by isolating everyone is that you crash the economy, and that we have to be, basically, at home, not doing our regular jobs for three, six months, maybe all year. And so much so that there's now this big debate in the US and other countries about this may just be the wrong strategy, that we can't crash the economy that badly, we should only isolate for another couple of weeks, and then let people back, and if that means a lot of other people get sick and we eventually build up herd immunity, that may be the right way to go. What's your thought on this, what is the isolation strategy that eventually leads to us getting back to normal? BG: It's very tough to say to people, "Hey, keep going to restaurants," you know, "Go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner, just, you know, we want you to keep spending," because there's some, maybe a politician who thinks GDP growth is what really counts. It's very hard to tell people, when there's an epidemic spreading that threatens, particularly, their parents or elderly people that they know, that they should go about things knowing that their activity is spreading this disease. I don't know of any rich countries that have chosen to use that approach. It is true, if you did that approach, over a period of several years, enough people would be infected you'd have what's called herd immunity. But herd immunity is meaningless until you infect over half the population. And so you can take — You'll overload your medical system, so your case fatality rate, instead of being one percent, will be like three, four percent. And so, the idea, it's very irresponsible for somebody to suggest we can have the best of both worlds. What we need is the extreme shutdown so that in six to ten weeks, if things go well, then you can start opening back up. CA: So just putting the math together from what you just said, Bill, to get to herd immunity, you need more than half the people in the country to basically get the bug. So in the case of the US, for example, that would be 150 million people, thereabouts. You said that the fatality rate in that scenario, you're talking about four to five million people potential fatalities. That is just a horrifying scenario that no one should be contemplating. BG: Even one percent of the population getting sick, they will treat, whoever goes for this "ignore the disease" strategy, they will treat them as a pariah state, so none of their people will go in, and none of your people will go into that. And so briefly, a few countries in Europe that hadn't really looked at this hard, considered, "OK, should we be the ones who kind of go about business as usual?" It is tempting, because if you got there early — South Korea did not have to do the extreme shutdown, because they did such a good job on testing. CA: Testing and containment. BG: That's why it's so maddening to me that government is not allocating the testing to where it's needed, and maybe that will have to happen at the state level, because it's not happening at the federal level. But there is no middle course on this thing. It is sad that the shutdown will be harder for poorer countries than it is for richer countries. CA: So let's come into that in minute. The one exception I've heard the case made for is Japan, that Japan has not contained it quite in the same way that South Korea did but has allowed people to work. It's tried to make extreme measures for protecting their most elderly population. But they've tried to find a middle scenario, haven't they? BG: If you act — When you have hundreds of cases, you may be able to contain it by doing great testing and great contact tracing, and restricting foreigners coming in, without as much damage to your economy. The US is past this opportunity to control without shutdown. So the worst case of what was happening in Wuhan in the beginning or in northern Italy over the last few weeks, that we avoid that. But we did not act fast enough to have an ability to avoid the shutdown. CA: But then what I don't understand, in the case of the US, for example, is that even if we're successful in bending the curve and reducing the number of new cases from a period of extreme shutdown, as it were, no immunity has been built up. Let's say that there's still no vaccine. Surely when you lift restrictions and people start going back to work, the whole thing just blows up again. BG: The experience that we're seeing in China and in South Korea is that there are not these people who are asymptomatic that are causing lots of infections. And that's a parameter that, as you build the model, you have to put in. There's an Imperial model that people talk about a lot, which shows that reopening is very hard to do. But the results of that model are not matching what we see in China, and so very likely, there aren't as many of these infecting asymptomatics. And that's why you have to be pragmatic. There's a lot we don't know. For example, seasonality may help us in the Northern Hemisphere, the force of infection will — Respiratory viruses, to some degree, they all are seasonal. We don't know how seasonal this one is, but you know, there's a reasonable chance that the force of infection will be going down. And it's your testing that always is telling you, "Oh, my gosh, do I have to shut down more, or can I start to open up?" So particularly, right as you open up, that testing and contact tracing is saying to you — And you can say I'm more on the optimistic side, that it will be possible to do what China's doing, where they are starting to go back to normal. CA: And help me understand what happened there because it seems kind of miraculous to me, because this virus was exploding, yes, in Wuhan, but people moved from there to many other parts of China. How is it possible that the combination of the shutdown in Wuhan and measures elsewhere seem to have got to the point where there are literally no new cases happening. I mean, to me, that implies that literally, the virus is not circulating at all between humans in China. You know, there's a few tourists coming in who they deal with, but I mean, is that literally your interpretation of what happened, that it's no longer circulating in China? BG: Absolutely. Take a spreadsheet and take a number like four — one person infects four people — and say the cycle is every 10 days. Go through eight of those cycles, and you're getting the big number. You know, start with 10,000 and then, you know, that increase. If you take the number 0.4 instead, that is, the average case infects 0.4 people, then look at what happens to that number as you go out. It drops to zero, and so things that are exponential are very, very dramatic. When they're above one, they are growing rapidly. When they're below one, they are shrinking rapidly. And so the isolation in China drove that reproductive number to well below zero. And so local infection rates — CA: Below one. BG: Below one, sorry. And that quarantine, you know, quarantine comes from "40 days," which is what they thought would help for black plague, that is our primary technique. Thank God we have testing, if we use it properly. We are doing therapeutics, which will help with the death rate, but in terms of keeping the infections below one percent of the population, it really all depends just on the two things: isolation and testing. CA: So to quote a question from my Twitter feed this morning for you Bill: If you were president for a month in the US, what would be the top two or three things you would do? BG: Well, the clear message that we have no choice to maintain this isolation and that's going to keep going for a period of time, you know, probably in the Chinese case, it was like six weeks, so we have to prepare ourselves for that, and do it very well. And then use the testing and every week, talk about what's going on with that. If you're doing isolation well, within about 20 days, you'll see those numbers really change, you know, instead of this, you'll see this, and that is a sign that you're on your way. Now, you have to stay to get more generations that are 0.4 infections per previous infection. You have to maintain it for a number of weeks there. And you know, so this is not going to be easy. We need a clear message about that. It is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But bringing the economy back and doing money, that's more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. And so, we're going to take the pain in the economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in the disease and death dimension. CA: Whitney. WPR: We have a lot of other questions coming in. One that we've been seeing is a question about what tools are available for countries that maybe don't have the luxury of being able to social-distance, don't have great health systems in place, how should they be handling this virus? BG: Yeah, I would say, if the rich countries really do their job well, by the summer, they'll be like China is, or some of the other countries that responded early. But in the developing countries, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasonality is large. As you say, the ability to isolate, you know, when you go out to get your food every day, you have to earn your wage, when you live in a slum or you're very nearby each other, it's very hard to do, as you move down the income ladder, than it is for a country like the United States. And so we should all accelerate the vaccine, which eventually will come, and you know, people are being responsible to say that that's going to take 18 months. And there's a lot of those being pursued. I'm talking a lot with Seth Berkley, who you're going to have later this week, who can talk a lot about the vaccine front, because he's definitely at the center of that, being the head of GAVI. We do need to get really cheap testing out to these countries, and we need to get therapeutics so you don't need to put five percent of people on respirators. Because even if they had the equipment, they don't have the personnel, they just don't have the beds, the capacity. And so the only good news is that the rich countries have this and so they will be learning about testing, therapeutics, and funding the vaccines for the entire world, to try and minimize the damage in developing countries. WPR: Great, I'll be back later with more questions. CA: Bill, you mentioned therapeutics there. What is looking promising, is anything looking promising? BG: Yeah, so there's quite a range of things going on. There's a few that get mentioned a lot, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and the data is still a bit confusing, but there's some positive data on those. Remdesivir is a five-day IV infusion, and actually kind of hard to manufacture, so people are looking at how that can be improved. The hydroxychloroquine looks like it works, somewhat, if you get in early. There's a huge list of compounds, including antibodies, antiviral drugs, and so the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust, with support from Mastercard and now others, created this therapeutics accelerator to really triage out. You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, try this, try that. So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be done all over the world. So the coordination on that is very complex, globally. But I think, you know, out of the top 20 or so candidates, probably three or four of them will work out, you know, at different stages of the disease, to reduce the respiratory distress. CA: I heard you mentioned that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the blood serum, of people who had had the disease and recovered. So I guess they're carrying antibodies. Talk a bit about that, how that could work and what it would take to accelerate that. BG: Yeah, this has always been discussed as how could you pull that off. So people who are recovered, it appears, have really effective antibodies in their blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out the white cells, the immune cells. And then the question is, OK, how many patients' worth of material could you get? You know, if you have that recovered person come in, say, once a week, do you get enough for two people or five people? Then logistically, you have to take that and get it to where that need is. And so it's fairly complicated, you know, compared to a drug that we can make in high volume. You know, the cost of taking it out and putting it back in probably doesn't scale as well. But there is work being done on this. You know, we actually started with Ebola, and fortunately, it got done before it was needed. So that is being pursued and it will work to some degree, but it will be hard to scale the numbers. CA: So it's almost like, when you talk about the need to accelerate testing, the immediate need is for testing for the virus. But is it possible that in a few months' time, there's going to be this growing need to test for these antibodies in people, i.e. to see if someone had the disease and recovered, maybe they didn't even know they had it. Because you could picture this growing worldwide force of heroes — let's call them heroes — who have been through this experience and have a lot to offer the world. Maybe they can offer blood donation, serum donation. But also other tasks, like, if you've got overwhelmed health care systems, presumably, there are kind of community health worker type tasks that people could be trained to do to relieve the pressure there, if we knew that they were effectively immune? BG: Yes. Until we came up with the self-swab and showed FDA that that's equivalent, we were thinking that people who might be able to man those kiosks would be the recovered patients. Now we don't want to have a lot of recovered people, you know. To be clear, we're trying, through the shutdown, in the United States, to not get to one percent of the population infected. We're well below that today, but with exponentiation, you could get past that three million. I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain. Eventually, what we'll have to have is certificates of who is a recovered person, who is a vaccinated person, because you don't want people moving around the world — where you'll have some countries that won't have it under control, sadly — you don't want to completely block off the ability for those people to go there and come back and move around. CA: Bill, is your foundation helping to accelerate the manufacture of these self tests? What are the prospects for really seeing scale on some of this testing soon, not just in the US, but globally? BG: Yeah, our foundation, we'd been funding the thing called the Flu Study to really understand how respiratory viruses spread. It's amazing how little was understood about how important schools are, different age groups, different types of interaction. And that gave us an experience. In fact, that flu study actually was the first time coronavirus was found in the community, because the government was still saying you only test people who'd come from China, but we ran into people who had coronavirus, who hadn't been travelers. So, that was like an early warning sign, even though the regulation said you weren't supposed to even look at that. So yeah, the Foundation is working with all the private sector people, the diagnostics people on this testing piece. Now that we can do the self-swab, those swabs are very easy to manufacture. The one where you had to jam it into the throat, deep turbinate, that was getting into short supply. So the swab should not be limiting, neither should the various chemicals that help run the PCR machines. So we should be able to get to a South Korea-type prioritized testing thing within a few weeks. CA: How important is it that the world's nations collaborate right now? I mean, it seems like, you know, here's this common enemy facing humanity, it does not know that it just crossed a border, it does not know what race people are, what religion they are — it just knows, "Here's a human, I've got a manufacturing machine here that can make me famous." And it goes to work. It's so terrifying to me to see signs of countries starting to blame each other or the xenophobia, it just seems so toxic. What's your take on this, Bill? Do you see signs of cooperation happening, or are you also worried about the sort of, "US versus China" kind of thing that seems to be going on if we're not careful? BG: Well, I see both. I see that countries that are recovered can help other countries. And that's fantastic. If by the summer, we've knocked this thing down, then great, we can help other countries. There are vaccine projects all over the world, and those should be evaluated on a very neutral basis, to which one is the best to help humanity. And make sure the manufacturing capacity isn't just for rich countries, that it's scaled up, very low cost stuff for the entire world, and that's the spirit of GAVI, is getting vaccines out to every person. So in the science side, and data-sharing side, you see this great cooperation going on. Unfortunately, whenever you have disease, this sense of other and foreign and "Oh, stay away from me," you know, that sort of pulling inward is reinforced. And we have to avoid that. You know, ironically, we have to isolate physically, while in terms of looking at community groups that are pooling resources to help make sure food gets to everyone and help assure medical care, you know, if older people need to be moved out of common facilities, you help out with that, and that people aren't suffering too much from the psychology of isolation. So our generosity has to go up towards others at the same time we're less actually physically interacting with other people. CA: I mean, thinking about the situation in many developing countries, I'm curious how you think of this. You mentioned, first of all, that seasonality may help, i.e. high temperatures. Is it possible that that is so far protecting, to some extent, places like India or sub-Saharan Africa and so forth? BG: India's Northern Hemisphere. So Southern Hemisphere is lots of Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia. And it is true, either the force of the infection is lower there or we're just not seeing it with testing. You know, a few months from now, we'll understand the seasonality question, which would be good news for the Northern Hemisphere, and somewhat bad news for the Southern Hemisphere. Now more people live in the Northern Hemisphere, including India, Pakistan, and that would buy us some time, and time is a big deal, because all these tools get so much better if you had to go into a second season with it. But yeah, sadly, we could see, in the next few months, as the Southern Hemisphere is moving into its fall and then winter, we could see a big increase there, and that is going to be very difficult. Now they don't have as many older people, but they have lots of people who are HIV positive, or have malnutrition or various lung challenges because of indoor smoke, and so the wild card is how well can the developing countries deal with this. CA: If you're in a country where the majority of your population is making less than two or three dollars a day, can you even afford a strategy that looks like, basically, shutting down the economy? BG: I'm very worried that there will be a massive number of deaths in those poorer countries, because the health systems just aren't — you know, the number of respirators, hospitals, and of course, when you overload that system, your deaths are not just COVID deaths, but everyone else who's trying to access a system that will be somewhat in chaos, including with health workers who are getting sick. CA: OK, we're getting near to running out of time with this. Whitney, maybe a last question or two from online. WPR: Sure, we have two from online, we're seeing thousands of questions around these same lines. One, there's lots of people who are really interested to hear about the kind of work that you're doing with your foundation as far as distributing tests, but also producing safety gear, masks and that sort of thing, to help with this effort for health workers. BG: So the Gates Foundation, you know, we, very early on, gave out 100 million to help out with all the pieces: the testing piece, the therapeutics and the vaccines. We are not experts in making masks and ventilators and gowns, and it's great that other people, including some 3D printing, and open-source things, that is great. Our focus, you know, like this self-swab thing, nobody had done that before, people thought it wouldn't work, we were quite sure it would work. And so that, for the globe, is a huge thing. We work a lot with both governments and private sector, so in some ways, we're kind of a bridge. And we've been talking to the heads of the pharmaceutical companies, the testing companies and, specifically, with the ones doing vaccines, including some of which are these new type of vaccines, RNA vaccines, that we've been backing for quite some time, and CEPI has been backing. And so our expertise is in those medical tools and really getting the best of the private sector engaged there. It's been a little slow. We can write checks right away, whereas the government processes, even in this situation — you know, there's still this notion of bidding, and not really knowing who has the unique capabilities of doing things, and so, an organization that's working on this all the time, lots of new vaccines, can step in and be helpful. And it's really amazing. When we talk to private-sector partners, their interest in helping out has been absolutely fantastic. And so that's where we have a unique role. WPR: And the other question that we're seeing a ton of — before we wrap up here — is just people are really interested in your insight, Bill, on whether you think we are heading in the right direction, do you feel like our economy is heading in the right place, that humanity is heading in the right place, are we in a better position now than you thought we were in five years ago? BG: Well, five years ago, I said that pandemic is this unaddressed, very, very scary thing. And that if we did the right things, we could be more prepared. Science is on our side. The fact we can be ready for the next epidemic, it's very clear how to do that. And yes, it will take tens of billions, but not hundreds or trillions of dollars. So it will be tiny compared to the economic cost. I remember when I did that presentation 2015, I put up, "Hey, a big flu epidemic could cost four trillion," and I thought, wow, that's a big number, do I really think it's that big? And I went and looked up numbers and thought, yeah, well, that's big. This epidemic will cost that much to the economy. So in the short run, we are going to have more pain and more difficulty and people are going to have to step up to help each other. I'm still very much an optimist, you know, whether it's climate change, countries working together, biology taking the diseases, malaria, TB, you know, even advances for what are more rich-world diseases, like cancer. The amount of innovation, the way we can connect up and work together — yes, I'm superpositive about that. You know, I love my work because I see progress on all these diseases all the time. Now we have to turn and focus on this, you know. Sadly, it may interrupt and the polio situation might get worse a little bit because of the distraction here. We're using a lot of the great capacity that was built up for those polio activities to try and help the developing countries respond to this very well. And that is appropriate, but the message from me, although it's very sober when we're dealing with this epidemic, you know, I'm very positive that this should draw us together. We will get out of this, and then, we will get ready for the next epidemic. CA: That's exactly what I was going to ask you, Bill, which is, where is your head, do you think we will get through this? Will the leaders that matter listen to the scientists, will they? Will we make it through? Do you believe that within a few months' time, we're already going to be looking back and saying, "Phew, we dodged a pretty bad one there." BG: We can't say for sure that even the rich countries will be out of this in six to ten weeks. I think that's likely, but as we get the testing data, we'll get more of a sense of that and people will continuously be able to see that. But you know, the rich countries will get out of this. The developing countries will bear a significant price, but even they, we will get a vaccine and GAVI will get that out to everyone. So you know, two to three years from now, this thing, even on a global basis, will essentially be over with a gigantic price tag. But now we're going to know, OK, next time we see a pathogen, we can make billions of tests within two or three weeks. We can figure out which antiviral drugs work within two or three weeks and get those scaled up. And we can make a vaccine, if we're really ready, probably in six months, using these new platforms, probably the RNA vaccine. So specifically, there are innovations that are there that will get financed, you know, I hope, quite generously, coming out of this thing. And so, three years from now, we'll look back and say, you know, that was awful, there's a lot of heroes, but we've learned a lesson and the world as a whole, with its great science and desire to help each other, was able to try and minimize what happened there and avoid it happening again. CA: That's certainly the optimistic scenario that I'm craving for, myself. That the world kind of realizes, one, that there are certain things that you just have to unite on. Two, that science really matters and it's a miracle that science can understand this bug, you know, make a vaccine, sequence it, make therapeutics, understand how to model it — it's kind of miraculous to me. So will we learn, now, to pay attention to scientists, because if we do, I'm sure that you feel this as well, there's an amazing analogue with climate, it's just a different timescale. That the scientists are out there, saying, "There's this huge enemy coming, if we do nothing, it's going to take millions of lives, it's going to wreck our planet. For God's sake, act, politicians! Do something." And the politicians are going, "Meh, no. We need a little more GDP, we need to win an election." And they're not acting. Do you see a scenario where this shocks politicians to actually change their thinking and their prioritization of science overall, or is that asking too much? BG: Yeah, it's interesting how much of this distraction will delay the urgent innovation agenda that exists over in climate. You know, I have freed up a lot of time to work on climate. I have to say, you know, for the last few months, that's now shifted, and until we get out of this crisis, COVID will dominate, and so some of the climate stuff, although it will still go on, it won't get that same focus. As we get past this, yes, that idea of innovation and science and the world working together, that is totally common between these two problems. And so I don't think this has to be a huge setback for climate. CA: Last question. There are thousands of people watching, many of them living alone, some quite scared, there may even be people there who have this virus and are suffering symptoms or recovering. By the way, if that's you, we'd love to hear from you, we really would. Maybe have a conversation with some of you, in a future one of these, just understanding the experience. But Bill, what can people do as individuals from their own homes, right now, to try and help? BG: Well, there's a lot of creativity, you know — can you mentor kids who are being forced into an online format where the school systems really weren't ready for that? Can you organize some giving activity that gets the food banks to step up where there's problems there? These are such unprecedented times, and it really should draw out that sense of creativity, while complying with the isolation mandates. CA: Bill, I really want to thank you for spending this time with us and for the financial investment, the time investment. You've really invested your life into trying to solve these big problems. And this is as big as they get. I have a hunch that your voice is really going to be needed in the next few weeks. Thank you so much for your time today. This was really wonderful, hearing from you. Thank you. BG: Thanks, Chris. CA: OK, thanks, everyone, thanks for being part of the TED community. Look after yourselves, be smart about this. You know, get ahead of it. If you're in a part of the world where this thing hasn't really hit, listen to Bill Gates. Get ahead of it. Keep, you know, if you possibly can, socially distanced. No, not — physically distanced and socially connect. That's what the internet is for. These days are what the internet was built for. We can spread love, we can spread ideas, we can spread relationship, we can spread thought, without spreading a dangerous bug. So get ahead of it, and let's figure this out together. It's been wonderful spending time with you. From Whitney and from me and from the whole TED team, thank you, and over and out. |
Simple, effective tech to connect communities in crisis | {0: 'Johanna Figueira is a strategist and digital marketer with Wells Fargo. She is also one of the co-organizers of Code for Venezuela, an organization that leverages technology to help nonprofits in Venezuela.'} | TED@WellsFargo | I'm an immigrant from Venezuela, and I've lived in the US for six years. If you ask me about my life as an expatriate, I would say that I've been lucky. But it hasn't been easy. Growing up, I never thought that I was going to leave my homeland. I participated in my first student protest in 2007, when the president shut down one of the most important news networks. I was getting my bachelor's degree in communications, and that was the first time I realized I couldn't take free speech for granted. We knew things were getting bad, but we never saw what was coming: an economic crisis, infrastructure breaking down, citywide electrical blackouts, the decline of public health care and shortage of medicines, disease outbreaks and starvation. I moved to Canada with my husband in 2013, and we always thought we'd move back home when the crisis improved. But we never did. Nearly all my childhood friends have left the country, but my parents are still there. There have been moments where I've called my mom, and I could hear people screaming and crying in the background as teargas bombs exploded in the streets. And my mom, as if I couldn't hear it, would always tell me, (Speaking Spanish) "We're fine, don't worry." But of course, I worry. It's my parents, and I'm 4,000 miles away. Today, I'm just one of more than four million Venezuelans who have left their home country. A lot of my friends are Venezuelan immigrants, and in the last few years, we've begun talking about how we could make a difference when we live so far away. That is how Code for Venezuela was born in 2019. It began with a hackathon, because we are experts in tech, and we thought we could use our tech skills to create solutions for people on the ground. But first, we needed to find some experts actually living inside Venezuela to guide us. We'd see so many other hackathons that came up with wily, ambitious, incredible technological solutions that sounded great in theory but ultimately failed to work in the actual countries they were intended to help. Many of us have been living abroad for years, and we are detached from the day-to-day problems that people are facing in Venezuela. So we turned to the experts actually living inside of the country. For example, Julio Castro, a doctor and one of the leaders of Médicos por la Salud. When the government stopped publishing official health care data in 2015, Dr. Julio began collecting information himself, using an informal but coordinated system of cell phone communications. They track available personnel, medical supplies, mortality data, disease outbreaks; compile it into a report; and then share that on Twitter. He became our go-to expert on health care in Venezuela. Luis Carlos Díaz, a widely recognized journalist who reports acts of censorship and human rights violations suffered by the people of Venezuela, he helps us make sense of what is happening there, since the news is controlled by the government. We call these people our heroes on the ground. With their expert advice, we came up with a series of challenges for hackathon participants. In that first hackathon, we had 300 participants from seven countries come up with 16 different project submissions. We picked the projects with the most potential and continued working on them after the event. Today, I'll share two of our most successful projects to give you a taste of the impact we are having so far. They're called MediTweet and Blackout Tracker. MediTweet is an intelligent Twitter bot that helps Venezuelans find the medicine they need. Right now in Venezuela, if you get sick and you go to a hospital, there is a good chance they won't have the right medical supplies to treat you. The situation is so bad that patients often get a "shopping list" from the doctor instead of a prescription. I live the need for this firsthand. My mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2015. She needed to have a lumbar puncture to get a final diagnosis and treatment plan. But the needle for this procedure wasn't available. I was in Venezuela at that time, and I was seeing my mom getting worse in front of me every day. After looking everywhere, we found the needle in a site that is like the eBay of Latin America. I met the seller in a local bakery, and it was like buying something on the black market. My mom brought the needle to her doctor, and he did the procedure. Without this, she could have died. But it's not just medical supplies, it's medicines, too. When she was first diagnosed, we bought her treatment in a state pharmacy, and it was, like, practically free. But then the state pharmacy ran out, and we still had six months of treatment ahead. Six months of treatment ahead. We bought some medicines online and the rest in Mexico. Now she's in her third year of remission, and every time that I call, she tells me, "I'm fine, don't worry." But not everyone can afford to leave the country, and many aren't healthy enough to travel. That is why people turn to Twitter, buying and selling medicines using the hashtag #ServicioPublico, meaning "public service." Our Twitter bot scans Twitter for the hashtag #ServicioPublico and connects users who are asking for specific medicines with those who are selling their private leftovers. We also pool the location data of those Twitter users and use it for a visualization tool. It gives local organizations like Médicos por la Salud a sense of where they have a shortage. We can also apply machine learning algorithms to detect clusters of disease. If they've received humanitarian aid, this could help them to make better decisions about the distributions of the supplies. Our second project, is called Blackout Tracker. Venezuela is currently going through an electricity crisis. Last year, Venezuela suffered what some people consider the worst power failures in Venezuelan history. I had two long days without communication with my parents. Some cities experienced blackouts every day. But you only know about this on social media. The government won't report blackouts on the news. When the power goes out, many Venezuelans, we quickly tweet out the location with the hashtag #SinLuz, meaning "without electricity," before their phones ran out of battery, so people around the country know what is happening. Like MediTweet, Blackout Tracker scans Twitter for the hashtag #SinLuz and creates a map using the location data of those users. You can quickly see where the blackouts are happening today and how many blackouts have happened over time. People want to know what is happening, and this is our answer. But it's also a way of holding the government accountable. It's easy for them to deny that the problem exists or make excuses, because there is no official data on it. Blackout Tracker shows how bad the problem really is. Now, some people in Silicon Valley may look at these projects and say that there are no major technological innovations. But that is the point. These projects are not insanely advanced, but it's what the people of Venezuela need, and they can have a tremendous impact. Beyond these projects, perhaps our most significant accomplishment is that a movement has been created, one where people around the world are coming together to use their professional skills to create solutions for the people of Venezuela. And because we are partnering with locals, we are creating the solutions that people want and need. What is so great about this is that we are using our professional skills, so it comes easily and naturally. It's not that hard for us to make a difference. If someone from San Francisco were to hire professionals to create solutions like MediTweet or Blackout Tracker, it would cost a small fortune. By donating our services, we are making a bigger impact than if we were just to donate money. And you can do the same thing — not in Venezuela, necessarily, but in your own community. In a world that is more connected than ever, we still see how specialized communities can be living isolated or in silos. There are so many great ways to help, but I believe that you can use your professional skills to connect diverse communities and create effective solutions through those relationships. Anyone with knowledge and professional skills has a powerful force to bring hope to a community. For us at Code for Venezuela, this is just the beginning. Thank you. (Applause) |
What is schizophrenia? | null | TED-Ed | Schizophrenia was first identified more than a century ago, but we still don’t know its exact causes. It remains one of the most misunderstood and stigmatized illnesses today. So, let’s walk through what we do know— from symptoms to causes and treatments. Schizophrenia is considered a syndrome, which means it may encompass a number of related disorders that have similar symptoms but varying causes. Every person with schizophrenia has slightly different symptoms, and the first signs can be easy to miss— subtle personality changes, irritability, or a gradual encroachment of unusual thoughts. Patients are usually diagnosed after the onset of psychosis, which typically occurs in the late teens or early twenties for men and the late twenties or early thirties for women. A first psychotic episode can feature delusions, hallucinations, and disordered speech and behavior. These are called positive symptoms, meaning they occur in people with schizophrenia but not in the general population. It’s a common misperception that people with schizophrenia have multiple personalities, but these symptoms indicate a disruption of thought processes, rather than the manifestation of another personality. Schizophrenia also has negative symptoms, these are qualities that are reduced in people with schizophrenia, such as motivation, expression of emotion, or speech. There are cognitive symptoms as well, like difficulty concentrating, remembering information, and making decisions. So what causes the onset of psychosis? There likely isn’t one single cause, but a combination of genetic and environmental risk factors that contribute. Schizophrenia has some of the strongest genetic links of any psychiatric illness. Though about 1% of people have schizophrenia, children or siblings of people with schizophrenia are ten times likelier to develop the disease, and an identical twin of someone with schizophrenia has a 40% chance of being affected. Often, immediate relatives of people with schizophrenia exhibit milder versions of traits associated with the disorder— but not to an extent that requires treatment. Multiple genes almost certainly play a role, but we don’t know how many, or which ones. Environmental factors like exposure to certain viruses in early infancy might increase the chance that someone will develop schizophrenia, and use of some drugs, including marijuana, may trigger the onset of psychosis in highly susceptible individuals. These factors don’t affect everyone the same way. For those with very low genetic risk, no amount of exposure to environmental risk factors will lead them to develop schizophrenia; for those with very high risk, moderate additional risk might tip the balance. The antipsychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia have helped researchers work backwards to trace signatures of the disorder in the brain. Traditional antipsychotics block dopamine receptors. They can be very effective in reducing positive symptoms, which are linked to an excess of dopamine in particular brain pathways. But the same drugs can make negative symptoms worse, and we’ve found that negative symptoms of schizophrenia may be tied to too little dopamine in other brain areas. Some people with schizophrenia show a loss of neural tissue, and it’s unclear whether this atrophy is a result of the disease itself or drug-induced suppression of signaling. Fortunately, newer generations of antipsychotics aim to address some of these issues by targeting multiple neurotransmitters, like serotonin in addition to dopamine. It’s clear that no one transmitter system is responsible for all symptoms, and because these drugs affect signaling throughout the brain and body, they can have other side effects like weight gain. In spite of these complications, antipsychotics can be very effective, especially when combined with other interventions like cognitive-behavioral therapy. Electroconvulsive therapy, though it provides relatively short-lived relief, is also re-emerging as an effective treatment, especially when other options have failed. Early intervention is also extremely important. After months or years of untreated psychosis, certain psychoses can become embedded in someone’s personality. And yet, the dehumanizing stigma attached to this diagnosis can prevent people from seeking help. People with schizophrenia are often perceived as dangerous, but are actually much more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. And proper treatment may help reduce the likelihood of violence associated with schizophrenia. That’s why education— for patients, their families, and their communities— helps erode the stigma and improves access to treatment. |
2 questions to uncover your passion -- and turn it into a career | {0: 'Noeline Kirabo self-educated her way out of the slums of Kampala, Uganda. Now she helps vulnerable youth gain skills to turn their passions into profitable businesses.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | When you have a job that pays you enough to cover your basic needs, your bills and even some more to spend, the assumption is that you'd be happy, or, even better, fulfilled. And it seems unthinkable when you wake up and say you're going to leave a job like that to pursue a passion. And that was my dilemma six years ago. I had a comfortable job, I lived a comfortable life, and people expected me to be fulfilled, but I wasn't. There was something in me that wanted more. There was a misalignment between the things I did on a daily basis and the things that I deeply cared about. And so I decided to quit and explore the possibility of bringing this passion into my daily routine. And the thing about finding your passion is that it's not straightforward. Even for people with money and degrees, they still struggle to identify their passion. And here I was as a 30-year-old, talking about finding my passion and turning it into a career. Literally, people told me, "You don't talk about passion until you've made enough money — (Laughter) or at least until you're ready to retire." Because there's a notion that looking inward and finding the things that give us pleasure and fulfillment is a luxury that only the rich can enjoy, or a pleasure that only the retired can indulge in. Which made me wonder: Is passion only for the rich, or an experience only the retired can enjoy? For many of us, we've been led to believe that life is a race of survival. We've been conditioned to see ourselves as survivors that must do everything in our power to survive. In Africa, we're nurtured to go through school, cram and pass, in the hope that you get a job after. And if you do, stick at it no matter how much it sucks. (Laughter) Until you get a better offer or you're asked to retire. And as a dropout, I knew that I was not entitled to anything. Every opportunity was a privilege. And so when I thought about quitting, it was a huge risk. I was given two alternatives, which are the most popular in Africa. The first one is sign up for any course at a vocational institution and do it. My second option, settle for any job offer you can get, no matter the working conditions, and do it. That probably explains why we have so many of our young people being trafficked in search of greener pastures. I opted for the first option. I did look at a couple vocational institutions in the hope that I would find a course that resonated with my persona, my dream and my aspiration. I was disappointed to learn that there was no room for misfits like me in these institutions. The education system in many parts of the world has been designed around preselected options that young people are expected to fit in or risk becoming misfits. And so going through school, I was nurtured and conditioned to think in the straight line and stay within the straight line. But when I dropped out, I discovered a world of possibilities. I knew I could be anything, I could study anything, and so I leveraged free online courses. That's how I built my CV, got into employment and worked for eight years. And after eight years, I told myself there must be more to life than just going through the routines of life. So in 2014, I started an organization called Kyusa where we are working with out-of-school youth and empowering them to turn their passions into profitable, scalable and sustainable businesses. Now, when we talk about passion, one of the most common questions that people ask is, "What is passion? How do I even find it?" And in the simplest definition, passion is a collection of your life experiences that give you the deepest sense of fulfillment. And to identify your passion, you need to look inward. So we use two reflective questions. The first question we ask is, "If you had all the time and the money in the world, what would you spend your time doing?" It sounds like a very simple question, but many people struggle to answer this question because they've just never thought about it. The second question we ask is, "What makes you happy or gives you the deepest sense of fulfillment?" Now, you would assume that we all know what makes us happy, but it's also interesting to note that so many people have no idea what makes them happy, because they are so busy going through the routines of life, they've never stopped to look inward. And so identifying the things that give us a deep sense of fulfillment and the things that give us deep joy are thoughts that begin to direct us in the direction of our passion. And just in case you're wondering what your answers are to those two questions, I invite you to sit with these questions later and just reflect about it. However, I am also aware that passion alone cannot guarantee success in life. And I should note that not every passion can become a career. For passion to become a career, it must be coupled with the right set of skills, conditioning and positioning. So when we get our young people to look inward, we also ask them what skills do you have, what talents do you have, what experience do you have that you can use to build a niche in the marketplace. But more than that, we also look at the market trends, because it doesn't matter how much you love and enjoy it. If nobody wants it or is willing to pay for it, it can't be a career. It's just a hobby. And the third thing we look at is how do you position yourself? Who are you targeting? Who do you want to sell to? Why would they want to buy from you? And so the combination of the three is what enables you to move from just a passion to a business. And many of our young people have been able to turn their ideas and burning desires into profitable businesses or social enterprises, and they're not just creating jobs, but they are solving societal challenges. I'll share with you two examples. One of them is Esther. I met Esther two years ago. She had been out of school for two years, and she had been deeply affected by her dropping out. As a result, she had experienced severe depression to a point where she attempted to take her own life several times. Her friends and family didn't know what to do for her. They simply prayed for her. When I met Esther and I started to converse with her, I asked her a simple question. I said, "If you had all the time and the money in the world, what would you do?" Without thinking or hesitation, her eyes lit up and she began to tell me how she wanted to change the lives of young people. She wanted to restore hope and dignity to other teenagers by helping them make informed decisions about life. I was certain of the fact that this burning desire in her was unquenchable. And so we worked with Esther to put a framework around this desire. Today, she runs a social enterprise in her village, raising awareness about substance abuse, mental health, sexual reproductive health and is helping other school dropouts acquire vocational skills, so they can make a living for themselves. Esther turned 20 this year, and for the last two years, she has organized an annual teen fest that brings together over 500 teenagers. (Applause) Young people that are able to network and collaborate on different projects, but more importantly to meet professionals they would otherwise never have met. This is all engineered by a girl that believed the world had no room for her, that without education she would never amount to anything. But by looking inward and tapping into a burning desire, putting structure around it, it has become a model that not only changed her life but is transforming the lives of hundreds of young people every year. My other example is Musa. Musa is a natural artistic guy. He's the kind that would look at any design and replicate it with ease. And so he seeks to recognize that ability in him. When I met Musa, he was doing all kinds of crafts — bags, belts, wallets — but it was more of a part-time thing. Or sometimes, if he was really broke and needed to make quick money, then he would come up with a design and sell it. But he had never thought of it as a business. We started working with Musa, helping him shift his mindset from a hobby to a business and beginning to rethink how he can make products that he could sell and even be able to scale. Musa makes some of the most amazing bags I've ever seen, and over the last one year, Musa's business has grown. He has been recognized in different places. Currently, he's talking about exporting to developed countries. Musa, like any other dropout, believed that without academic credentials, he wouldn't amount to anything. He thought the talent he had was nothing simply because he did not have an academic paper to define him. But by looking inward and finding that what he had was the greatest asset and supporting him to turn it into a business, he's not just living — he's thriving. The thing about looking inward is that it can be scary, especially if you're doing it for the first time. But the truth is you never truly start living until you learn to live from the inside out. And in unlocking potential, we need to look inward to identify the things that give us a deep sense of fulfillment, the things that give us the deepest joy, and then weave them into the patterns of our daily routines. In so doing, we cease to work and we start to live. And the thing about living is that you never have to retire or to resign. (Laughter) (Applause) And so as you think about unlocking potential for ourselves, for our young people, for our children, let's not condition them to look outward but condition them to look inward to tap into who they are and bring that self into what they do every day. When you cease to work and you live, when passion becomes a career, you don't just excel, you become unstoppable. Thank you. (Applause) |
Indigenous knowledge meets science to solve climate change | {0: 'Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim advocates for the inclusion of Indigenous peoples, along with their knowledge and traditions, in the global movement to fight climate change.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | I guess all of you have a smartphone or an iPhone, and this morning, probably you checked on the weather, if its going to be rainy to carry your umbrella, if it is going to be sunny to use your sunglasses, or if it is going to be cold to have an extra coat. It's going to give you, sometime, good information and sometime not. Let me tell you, my best app is my grandmother. (Laughter) She's called Mamadda. She can tell you not only today's weather but she can predict the next 12 months, if it's going to be a good rain season or not. She can tell you just by observing her environment, by observing the wind direction, the cloud position, the bird migration, the size of fruits, the plant flowers. She can tell you by observing the behavior of her own cattle. That's how she knows better the weather and the ecosystem that she's living in. I'm coming from a pastoralist community who are cattle herders. We are nomadic. We move from one place to another one to find water and pasture. We can move up to a thousand kilometers, the size of California, within one year. And this life helps us to live in harmony with our ecosystem. We understand each other. For us, the nature is our supermarket, where we can collect our food, our water. It's our pharmacy where we can collect our medicinal plants. But it's our school, where we can learn better how to protect it and how it can give us back what we need. But with the climate change impact, we are experiencing a different impact. In my community, we have one of the top five fresh waters in Africa. It's Lake Chad. When my mother was born, Lake Chad used to be about 25,000 kilometers square of water. When I was born, 30 years ago, it was 10,000 kilometers square. And actually now, it's about 1,200 kilometers square of water. Ninety percent of this water just evaporated, disappeared. And you have more than 40 million people living around this lake and depending on it. They are pastoralists. They are fishermen. And they are farmers. They do not depend on the end of the month's salary. They depend on the rainfall. They depend on the crops that are growing or the pasture for their cattle. The shrinking resources, you have many communities that are fighting to get access. The first come is the first served. The second have to fight unto death. So climate change is impacting our environment by changing our social life, because the role of man and woman in this region, it's different. Man is supposed to feed his family, take care of his community, and if he cannot do that, his dignity is under threat. He cannot do anything else to pay it back. So climate change takes our men far away from us. That is the migration. They can migrate to a big city where they can stay for six or 12 months, where they get a job, they can send back money. If they didn't get it, they have to jump into the Mediterranean and migrate to Europe. Some of them die there, but none of them stop going. Of course, it's sad for the hosting country, who are developed countries, who have to adapt to host the migrants coming. But how about those who are left behind, the women and the children who have to play the role of men, the role of women, who have to take care of the security, of the food, of the health of the entire family, children and old people? So those women for me, they are my heroes, because they are innovators, they are solution makers, they are changing the little of the resources into the big for the community. So those are my people. So we use our indigenous people's traditional knowledge to get better resilience to what we need to survive. Our knowledge is not only for our communities. It's to share with each and others who are living with us. And indigenous peoples around the world are saving 80 percent of the world's biodiversity. That's the scientists who say that. Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, you can find the most diverse ecosystem, better than the national park. The indigenous peoples from the Pacific, the grandma and the grandpa, they know where to get food after the hurricane hits them. So the knowledge that our peoples know is helping us to survive and helping other peoples also to survive the climate change impact. The world is losing. We lost already 60 percent of the species, and it's increasing every day. So one day, I took a scientist to my community. I said, you are giving the good weather information through the TV and radio, but how about coming to my people? And then they come, they sit around, and suddenly, as we are nomadic, we just start packing our stuff, and then they say, like, "Are we moving?" I'm like, "No, we are not moving. It's going to rain." And they're like, "Oh, there's no cloud. How do you know it's going to rain?" We're like, "Yeah, it's going to rain." We pack our stuff. Suddenly, heavy rain starts coming, and we are seeing the scientist running around, hiding under trees and protecting their stuff. We already packed ours. (Laughter) After the end of the rain, the serious discussion starts. They say, "How do you know that it's going to rain?" We say, "Well, the old woman observed the insects taking the eggs inside their homes, and while the insect cannot talk or watch TV, they know how to predict to protect their generations, how to protect their food. So for us it's the sign that it's going to rain in at maximum a couple of hours." And then they say, well, we do have knowledge, but we do not combine ecological knowledge and weather knowledge all together. So that's how I started working with meteorological scientists and my communities to give better information to get peoples adapted to climate change. I think, if we put together all the knowledge systems that we have — science, technology, traditional knowledge — we can give the best of us to protect our peoples, to protect our planet, to restore the ecosystem that we are losing. I did that in another way, also. I used a tool that I really love a lot. It's called a 3D participatory mapping: participatory, because it can bring women, men, youth, elders, all the intergenerational peoples. Then they use science-based knowledge, and the community comes together, they build this map, they figure out all the knowledge that we have about where is our sacred forest, where is our water point, where is our corridor, where is the place that we move during each season. And these tools are amazing, because it's building capacity of women, because in our communities women and men cannot sit together. Men talk always, women just sitting there, but in the back. They are not there to take any decision. So after the men figure out all the knowledge, we say, well, you call the women, "Come and have a look." They say, "Yes, sure," because they've already done the first work. (Laughter) When the women come, and they look at the map, they're like, "Mm, no." (Laughter) "This is wrong. Here's where I collect the medicine. Here's where I collect the food. Here's where I collect —" So we changed the knowledge in the map, and we called the men. Well, they think about what women say. All of them shaking their heads. "They are right. They are right. They are right." So that's how we build the capacity of the women in giving them a voice in this 3D participatory mapping, so women get the detailed knowledge that can help the community to adapt. And man have the bigger picture knowledge. So when we put it together, this map helps them to discuss but to mitigate the conflict between the communities to access the resources, to share better these resources, to restore it and to manage it for the long term. Our knowledge is very useful. Indigenous peoples' knowledge are very crucial for our planet. It's crucial for all the peoples. Science knowledge was discovered 200 years ago, technology 100 years ago, but indigenous peoples' knowledge, it's thousands of years ago. So why we cannot put all of these together, combine those three knowledges and give the better resilience to the peoples who are getting the impact of climate change? And now it's not only the developing countries. It's the developed countries also. We saw the hurricane. We saw the flood around all the places. We saw the fire, even here in California. So we need all this knowledge to come together. We need the people in the center. And we need the decision makers to change, scientists tell them, and we tell them, and we do have this knowledge. We have 10 years to change it. Ten years is nothing, so we need to act all together and we need to act right now. Thank you. (Applause) |
The quest for the coronavirus vaccine | {0: 'Epidemiologist Seth Berkley is leading the charge to make sure vaccines are available to everyone, including those living in the developing world.', 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.', 2: 'Whitney Pennington Rodgers is an award-winning journalist and media professional.'} | TED Connects | Whitney Pennington Rodgers: Hello everyone, and welcome back to TEDConnects. If you're (Audio feedback) joining us for the — If you're joining us for the first time, we've been bringing interviews all week with some of the world's greatest minds to help us make sense of this unprecedented moment that we're living in. I'm Whitney Pennington Rodgers, TED's current affairs curator and one of your hosts. This week, thousands of you have tuned in to these live events each day, and hundreds of thousands more have watched these interviews after the fact. We've really loved seeing your questions. They add so much to these conversations. So please keep them coming. In a few minutes, I'm going to disappear to work with our team behind the scenes to monitor our Facebook feed, where you can leave some of your questions. I'll work to figure out which ones are the ones that we can bring back to our guest, and I will ask as many of them as I can during the live interview. Today, we're going to be touching on a subject that I think is top of mind for a lot of people, so I'd like to turn things over to the head of TED, Chris Anderson, who will introduce today's guest. Chris Anderson: Hello. WPR: Hi Chris. How's it going today? CA: Nice to see you again, Whitney. It's going pretty good here. Amazing days. WPR: That's good. That's great. We have sunshine here in the Northeast, which is nice. CA: So look, I am excited to introduce this guest, because I've known Seth Berkley for a long time. I count him as a friend. He's a man who has really devoted his life to the most profound questions about public health. Vaccines are extraordinary. They save millions of lives. The quest for a coronavirus vaccine is, I think, the biggest single question that the world faces now if we're going to get out of this. So it's just a delight to welcome Dr. Seth Berkley to TED Connects. Come on in, Seth. Seth Berkley: Good to see you there, Chris, and delighted to be with you and all of the TED community. CA: Well, so look, on Tuesday, Bill Gates was here, and he mentioned that your organization, Gavi, is really at the heart of the quest for a vaccine. So tell us a bit — what is Gavi? SB: So Chris, thank you for that. What's interesting is that 20 years ago — we just celebrated our 20th anniversary — there were all these powerful new vaccines that were being used in wealthy countries, and the challenge is, they weren't getting to the places that they could make the most difference: the developing world. So Gavi was formed as an alliance — WHO, the World Bank, the Gates Foundation, UNICEF — all working together to try to bring these vaccines to the developing world. And it's been very successful. We've launched 433 new vaccines in the most difficult countries in the world, in the Somalias and Yemens and DRCs and Nigerias. But we've also set up emergency stockpiles for outbreak-based vaccines, so if there's an outbreak anywhere in the world of yellow fever or of things like cholera or meningitis and now Ebola, we have vaccines that are available to do that. And the last thing we are trying to do is build the health systems out to deliver these vaccines, but also to make sure that we can pay attention to new diseases that pop up in different parts of the world. CA: And just give us a sense of the scale of this. How many vaccines do you distribute in a given year? And how many lives do you believe that that may be saving? SB: So, let me give you a macro number. We've immunized more than 760 million additional children — 760 million additional children — and prevented more than 13 million deaths. In an average year, we give about a half a billion doses because we started out with six diseases, but now we vaccinate against 18 different diseases. CA: Yeah, the scale of that is incredible, and amidst all the bad news that's happening, it's kind of amazing that this intervention can save so many lives. I mean, help us understand what a vaccine is. SB: So, the original idea, the word "vaccine," comes from "vaca," or cow. And the observation made in the 1700s was that milkmaids had beautiful skin, whereas everybody else had pockmarks from having gotten over smallpox. And the concept was that she was getting infected with a zoonosis, that is, with naturally occurring cowpox, not smallpox. That then protected against smallpox. And it was tested in those days: Could you artificially do that? They of course didn't understand virology, they didn't understand any of those issues. But what a vaccine is is something that you give to artificially stimulate the immune system, hopefully to not make you sick. But then later on, when the body comes in contact with the real disease, it thinks it's already seen it and it is able to fight it off without making the person sick. CA: I mean, it's kind of a miraculous thing to me that they work that way, that your body is always there looking for these threats. And a vaccine, I guess, the body perceives it as a threat, and therefore arms itself against that threat, right? And that's what gives the protection. So, is that why some people are sort of — irrationally, I will say — irrationally scared of vaccines and feel that they may be dangerous, because they are a kind of threat that you're putting into your body in a very subtle way? SB: Well, of course, when this first started, there were two ways to make vaccines. You could grind them up and inject them, so-called "whole killed vaccines." So you took organisms and you got an immune response, and sometimes those organisms, even though they were dead, gave you a pretty whopping immune response: your arms were sore, you got fevers. Then we moved to these weakened live viruses, and frankly, those are the best vaccines. That's what measles is. That's what yellow fever is. These are weakened viruses. They don't give you disease, but because they look like the natural viruses, your body gets protection and, frankly, you get protection for your whole life. Today, because people are worried about side effects, we've begun to use molecular biology and use little bits of it, and therefore, it's moved forward. But the reason people are mostly scared is because, frankly, vaccines have been so successful. You don't expect, if you have a child or two children, that those children are going to die of these diseases, unlike in the past, when three or four out of your five or six or seven kids would die. So today, people think, well, gee, these diseases aren't around, they're not that bad and, by the way, if I'm injecting these things, maybe they're not organic, maybe it'll make my child cry, maybe it'll make them sick, and I don't need to do it. And that's the challenge. You don't want to scare people to death on how bad these diseases can be, but at the same time, you want them to understand that these diseases are serious and can cause really bad disease and sequela. CA: So yesterday, you issued a really powerful call for this massive, coordinated global response to tackle the search for a coronavirus vaccine. We're going to come that in a bit, because I think that's a very exciting topic. But I think we need some more background first. I want to go back five years to when you stood on the TED stage and you held up two candidate Ebola vaccines. This was just a few months after Ebola had been terrifying the world. It was basically amazing how quickly those vaccines had been developed. What happened to them? SB: It's a great question, and let me tell a little bit of the story, but at the end, there were two vaccines. One, it turned out, couldn't finish its testing, because the epidemic died down. The other one was fully tested. It had a hundred percent efficacy. We then went on to work with manufacturers to produce that vaccine, at least temporarily, in an investigational form, just in case there were more outbreaks. There were, and those are the vaccine doses that we've used in the DRC. In the last two outbreaks, 280,000 people have been vaccinated with this experimental vaccine, and today, there is a licensed vaccine, and we are now procuring a global stockpile of a half a million doses. But let me just say, Chris, the reason they came so quickly at that moment is, after September 11th, there was concern in the US about bioterrorism. Remember, there were anthrax attacks. And so what happened was there was a list of agents, and Ebola, for a short time, was on that list of agents, so people started making vaccines, and later on, they decided that was not necessarily a good bioterrorism agent, so they dropped that off the list. But in the freezers were vaccines that had been started, and they were dusted off, and that's why we could move so quickly in that moment. CA: And yet, how long was it from that moment on the TED stage with the candidate vaccine to actual deployment? SB: So, what happened was, the epidemic began to go down. The clinical trial I told you about was done. It was a heroic clinical trial done by WHO, and it showed that it had these results. That epidemic then stopped. We didn't know if there were going to be more epidemics. It took another number of years to finish the work on the vaccine to make sure it was pure, to figure out how to manufacture it at scale. It's during that period that we put vaccine away and had it available in case there were other outbreaks. And it turned out, there were three outbreaks. One went away quickly, but there were two. I was there on day 13 of the second outbreak. We injected the vaccine, cases went up, then they went down, and controlled it. And then this DRC in North Kivu outbreak, which really was terrible because it was in a war zone. And that's the one where we've been not only vaccinating in DRC but in surrounding countries. By the way, that is now, I believe, day 38 or 39 out of the 42 necessary to say it's over. We hope it is. And that would be, again, an enormous example of what vaccines can do, even in a very difficult setting. CA: And yet, in one way, Seth, it's kind of shocking that the outbreak that happened at the start of 2015, end of 2014, that it happened at all, because the world has known about Ebola for a long time. It's been sequenced and so forth. A vaccine could have been developed and got ready for a possible outbreak. Why didn't that happen? SB: Well, there had been 26 outbreaks before, but each one of them was small — couple of hundred people or a couple of dozen people — in the poorest African countries in the world. There was no market for it. People didn't know how to test it because they would just pop up and then go away. And so even though it was obviously a disease that potentially could spread, it had never really spread before. Of course, in West Africa, they didn't have a good surveillance system; it spread for three months before people identified that it was Ebola, and by that time, it was too late. It had spread. What's important about that lesson is that then caused huge disruption across Africa, across the world, because cases went to other places. And the challenge then was, and the reason we had to step in, was because there still was no market. So the Gavi board said, "We will put out 390 million dollars. We'll put it out there and tell companies, we're open for business, we'll create a market, we'll buy the vaccine." And that led to companies being willing to finish the investment to get us to where we are today. CA: Right, right. So it's a real paradox, right? In a way, the very thing that makes vaccines so extraordinary, that once they're developed, they are so cheap to administer, for a few dollars, I guess, you can administer this dose that will save someone maybe a lifetime of illness or save their lives, and yet so much of medical research and invention and development is done by companies who need to see a revenue stream, and so they don't see it from those tiny little cheap things that might save a lot of lives. So it's a real market failure that in this circumstance now — That's one of the things I guess you're thinking hard about, how on earth do we get round and avoid that market failure crippling the response this time? SB: Well, first of all, one of the reasons Bill Gates likes vaccines is, in a sense, it's a little bit like software creation. You put a lot of money and effort into creating it, but once you've got it, you can produce it pretty cheaply and use it in different places around the world. I don't want to beat up the pharmaceutical industry here because they were heroic in Ebola, but I think realistically, they are for-profit entities, and they have to say to their shareholders, "Somebody's going to pay for this, or we're going to do it as a charitable thing." And if we do it as a charitable thing, they can't keep doing it. Since then, there is a new initiative called CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. It was set up at Davos a few years ago, and its purpose is to try to make vaccines for the list of diseases that aren't yet known epidemics but that can potentially be there. And the idea would be using public sector money to get us prepared. Of course, they jumped in on this coronavirus as well. Last thing is, of course, I'm not worried on a coronavirus stage that this is a problem, with not having a market. One of the challenges here is that there may be too big a market for this, and therefore, how do we make sure there's access for developing countries. CA: All right, so talk about this virus, Seth. How is it different from Ebola? How challenging is it to create a vaccine for it? SB: So what's interesting about coronaviruses is that they are animal viruses, probably primarily in bats. They jump into other animals sometimes, and then they jump into humans. So this shouldn't have been a surprise. This is the third coronavirus that has jumped into humans. We had SARS in early 2002, we had MERS a number of years later, and now we have this virus. What's interesting is there is a database that shows there are 30,000-some-odd isolated coronaviruses in animals, and one of the things that people tried to do was say the way these coronaviruses work is they have a spike on them. They're called "corona" because they look like the sun. That spike is where it attaches to a certain receptor in people's lungs. And so somebody said, well, maybe we can begin to look at those spikes and see if they're similar to the human receptors and they can be predicted. But the problem is people don't invest in those types of research. And, of course, I think that, given it's an evolutionary certainty, we're going to see this, that we should be. But one other point about this is coronavirus jumped into humans in ancient history as well, and so we have now about a third to a quarter of the common cold viruses are actually coronaviruses. And what's interesting about those is they don't make you deathly ill like these, but you also don't have long-term immunity to them, so you can get reinfected with these viruses after 10 months, a year. And so that does raise an issue on vaccinology, because you want to ideally have lifetime immunity. CA: The reason why we get reinfected is because the virus mutates slightly, and so it escapes the antibodies? SB: No, no, not in this case. Not in this case. So in flu, that's what happens. The viruses are always mutating. In HIV, the reason we don't have a vaccine is because they're all mutating. In this case, the immune response seems to get weaker and go away, and people get reinfected with the same viruses. Now, that is potentially a solvable problem using vaccinology and many different techniques, but the point is, we just can't assume. Some people now are talking about herd immunity as a way to deal with this virus, and the idea there is if you could get enough people infected — you know, forget for a moment that a lot of people are going to die and be miserable while that happens — but the idea is that you get a certain level immunity in the community, and then the disease will go away. Well, that is only true if you get long-term immunity. If you don't, then you could go through all of that horrible experience, have all those deaths, and then not have the protection you need to protect against this disease. CA: OK, so in a way, the quest we're looking for is a vaccine that will work for the long term. I mean, I guess any vaccine that works at all will be a huge gift, but it could well be one that we have to retake every year, or something like that. SB: Right. That is certainly possible. Of course, we have to remember, though, that SARS and MERS both had even higher mortality than this virus does, and they give a much more profound immune response. So it may be that they react differently than the common cold viruses. The challenge, of course, is that we haven't had the opportunity to study these over a long time, and this new disease — three and a half months, we've had it. More science has been done for this disease in this short period of time, but we don't understand fully the epidemiology of the virus, the immune response, what's protective, which is the best animal model. All of that is being worked on by science and at breakneck pace, but a lot to learn. CA: So talk about how the medical and the research community responded. Because, the Chinese authorities — I guess we heard it yesterday — only found out about this sometime in December. Already, early in January — I think the virus started in November, they found out about it in December — by early January, they had already released a sequence of the virus to the world, and now here we are. And I think I saw that more than 40 companies are already claiming candidate vaccines. What does it mean to have a candidate vaccine? Like, have companies tested this already against animals or something? Or are they just looking at a computer model where they go, "That should work"? SB: Well, it's an interesting question you ask there. So first of all, China was heroic on this. They did post the genetic sequence of it. Today, we have companies that can sit down with a computer and from that genetic sequence, make what is a candidate vaccine. Now, a candidate vaccine obviously means it's not a licensed product. It's something that somebody wants to work on. But you're right, you have to have the right nomenclature, because "candidate" can mean I'm working on something, it's in my head, I'm just doing a little work on it, I've got something in a vial, I'm beginning to do testing on it. And so what we saw in that case was a company called Moderna. That was the first vaccine that went into humans. It's a messenger RNA-based system. I actually visited the company, not in this outbreak but before, because the technology is interesting. And what they were able to do was, in 42 days, make a candidate vaccine from the genetic sequence. They didn't need the organism. That now is in clinical testing. Now, there is no licensed mRNA vaccine, so we're going to have to figure out, is it safe? Does it work in different age groups? How are we going to scale it up? All of that. But there are many others who are using conventional vaccinology. An example would be, the French are working on a measles-based vaccine. The idea is to put the spiked protein in the measles vector, and it takes a little bit longer to do that work, but once you have that done, of course, we know how to make measles vaccine. We make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of doses and provide it to the whole world. If that was to work, that might be easier to scale up. So I think what we want in the race is to have multiple different vaccines moving forward. We don't want one or two. We don't want a hundred in the late stages, because it's expensive and hard to do. But we want to have a diversity of science approaches going forward. CA: Which of the other candidates out there are you excited by or at least intrigued by? SB: Well, for me, the critical issue here is going to be we have to optimize for speed, and so that means, as I said, having examples of all the different new technologies that could potentially work, as well as conventional doses moving forward at the same time. So what you're going to want to do is have this bubble up. And it's not just companies, or big companies. It's also biotech companies. It's also academic researchers that are working on this. You want all of those to bubble up. Then you want to be able to look at what's the most promising, and that will depend upon animal results. It'll depend upon being able to produce those vaccines, have a pathway, and eventually, you will want to put those into human clinical trials. That requires a certain amount of safety work. You can try to accelerate that. But then you need to say, OK, we need to know, do we need one dose, do we need multiple doses, do we need 50 micrograms, 100, 150? Do we need a chemical stimulant we call an adjuvant? Given that this disease, its big problems in outcomes are in the elderly, we might need to put some stimulants in to make it a more potent immune response. So all of that work has to go on. That's what the clinical testing is. Eventually you say, "Aha! Here's the vaccine we're going to use." Now you test it in an efficacy trial. And that is to see, does it work? And at that point, you then have a vaccine that you know works. But there is a stage after that, and that stage is, you've got to work out the manufacturing, have it all worked out so that the regulators know that you can really make this, and that it's pure, it doesn't have any problems with it. And during that period, and that's what we did in Ebola, we were able to use those vaccines to help in outbreaks under a clinical trial protocol while monitoring them and learning. So there's a lot of steps there, and it's complicated, and I've shortened it a little bit. CA: But summarize the steps that they basically need to go through. I heard probably an animal test, and then — SB: Well, for example, Moderna. They went into humans at the same time they're doing animal testing. We don't have a perfect animal model. But normally it takes 10 to 15 years to do this, and that's the compression you're trying to do here. So the challenge is, we can compress all those different clinical trials. The basic way you think about it is, preclinical studies, animals, understanding it, purity, reproducibility. Then you move into human studies. You start off with a small number of healthy people. You then work on the dosing, how much, how often. Then you move into people at risk for the disease — that might be in this case the elderly or people with other conditions — and then eventually do an efficacy trial. Now, one of the cool new things we can do today is something called "adaptive trial design." So rather than do these sequentially, what you can begin to do is enroll people and then, as you get the data you need, you can just begin to bring in the next set of groups, and by doing that, you can speed it up dramatically. CA: When you say enroll people, you mean enroll people who have their eyes wide open. They have informed consent. I think that's the term. SB: Absolutely. CA: And they're willing to, I guess, take the risk that this isn't a fully tested vaccine but it may well be efficacious, and so that obviously can help a lot. That's crucial to this, right? SB: Absolutely. They are the unsung heroes of vaccinology, because people go out, they volunteer to take a substance, particularly early on, that don't know how it's going to react. Is it going to make the disease worse? Make it better? Is it going to protect them? Is it going to make them sick? So you try to predict that if you can with animals, but people do do that, and the informed consent says not only you may have these side effects or these problems, but also this vaccine may not work. And so it's important for people to understand that, because you don't want people to go and put themselves at high risk, saying, "Oh, gee, I had a vaccine, and so I'm protected." We don't know that until we get to the efficacy stage of trials. CA: But Seth, even putting together all those dots, what I've heard most people say is that it is likely to take at least 18 months before the world will have a vaccine available at any kind of scale. Is that time line right? And can the world remotely afford 18 months on this? SB: Well, I think, you know, I've given you many questions. I could raise lots more questions. So part of it's going to be luck: How easy is this particular candidate vaccine going to be? How lucky will we be in getting a good immune response? Which approaches will work? Will they be scalable? So I think there's lot of questions there. The world will do everything they can to squeeze it down, but I think that's the time line we're talking about. And remember, it's 10 to 15 years usually. In the case of Ebola, we did it in five years to a licensed product. In this case, we are hoping to squeeze it down dramatically, but there are many things we're going to have to go through, and it's really about making sure that vaccine works and it is safe for use in what ultimately may be billions of people. CA: Whitney. WPR: Hi. So we have lots of questions coming in, Seth. One of them that's kind of related to this is, you know, a lot of us right now are isolating, and we're not building our exposure to this virus, so how will that affect us in the long term? Will this make us vulnerable to the virus until a vaccine is available? SB: So that's a great question, and, as you know, we don't fully understand the epidemiology of this virus, but there is some sense that there may be asymptomatics. Do they get immune protection? Are they afterwards resistant to infection? We don't know that, but we do know that people do get sick, including young people, and that sickness can be quite severe. Obviously, a lot of it is mild, but some of it is quite severe, and then it gets more severe in the elderly. So I wouldn't recommend that anybody go out and intentionally try to get exposed to this virus now. The whole idea of having isolation now is to try to stop the chains of transmission, protect health workers in hospitals, with the idea being that if you can suppress it enough — and Bill talked about this in his talk — and later on have testing available, you might be able to go back to somewhat of a normal life and then watch for reintroduction of this virus. Of course, at the end of the day, we will probably need a vaccine to be able to completely control that, but the experiment is going on, in China ... Japan has done an amazing job of controlling this with slightly less severe interventions. We've seen in Korea similar things. So the hope would be that if we take it seriously, we actually damp down the exposures and stop this epidemic now, we'll be able to remove to some form of normalcy. And we also may have drugs, and drugs will change the dynamics as well, because people will then know that they are able to get treatment as well. WPR: Great. I'll be back later with other questions I'm seeing. SB: Thanks, Whitney. CA: Thanks, Whitney. Thanks everyone watching. Keep those questions coming. Seth, this time line, I've been puzzled about this, because I get that there are so many things that have to be checked out, but I still worry that the rules are not adapting rapidly enough for the scale of the emergency. I mean, my analogy would be: you're going about your lives, and suddenly there's this emergency, you see that there's this enemy force approaching you from the horizon and coming your direction. You don't, in that circumstance, spend a week trying to test all your guns and make sure they're operating absolutely safely and in the right way. You galvanize and you do take some additional risk for the sake of avoiding the bigger risk. Is that thinking prevalent right now? Are there people trying to make those kinds of trade-offs? How should we think about that? Or do you really believe that the community is galvanizing and moving forward as fast as it humanly can and appropriately balancing the two risks? SB: I think we're seeing heroics in moving forward here. Obviously, you're right, and the reason we talk about going from 10 to 15 years down to something like 18 months is about squeezing those steps as much as possible. The regulators in the Ebola experience were really fabulous. They worked with us and tried to keep any bureaucratic delays down to the smallest amount possible. And I think that's what's going to be important here, is we have to look at every single step and say, "Is it critical?" But you do need to answer a lot of these questions. For example, if you have a vaccine that works in healthy people, it very well may not give an immune response to the elderly. We may need to change that vaccine to make it work there. It may not work in young children. So you need a certain amount of studies done. Of course, if you work in areas that have big outbreaks, you're able to also enroll more quickly and follow people more quickly. That's one of the reasons we'll have to think about this globally, because we don't know in 12 to 18 months, or even six to 18 months, if we're really lucky, where the epidemic will be raging and where we want to do the clinical trials. We should be prepared to do them wherever in the world it's possible, and also do some in different types of countries. Developing countries may have different immune responses than in wealthy countries. CA: What alarms me a bit is that on the models I've looked at, with the possible exception of what happened in China and Japan, by distancing, we can bend the curve, we can reduce infection. But as soon as you go back to normal, there's this huge risk of a massive resurge, and until the vaccine comes along, it feels like your choices are: one, sort of recklessly expose the whole population to the bug and develop some kind of herd immunity, or try and do this scary dance of really cramping down on the economy and all the risks that are associated with that, and risking, if you lift the lid on that, risking these really dangerous second surges. So is that the right way to think about it? There's a scenario where, until this happens, and if it's 18 months, that's an incredibly long time for the world to be in that sort of dangerous, scary dance. SB: Well, I think the issue here is that is a little bit the way to think of it, but the experiment is going on now. China is now releasing its controls, and we will see what happens there. We'll see where they have to clamp back down and what's going to happen, and we'll get a good idea of what that's like. Right now, in many countries, we're still in the upscale period when we're seeing lots of cases. And so we have to break that transmission first before we can have that conversation. I'm the first person that would like a vaccine to occur quicker, and, of course, my job is to underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way around. And I think we have to be careful not to think about, "Oh, we can just have a vaccine in a couple of months." It may be that we're lucky. It may be that it's easy to do. It may be the first few candidates will show promise, we get efficacy, we can scale those up for at least some limited use while it's being worked out. But a lot of things have to fall in place for that to happen. And that's why we want to have an organized, global effort to absolutely incentivize the best possible chance for that to happen in the fastest way. CA: There's some kind of debate out there about whether there might be way, way more cases, mild cases, basically zero-symptom cases of coronavirus out there that may have granted more people immunity than we know. Is that a credible suggestion? More cases and much lower fatality rate than we know, because so many of the cases could be invisible? SB: You know, Mayor Bloomberg used to have a saying that I loved. He said, "In God we trust. Everybody else, bring data." And I think the answer here is we haven't done enough testing to know, and we started out with PCR tests to look for virus, and therefore, if you had recovered, didn't have the virus anymore, we weren't able to pick it up. Now there are beginning to be antibody tests to look to see if you've been exposed and don't have the virus now but have an immune response to it. Once we have those tests operating at scale, we'll be able to understand what the epidemiology is and what's happening, and then we'll be in a much better place to understand how this is playing out. Also, I mean, even the question: We don't see a lot of cases in children — is that because the children get infected but they don't get symptoms, and therefore they might be potential spreaders? Or, is it because those children don't get it at all? CA: So tell us, Seth, about this call that you issued yesterday. I mean, you've said that scientists are behaving heroically. But you've called for something more here from both scientists, companies, governments. Tell us what your call is. SB: So, first of all, I believe that, given the situation here, this is not the time to just let the normal system work, as we've talked about. I think we have to think about vaccines as a global public good. And what that means is that initially, it ought to be public sector financed. Obviously, if others want to contribute resources, I believe they should, fine. But we want to make sure the best approaches come, and it doesn't matter where they come from in the world. We want to make sure if the best approach is in China or Japan or in South Korea or in the US, wherever it comes from, whatever company has the ideas, get them on the table. Then we want a process to say, realistically, how are these being compared? How do we decide which ones are most likely to succeed? And then, as I explained, some diversity in taking those risks. Maybe some new technology, some old technologies to drive forward. Once that happens, then, to try to get clinical trials to drive forward as quickly as possible. Now, the delay here is actually likely to be in manufacturing, because we might want billions and billions of doses, so how do we then begin to invest, at risk, in manufacturing plants? If it's a big company, they may have adequate manufacturing, but we may want to work with contract manufacturers, other companies, or even build plants or use new technologies, modular technologies to do this. And then, of course, at the end is going to be the process of getting the vaccine out to all those who need it, and that's going to need to be dependent upon the risk at that time. CA: Help me understand this better, Seth, because right now, it feels like there's this huge effort going on, but companies are operating, in a way, competitively with each other. To an extent, countries are operating competitively with each other. Are you saying that what the world needs is some kind of widely supported global — I don't know — vaccine czar that is pulling together different efforts, coordinating, encouraging everyone to work together for the common good, and trying to get agreement on these big decisions like what are the smart few candidates to get behind, rather than this confusing explosion? And then, how do we coordinate manufacturing, etc? Like, is that a person or a small organization that some combination of governments, WHO, UN needs to put together? SB: So, first of all, you want science to bubble up at the beginning. You don't want to have centralized control, somebody saying, "I know best and I'm going to predict this." So you want it bubbling up from all over the place, but then you want a coordinated effort. The group that is best-placed to do that is the World Health Organization, maintaining a list of all the different programs that are going on. We also have other organizations. I mentioned CEPI before. CEPI has now supported eight different candidates. I think it's going to support more. Right now, WHO has on its list 44 candidates, but some people think as many as double that. So what you want to do is say, which are the most likely to succeed, and then put them through some type of standardized set of criteria to pick a few of them to move forward aggressively for the world. Obviously, science is going to keep moving, they're going to keep changing, and it may be that your original approach isn't right and new ideas may come up, but you do need to have some process of moving this forward. And really, that's what I called for. What we need to make sure is that if companies have adequate resources to do this on their own, that's fine, but if not, they need to be supported by the public sector and, again, making sure there's adequate manufacturing and ultimately distribution. Then, after a period of time, we can go back to normal and return to the normal way vaccines are handled. But I think that's probably the best way to get there. CA: How much might this cost, and who should pay for it? SB: Well, it depends how many cases there are. The good news is, we're talking now about trillions of dollars in economic loss, and this is going to be — CA: I would hardly call that good news. SB: I mean, I'm making the comparison. Sorry, you're absolutely right, Chris. I mean, we're talking about tens of billions of dollars here, not trillions of dollars, and the reason that's important is you want to make sure that any good idea has its best chance of moving forward, and we ought to, again, optimize for speed and not optimize for being cost-effective at this time. CA: So I guess you're saying that, like, the rich countries may well be able to afford some kind of vaccine program. I think what I hear you doing here is representing a lot of the countries that can't afford it, and what you're saying is that the world may have to find a way of spending tens of billions of dollars to avoid trillions of dollars of economic damage and all the hardship that goes with it around the world. Is that about right? SB: That's absolutely right, but I think the important point is, this needs to be a global perspective. I mean, look at what happened with Ebola. We had a vaccine that was originally made in Canada by the Public [Health] Agency of Canada. It was then transferred to a US biotech, then to Merck and Company, which is obviously a global player based in the US, and they're manufacturing it in Germany. That's the way science works, and these vaccines may need components from other places. So how do we think about this in a global way and make sure that — By the way, the second vaccine that's in humans is from China. Of course, they've had a lot of time to work on it compared to some others. And they have a candidate that's moving forward. If that candidate is successful, we want to make sure that's the one that's scaled up. And so for me, it's making sure that we're looking at this as a global ecosystem with the best candidates moving forward for the good of the world. CA: Whitney. WPR: We have a lot of people watching from all over the world and we're seeing questions, especially from some of our friends in India who are watching, connected to this just basically about how are poor nations going to get access to this vaccine? And then, specifically, when we think about who gets the vaccine first, will there be some sort of payment that people are paying for this vaccine and those who can afford it will get access before others? SB: Well, the decision on who will pay for it will ultimately come from the political leaders, and my recommendation would be, you start off as a global public good, you make the vaccine available because we're trying to stop the epidemic. Later on, we can have tiered pricing in different places. But one of the concerns, of course, is: Where is the epidemic going to be at that point, and who needs it first? I would argue that people that will need it first are probably health workers, because health workers are going to be on the front lines and we want them to be there to be able to take care of people. They're at risk of both contracting it as well as spreading it. Then you probably want to think about the high-risk individuals, the elderly, people who have preexisting conditions, and then eventually, the rest of the population, if it's needed. So having some type of way of thinking about that. We'll also need to be thinking about equitable access, and that is going to mean thinking about the entire world. Now, Gavi, in the past, including in India, has worked to make sure these new technologies are there, but these are vaccines that existed and, in this case, it's a new vaccine. We have to make sure that it isn't hoarded only in wealthy countries or in a select set of countries. And one way to do that would be to have vaccine production in multiple places. So today a lot of the vaccines that Gavi uses are made around the world. Some are made in the United States and Europe, but some are made in South Korea, in India, in China, in other countries. And so what we could do is have a vaccine transfer the technology and manufacturing in multiple different sites so we could have enough vaccine for that original launch. But whatever happens, there will always be a period of time when we'll have an exciting vaccine and not enough doses to go around, and that's when we need to take hard decisions based upon science on who should get it. WPR: Thanks for that, Seth. I'll be back later with other questions. CA: Thanks, Whitney. SB: Thank you. CA: How confident are you that we'll eventually get one? I mean, we still don't have a vaccine for HIV, nor for the common cold. How can you be confident that we can get one this time? SB: Well, first of all, as you know, I did a TED Talk even before the one of 2015 talking about HIV and flu and how new science needs to come in, and frankly, we are making progress against some of these incredibly difficult organisms. You talked about variability. That's the problem with HIV. It's constantly changing, and so you're chasing. You get a good immune response, but it's to the strain that was there before, and now you're chasing new strains. There are ways to work around that. It's new science. I, actually, I am optimistic. I'm optimistic because we have some experience with SARS vaccines and with MERS vaccines, and so people have worked on it. They've been able to get good immune responses in animals and in people for those vaccines. And so we can build on that experience. I can't tell you how long they'll last for, how effective they will be. Will they need to have local mucosal immunity, which is in the mouth and nose, as well as serum immunity in the bloodstream? Will they need to have just antibodies or the other arm of the immune system, the cellular arm? These are questions that will need to be answered, but I am a great believer in the power of science, and I think in this case the organism is not going to be quite as difficult as the ones you're talking about that are much more difficult. CA: You mentioned in your TED Talk five years ago, Seth, that we've got this situation where we're spending billions of dollars on nuclear submarines patrolling the oceans for a possible incoming threat, nuclear war threat or whatever, and almost nothing on preparation for a pandemic like the one we're suffering. If the world is adequately shaken up by what's happening now and gets rational about this, what is the key structural shift that would be the pandemic equivalent of having those nuclear submarines? How do we prepare for a new virus that we don't know what it will be or when it will come? How do we prepare to have a much more rapid response? SB: Well, it's a great question and I think the TED community has a role to play here. So first of all, we need better surveillance. We need surveillance everywhere in the world, and that's why we don't want to have another outbreak like in West Africa with Ebola. You want to have a resilient health system in every country that reaches out to the periphery. And that's an important priority. We're doing pretty good with immunization. We've reached 90 percent of the kids of the world with at least one dose of routine vaccine. That's the best of health interventions. But we need to reach that last 10 percent and put that health system in place. Then we need to have a different view. We need to start working, where are our likely hot spots? It's where we're cutting down forest. It's in urban slums, where there's density of populations. It's with climate change and movement of different vectors. And what we need to do is use predictive science, and that's where big data can help, that's where AI can help in terms of trying to do that. And we need to have a one-health approach, because we tend to think of animal diseases — and by the way, people have worked on coronavirus vaccines for animals, because they also cause disease there — we need to make sure that the scientists working on veterinary vaccines are connected to humans, are thinking about those whole ecosystem. And we need to invest in that. And unfortunately, after an epidemic, everybody wants to invest, and they say, "Whatever it takes," and then we move to on other things, and investments go down. What's different about the military is that there is a baseline of investment that goes on all the time and nobody questions that. It continues, and that level of preparedness seems to be there. Bill Gates in his talk in TED, when we did that back-to-back, said, look, the military are doing war games, they're constantly testing, they have all this preparatory activities. Why are we not doing that in diseases? And, as you know, since then, there has been some war games, and they've basically said we weren't prepared, and I think we're seeing now that, in fact, we're not as prepared as we could be. So my hope, the silver lining would be that we prepare for the next big outbreak, because it's absolutely evolutionarily certain we will continue to have outbreaks. The question is: How prepared are we to deal with those? CA: As we wait for a vaccine, are there other interventions that could be made, for example, the serum from people who have been infected and have recovered? SB: So, that technique has been used in other infectious diseases and throughout history and even in Ebola recently. That's something that could potentially be done. Of course, today, it's more attractive if you can make antibodies in the laboratory and then have those available at scale and use those, and I know of a lot of companies that are working on producing those antibodies, which could be infused in an emergency situation, and do that. Obviously, drugs may play an important role here. There's a similar effort to try to create drugs that are active against this organism, and if we knew that you'd get sick but there was an effective treatment, that would also change a little bit of the dynamics of the fear that exists around this pandemic. So I think there are lots of interventions. Of course, traditionally, a preventive vaccine is the best way to deal with these types of epidemics. CA: So paint us — it's the inner optimist in me, begging for something — paint us the best case scenario, Seth. Lots of people are saying, we don't want to be huddled in our homes by ourselves for 18 months, lovely though the internet is. What's the best case scenario, putting all the pieces together here? SB: Well, I think what is likely to happen, but I don't want to predict, because we're in unprecedented times here. What's likely to happen is that countries who don't take this seriously will have severe outbreaks, those that really take it seriously and put these extraordinary mechanisms in place will control the disease. It'll take some time, it'll take — you know, this is weeks, maybe months, not years, to do that. And then you end up with a situation where the disease is controlled, and you then can go back to life as normal with some cautions around it. Now there's beginning to be new tests that are going to be home tests. We're going to be able to figure out whether classrooms, regions, countries have disease. We can go back to some level of normalcy, but one thing that's really important is we can't have areas of the world with raging disease. So for example, if people said, "Oh, we're not worried about Africa, we're only worried about our countries," you might end up in a situation where you have large numbers of infections, the virus is mutating, it's actually adapting to humans. We saw some of that with SARS. And then it is easy to reintroduce. So what you want to do is dampen it down everywhere in the world. And maybe it'll burn out. Maybe that'll be it. I personally think we'll probably need a vaccine, but best case scenario is that those alone will stop the epidemic, and what we'll need is then a vaccine just in case it comes back, but of course if I was a betting man, I'd say let's get a vaccine as soon as possible, because that's the best way to control a viral infection, particularly one that is spread respiratorily. CA: Yeah. It's so interesting what you said there. Like, the vaccine doesn't know what continent it's on, what country it's in. It just does its thing. SB: That's correct. CA: So in terms of people listening here, what kind of psychological advice can you give them? What should expectations be? Like, do we have to be ready to settle in for the long haul here, or should we be looking forward to getting back to business around about Easter time and celebrating? SB: Well, again, I don't want to put a time line on it like others do. What you're going to want to see is that bending of the curve. I think Bill talked about this. You want the reproductive rate below one. You want to get it way below one if you can, and then to begin to see the disease spread. And what you don't want to do is, in the middle of that, jump out and start having parties. It's not time to go on spring break and start mixing again. But with careful control, you can begin to release the controls if that's what science shows us. And I think the most important thing here is we need the data to tell us that. That's why testing is so important. With the wide availability of testing, we'll be able to keep tabs, know what's happening. We'll know how many people are asymptomatic, what's happened. We'll know where there are hot communities, and we'll be able to deal with this, is my prediction. So I don't think this is over a very, very long time, but I wouldn't rush it during this unprecedented moment. Otherwise, we're going to end up seeing what we saw in Italy. What we're seeing in New York right now is the overwhelming of the health system. CA: Yeah, no kidding. New York is a scary place right now. I was out walking today. I hope that was OK. But there was no one. There was no one. Like, you couldn't get within six feet of someone if you tried right now, on the busiest walk spots. That was nice to see, but man, it's startling. SB: I mean, recent data has shown that droplets can spread the disease, and so people are rightfully being cautious. And we didn't know that. You remember when we started, we said it's a point outbreak, out of Wuhan, wet market, you had to be in the market to get the disease. Then it was, if you were with sick people, you got the disease. Then it was maybe asymptomatics. I think as we understand better, that gives us the tools to do the right thing. CA: There's a debate out there that seems to be growing again about masks. The East and West take very different advice on masks. We were hearing from Gary Liu yesterday that everyone in Hong Kong and China is basically wearing masks, and arguably, that has been effective. The advice in the West against not wearing masks — how much of that has been driven by just the fact that there's a shortage of masks and that if anyone needs to wear them, it's medical professionals? If it's water droplets, it seems like masks could be effective in prevention. SB: I mean, the most important intervention, as you know, is some isolation and very careful handwashing or use of sanitizers, because what happens is, you touch your face — I forget the number, I think it's like every one to two minutes — and you touch your eyes, so if you reach a door handle or you have contact with a surface, and we know the virus can live on those surfaces, and then you touch your face, touch your mouth, touch your nose, you can spread it. So the purpose of a mask for a person who is not infected is not so much to keep them from getting infected. It is to keep them from touching their face. So I think what's interesting here is, how do we get people to have this personal sanitation? If we have unlimited quantities of masks, people want to do it as a way to remind themselves not to touch their face. Now, that's very different if you're infected, because if you're coughing, having a mask on does reduce the spread of droplets, and that's why they recommend it in a situation where somebody is infected and has to go to the hospital or has to go out and be seen. CA: Yeah, I was touching my face all through the Bill Gates interview, apparently, and I got called to task by our online friends, which was very nice. I don't know if I've been doing that today. It's funny, you're unconscious of it. It's weird. SB: Yes. No, it's automatic. And in fact, there was a WHO challenge for safe handwashing, and I did a video, and I left my water running while I did it, and my friends in the developing world came to me and said, you know, I live in Switzerland by a lake where we have a lot of water, and I wasn't careful, and they were absolutely right. So it's really good we correct each other, that's an important point, and help each other in doing this to get us to be as compliant as we possibly can for these issues. Whitney. WPR: Yep. So feedback online is overwhelmingly positive. You're really answering all of everyone's questions out there, and people really appreciate what you're sharing, Seth. I think one big question is just for folks who are watching from home and maybe who are not part of your community in terms of the science community. How can they contribute to this global response effort? How can they do something to advance this? SB: That's a great question. So first of all, I think it's really important that citizens support leaders who are following science, are using science, because, as you know, sometimes political leaders say, "Well, I don't want to do this because it's not good for my image or it's not good for the economy or it's not good for whatever." And I think you want to have all of your decisions taken by science, understanding that they're not the best science. So, citizens need to applaud, even if it's a tough decision that politicians take for the good based upon science, that's a good thing. The second thing that really would be helpful is this concept: How do we keep our world focused on the fact that these epidemics will occur? Another example I didn't answer, which Chris, when he asked me about what could be done, we talked about this idea of platform technologies. These are vaccines that you can test, get them all ready, and then, when a new organism occurs, you can put it in there and you know how to manufacture it, how to scale it up. These types of things can be done. CEPI is trying to do that now. But the challenge is, if we, a year after this, go down to having no money available for these types of issues, that will be a problem. So what you need is citizens to say, "I understand now that health is precious, and I want my government, my leaders to invest in this, in the science, in the ways of working so that we will be as safe as we can be going forward." And I think I can't emphasize enough how important a message that is for citizens everywhere in the world. CA: Mmm. Hey Whitney, stay on as we wrap up here. I guess what I'd like to give you a chance to do, Seth, as we wrap this up is just to look at the camera and make your call to the world's leaders, companies, politicians, scientists, citizens. How do we move forward? How would you wrap this up? SB: So from my perspective, what we need is the world to come together at this moment, not to talk about our national programs, not to talk about our science are the best, and they may be the best, but how do we, as a world, pool our best science, our best resources, our best ways of working, our best manufacturing, our best clinical trials, to move this forward as fast as possible? The WHO is a global organization whose job is this normative function, and we can get scientists to help them make sure that the normative function is as strong as it can be. We can get the leaders of the world to come together and put the resources in place. Given the cost it's having on the economy, this will be a real bargain to invest in it. But what we need is to have that mindset of having science drive us and to make sure that we have no barriers in stopping that science going forward. That's my request to the world, and I think we can do it, and if we do that, we will end up seeing the power of science, which will give us the tools we need to either stop it — hopefully, it'll be stopped by then — but stop it and then prepare us for the next one. CA: Mmm. Powerfully said. I have to say, Seth, it's incredibly encouraging to know that there are people like you out there in the trenches, trying to coordinate this immense and crucial effort on behalf of all of us, and also that there's an organization out there, that your organization is tasked to carry any effective vaccine to the many billions of people who may live in countries that can't afford to pay the same prices that the West can pay. That's really cool that you're doing that, and thank you so much for explaining so clearly to us what the situation is. I guess I speak for the majority of people listening to say all power to you with pulling these threads together. Thank you, Seth. WPR: Thank you, Seth. SB: Thank you, Chris and Whitney and the TED community for all of your support over the years. Let's continue to use science and technology for the good of the world to solve problems like this. CA: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. WPR: That was wonderful. I learned so much from this conversation. It seems like everyone online also really did, which was helpful. And I'd like to remind everyone that, if you missed part of this interview, you can watch it on our Facebook page as soon as we finish, and then also — and I'm going to read the link — it's go.ted.com/tedconnects. So our Facebook page, or go.ted.com/tedconnects. CA: Thanks so much for joining us. We get the sense people, literally all over the world and in so many different circumstances, and yet, this moment has given us a new excuse to bring you all together. Part of me, even though you really could wish that we weren't in this situation, it does give us a chance to explore some ideas in greater depth than we're normally able to, to have these conversations. These are not 15-minute talks on a red circle. You can just go a little bit deeper, and there's something really cool about that that I think we want to do more of, and we want to figure out how to hear from you and include you and make sure that your questions and your thoughts are coming in. As we speak, we're dreaming up what speakers to bring next. We know about Friday. We don't necessarily know beyond that. But watch this space. Whitney, talk about what's going to happen tomorrow. WPR: So we're really excited. We're going to have Priya Parker on to finish out the week for us. She is the author of "The Art of Gathering," and she's going to give us some really helpful tips, I think, about how we can stay connected during this time, which is something I'm sure all of us are struggling with as we're trying to practice social distancing and are just spending more time physically apart. So going into the weekend, that feels like the type of thing I think all of us can really benefit from hearing. CA: If you've got value from this conversation, consider sharing it, sharing those links with people you know. That would be cool. And hang in there, everyone. These are hard days. We know many people are struggling hugely. Hang in there. We'll get through it together somehow. And until tomorrow, take care. Bye for now. WPR: Take care, everyone. |
What the world can learn from China's response to the coronavirus | {0: 'Gary Liu is CEO of the South China Morning Post, a leading news media company that has reported on China and Asia for more than a century.', 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.', 2: 'Whitney Pennington Rodgers is an award-winning journalist and media professional.'} | TED Connects | Chris Anderson: Welcome to TED Connects. This is a new series of live conversations, trying to make sense of this weird moment that we're in: coronavirus. Everyone's suddenly changing how they live their lives, it's so jolting, it's so startling. We're all trying to make sense of it, and it ain't easy. That much we know. We're trying to make sense of this together in the only way that we know how, which is by having wise humans coming on, talking to each other, listening to each other trying to learn from each other. We are apart, but we can use this moment to build community together, and that's what we're trying to do. So this is being produced by a virtual TED team scattered around New York, currently one of the epicenters of this pandemic. So it's definitely a scary time for people here. I'd like to welcome to join me my cohost here, Whitney Pennington Rodgers. She's our current affairs curator. Whitney Pennington Rodgers: We're going to be looking a little bit at China's response today. When news surfaced about a strange viral outbreak in Wuhan, China at the very last days of 2019, I think a lot of people were confused about what was going on there, and in the months that followed, we learned more about the disease that's now known as COVID-19, we watched the situation in China quickly worsen and in the most recent weeks dramatically improve. And I think as all of us around the world grapple with how we can contain and control the spread of COVID-19, there are a lot of lessons we can learn from what China experienced and how they responded. So we're really thrilled to be joined today by the CEO of the "South China Morning Post," Gary Liu, who's here to share his perspective and insights. So, welcome Gary. Gary Liu: Thanks for having me. WPR: Hey there, Gary, thanks for being with us. And I think before we dive into things, I'd love to hear about just how things have been for you personally, your loved ones, those close to you, how have you been experiencing this? GL: It's complicated. So we're here in Hong Kong, I'm working from home, like much of Hong Kong. I'm actually self-quarantined in our apartment here in Hong Kong, because there was a confirmed case in our workplace. So over the course of the last week plus, and likely for at least another week plus, the entire organization has been distributed and working from home. You know, when Hong Kong got its first confirmed case, I was actually back in the United States with my wife, we were taking a small break in the Rockies, and we came back to Hong Kong pretty soon after that to make sure we got back into Hong Kong before the airports shut. And at that point, it was all of our family in the United States and friends texting us and worrying about how things were in Hong Kong as the situation in China started escalating, and people were sending us, or trying to send us, supplies. Masks and sanitizer and stuff like that. And now it's the opposite. New York City is our home, so we certainly empathize with what you guys are dealing with right now and going through in the city. And we are seeing our friends and our family back home in New York and in California and checking in on them, trying to send equipment and materials back to them, so the script has flipped actually pretty fast over just the last couple of weeks. WPR: And you know, I think that's actually a really interesting place to start and probably a question that a lot of people who aren't in China have, you know, I think from the outside looking in, it seems as if what's happened in China is kind of miraculous. That to go from, you know, you have a country with more than a billion people there, to go from as many as 80,000 cases to nearly zero new cases now, you know, what can you tell us about how this happened, to help us understand the current situation and just really how China ended up there? GL: Yeah, a lot has happened. China has been dealing with this for several months now. Several-month head start, that's not a good thing, but they have gone through several different phases. I think, Whitney, before I jump into it, there are a couple of caveats that are really important to make. The first one is that we're still parsing what happened in China. The information system, as everyone knows, is still relatively closed. And so a lot of the information that we're using to piece together what happened in China is still not fully complete. And so with every passing day, every passing week, there's more information that allows us to retroactively make sure that we get the picture of what happened early on in those early days at the end of 2019, get that picture right. And there's still a lot that's happening today, even though I think the information sharing is much more open than it was early on, there's still a lot of stuff that we need to parse. And the second important caveat here is that I think learning sometimes suggests that everything China did was right and good, and hopefully, other countries can take it and apply it, but that's not 100 percent the case. China, of course, did a lot that was right, and if we walked through the time line, I think it would be pretty apparent the decisions that they made kept the coronavirus from really exploding across the entire country and really limited it to one province and mostly one city. But there were also many, many missteps, and those are things that I think the world can also learn from, most importantly, China should learn from, because most of these — I think those of us who are professional observers would call missteps, are because they are systemic issues with the country, because of governance, lack of free information flow, stuff like that. Those are the initial caveats, but I think the timing of how China progressed from first case to now has been fascinating. WPR: Yeah, and I mean, so we know now that in Hubei province they've officially lifted the two-month lockdown. And are you getting the sense, do you feel like this is the right decision to make at this moment? GL: I don't think I'm the right person to say whether or not it's the right decision. But certainly, this has been a progression of decisions, and I think they've been sitting on this decision for quite some time. Wuhan itself, which was where the pandemic started, it was the first epicenter and the major epicenter. Wuhan is opening up on April 8, that's right now the schedule. And this is really, what we're in now is the third of three phases from the first discovery of the virus in Wuhan. Now, April 8 will be about 11 weeks after Wuhan the city got completely shut down, and the Hubei province got shut down. And so for those who are in a shelter, at home kind of situations right now in the United States and wondering how long this is going to take, in Wuhan, they've been locked down for 11 weeks and only now has the Chinese government decided they're ready to start letting people move freely around. WPR: And to your point earlier about some of the possible missteps in terms of reporting, I mean, there are still reports now that we might not be getting an accurate number of cases that we're seeing in Wuhan or beyond, we're hearing some people say there are no new cases, other people saying that there actually are cases. So do you feel like there is accurate spread of information about the current state of the virus in China right now? GL: Generally, yes, with the caveat that it is based on the Chinese government's definition. And this is one of the problems right now that even the World Health Organization is struggling with, is that the definition of what is a confirmed case, what is an infection, is different from country to country. As an example, in China, the folks that have tested positive but are asymptomatic, we understand now that they are not included, since February 7, they have not been included in the official numbers. Or at the very least, on February 7, they changed that definition, and they're not included in those official numbers. And that could be another 50 percent on top of the numbers that we're seeing today. So what we've found, our reporters have gotten their hands on some classified government documents and government data that suggests that a third of total actual positive tests are asymptomatic, and therefore not included in official numbers. Now, I don't think that this is an example of the Chinese government trying to hide information. This is a definitions issue, which countries have been debating and people are doing it in different ways. But like I said, there really have been three very distinct phases. We are in the third phase that I would call recovery and rehabilitation, rehabilitation being the rehabilitation of China's image. But the first part was discovery and a lot of denial. And then there was this two-and-a-half-month period of response and containment. And that I think, the response and containment part is the most interesting to the rest of the world. WPR: And so maybe we can break some of that down, you know, thinking about China's response. What were some of the specific things that you think China did right, both as a nation, individuals in the country, what were some of the things that you saw that worked really well? GL: OK, so let me walk through the time line, I want to try and get these dates right, because the dates do matter, I think again, for context, how many weeks it took from one step to another. Let me actually back up into that initial first phase, that discovery and denial phase. The first time we heard about the coronavirus, this mysterious respiratory disease that looks somewhat like SARS, was on December 30. That was the day that there was a doctor, whose name is known all over the world for the unfortunate reason he ended up eventually dying, named Li Wenliang. And Li Wenliang, Dr. Li, posted to a private WeChat group on December 30. These were some of his old classmates from med school. And he said, "Hey, I'm in Wuhan, I'm at the hospital, there is a SARS-like illness," SARS being the epidemic from 2002 to 2003, "There's a SARS-like illness that is spreading through these hospitals in Wuhan." A private message. Somebody forwarded it, and it went viral across the Chinese internet. The very next — so that was the first time we actually heard about something that was going on in Wuhan. The very next day, December 31, was the first time that any Chinese officials — and on that day, it happened to be the actual provincial and the city officials — acknowledged that there were 27 people, at that moment in time, who had been diagnosed with this mysterious pneumonia, and they reported the cases to the World Health Organization. That was also the day that Dr. Li was reprimanded, officially reprimanded. So that was really the discovery, the end of the discovery and denial phase, because what we know now is that back to mid-December, several weeks before Dr. Li wrote his blog post, the authorities had already been notified that a SARS-like pneumonia was showing up in Wuhan hospitals. And action had already started down the chain of authority. They have now backdated, at least publicly backdated, the first case to December 1. But actually, in their confidential and classified government documents that again, our journalists have seen, and we've published a story — Officially, in classified documents, they've backdated the first COVID-19 case all the way back to November 17, as the earliest example that they can find based on symptoms and based on retroactive diagnosis for a COVID-19 case. So in effect, there were several weeks before the acknowledgment to the World Health Organization that that was going on, and the first case with symptoms was actually identified about a month and a half before that notice to the World Health Organization. Then the second phase, which really started, let's say, December 31, when the acknowledgment happened, was response and then massive containment. Now this phase, to be clear, still had some denial and a good amount of censorship happening within the country. So on January 1, the World Health Organization started working with China on trying to identify the virus and trying to figure out course of action. It wasn't until several weeks later that Beijing, the central government, for the first time broke its silence, and that was on January 18. And actually, they broke the silence to deny that this was SARS, and in fact to "defy rumors" that were spreading around the Chinese internet. But there was a major date that happened two days afterwards, which was January 20. Because for the first time, a member of the party, a senior government official who is now one of the central gentlemen that is actually leading the task force against COVID-19, his name is Zhong Nanshan, he's an epidemiologist, he was one of the central figures during SARS 17 years ago. On January 20, he visited Wuhan. And he admitted, for the first time, that human-to-human transmission was possible. Now this was important, because prior to that, officials who had spoken up had said that human-to-human transmission was not likely, was not possible. And previous to that, all of the cases, the majority of the cases were tied to this seafood and wildlife marketplace that was in the city of Wuhan. But now, on January 20, human-to-human transmission, it's possible, it's happening, and so of course, the course of action, not only in China, but the course of action all over the world, started to change. And three days after that, Wuhan was locked down. It was completely, I mean, it shocked the world that they could lock down that many people so quickly. Of course, now India yesterday announced that 1.3 billion people are being locked down. So we have another frame of reference now. And then the end of this middle second phase I think really came in March, around March 10. Actually, on March 10 I should say, because Chinese president, Xi Jinping, visited Wuhan. And these things, in Chinese politics, because everything is so well-choreographed, matters a whole lot. The fact that Xi Jinping visited Wuhan signaled that the Chinese government believed the worst was over. The reality was that probably about 20 days before that, the curve had already been flattened. So 20 days before that, probably around February 20, the infection rate was around 75,000, 76,000, and it's effectively stayed within a couple of thousand since then. So on March 10, Xi Jinping's visit to Wuhan kind of signaled the worst is over, and then they moved into the recovery and rehabilitation phase. WPR: OK. I mean, if I'm hearing correctly — thank you for sharing all of that, it sounds like, although there was a slow period of getting the information out initially, eventually there was quick reaction from the Chinese government to respond to this, lock folks down. And it seems like that had a real impact on flattening the curve in China, in Wuhan. GL: A real impact. WPR: Yeah and I — GL: Absolutely. WPR: Yes, please go ahead, Gary. GL: The date of January 23 was not by coincidence. Because the Chinese New Year holiday started on January 24, the very next day. And the thing is, with the Chinese New Year holiday, is that it is, every single year, it's the largest human migration that happens on Earth. About 400 million people travel during about a forty-day period that would have started on January 24. And that's three billion trips, it's just people traveling all over the country, 400 million people traveling. Now, Wuhan is one of the most important cities in China, although before this, I don't think a lot of people around the world knew the city of Wuhan, but it's extremely important. It is considered the most important city in the center of China for many different reasons, but one of the key reasons is that it is one of the key transportation hubs of the country. So all of the major train lines, the high-speed train lines, the normal train lines, the trade lines, they all kind of converge on Wuhan. So you can imagine if 400 million people start moving around for Chinese New Year on January 24, a huge number of them were going to go through Wuhan. And of course, Wuhan itself is an 11-million-person city. The surrounding cities all added together, Hubei province has about 60 million people, and they were also largely going to travel. And so if January 23 they had not shut it down, and people had started traveling, the likelihood would have been that this would have been really, really hard, possibly, likely impossible to contain. And even though they shut down before the Chinese New Year holiday started, we now also know that at least five million people actually left the surrounding areas and traveled. Which is one of the reasons why it did spread a little bit across the country, and then eventually spread to other parts of the world. WPR: And I'd like to come back to that as well, just thinking about the five million people who left and sort of where they landed today and how that affected things, but before we do that, I'm interested to talk with you a little bit more about — you mentioned this November date as one of the earliest cases you discovered that was reported was in November, and that's something actually that I hadn't heard before, and I imagine that might be news to a lot of people hearing this, and so I'm curious, when you think about the missteps from China's perspective, in terms of what China did, you know, there is, as you mentioned, suppression of information is one thing, one major criticism of how China handled this. And hearing that maybe there was knowledge of something as early as November, if that might have played a role in how we were able to control and contain this a lot sooner. GL: I do want to clarify, from what we understand, officials were not notified about this until mid-December. It wasn't — So it was really a couple of weeks between officials realizing that there was a SARS-like pneumonia going around to when the first case was reported to the World Health Organization. It wasn't all the way back to November 17. That was retroactively backdated, but that has not been made public by the government. We published it because we've seen the data that actually backdates the first case. From a misstep point of view, again, it's a couple of weeks compared to what happened in SARS, which was a long time of locking down on information. This was much shorter, the period of time that the government wasn't in complete shutdown mode. But then, after that, of course, there was still continued censorship on the internet, especially within the Great Firewall of China, for communications between Chinese citizens. And you know, surprisingly to some, I think for a lot of China watchers not so surprisingly, is that the government has — the central government — over the course of the last several weeks, actually, I should say probably the last two months, has started to change their tone and to some degree admit that there needed to be better free flow of information. They've changed the official narrative of a couple of different things, including this initial whistleblower, Dr. Li, who unfortunately ended up passing away from the virus, they actually now refer to him as a national hero, they have officially removed the reprimand, the Wuhan police have apologized to Dr. Li's family, and they have actually been — a couple of policemen — have been punished in Wuhan for the way that they handled the situation. So there has definitely been an internal shift and there is a lot more sharing of data and information. I can tell you, from Hong Kong's point of view, without the open sharing of information between the authorities, between Hong Kong and mainland China, I think Hong Kong's response would have been much more different and I think Hong Kong would have suffered because of that. So that much more open sharing of information has benefited this city for sure. WPR: And we have Chris here who has a question, I think, from the audience. CA: Hey, Gary. The online audience, loving what you're saying. It's so interesting, you're giving us amazing new insights here. Just in the current situation where much of — you know, there have been these very few reports of new cases. How much does it feel like life is getting back to normal? Do people really believe that this problem has been successfully tackled elsewhere? GL: I think the sentiment in mainland China is that yes, in China, the problem has been tackled. And people are looking forward to going back to normal life. A lot of the other major cities, Shanghai, Beijing, are starting to get back to work. Many of the factories have now been reopened. The last stat that I saw was that 90 percent of the businesses that had been shut down are now reopened in China. So generally speaking, life is getting back to normal. Wuhan and Hubei are really the last places that are still shut down, with Wuhan being the city that is shut down until April 8. Hong Kong is a little bit different. Hong Kong has actually gone back into a second wave of social isolation and distancing. A bunch of different companies, us included, as well as the Hong Kong government and the civil service has now gone back to work from home. And it's because we are starting to see a second wave, but for us, honestly, is the first time that we've had a spike of infections, and it's because of imported cases. It's because a lot of Hong Kong residents who left Hong Kong prior to, well, actually when the virus first came into the city, are now returning, because oddly enough, the places they escaped to are now more dangerous than Hong Kong. And as they're coming back, a lot of them are actually bringing the virus back with them. And so we're starting to see a spike. Before this week, the highest infection day that Hong Kong had during the first two months of this was 10 infections in one day. Now the highest that we've seen in the last week was 48. So this is really the first spike that we're seeing, and so Hong Kong is returning back to a state of alertness, to a state of caution, and more and more people are holed up at home. CA: Is it possible, in mainland China, that because of this redefinition that you spoke about, where if someone tests positive, but they're not showing symptoms, that is not reported as a case. That seems significant to me. Is that part of the explanation for why new reports have gone nearly to zero? GL: I don't know if that's the answer to it, but I do actually think that even with — and remember, these are folks that are tested, so the data that we have is that these folks have been tested, the tests have come back positive, but have not been added to the official number of infections, because they're asymptomatic. But they have still gone through the process that is part of China's containment strategy, which has worked extraordinarily well. Which is, first of all, lots and lots of people have been tested. And then once — if there is a positive test return, regardless of whether or not they're symptomatic or asymptomatic, regardless of whether or not they're added to official numbers, what happens next is that they are quarantined, they're isolated, and contact tracing happens. Contact tracing is a key, key, key action. And so they go and figure out where this person has been moving, where they've been, who they've been in contact with, and all those folks that they've been in close contact with, they get tested. And if they come back with a positive test, then they're also isolated and they go through the process again. So China has not been testing people, finding that they're asymptomatic and then just releasing them and letting them go home. That's not the case. WPR: I think to that point too, Gary, what you mentioned about this trace-testing and being able to figure out who people have been in contact with to figure out who may also have been infected, you know, when you look at what's happening in other parts of the world, you hear in the United States, where Chris and I are based right now, you're hearing that people who are experiencing symptoms, have symptoms cannot get tested. You know, how does China's ability to test so many people affect the way that they can respond to this and control this virus? GL: It really matters. Without the significant testing and without the contact tracing that comes afterwards, I don't think there's a way that China could have contained it the way that they did. The same thing here in Hong Kong. If we didn't have both of those, as minimum requirements in a health system, Hong Kong could not have contained it. And this is actually the reason why South Korea is the only other country besides China that has managed to flatten the curve, is because they aggressively tested. I think by far the highest per capita testing anywhere in the world, as far as we know right now. And they aggressively did contact tracing. And because of that, even though South Korea had this huge spike, and we thought that it was going to get out of hand, they were able to suppress it, control it, and now they're in a much, much better place. WPR: One thing you mentioned earlier that I'd love to talk about, too, is SARS and the impact of going through that in 2002 and 2003 for China, other countries in Asia, Hong Kong. You know, what effect did that have on everyone's preparedness in that part of the world for the COVID-19 outbreak? GL: It was significant. I think the institutional and social memory of SARS matters a heck of a lot, when you look at China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, a lot of these countries in Asia have dealt with COVID-19. Let me use Hong Kong as an example, because it's the one that I know the most intimately. But a lot of what I'm about to say actually does apply to those other areas of Asia. So for context, SARS, November 2002 to July 2003, very, very similar coronavirus to COVID-19, I think there's about an 80 percent similarity to those two viruses. The global infected number was a little over 8,000, 774 deaths. So by percentage, deadlier than COVID-19 is but far less infectious than COVID-19 is. Now here's why it impacted Hong Kong so much, and why the memory is so deep, and actually it tells you a lot about Hong Kong's reaction to COVID-19. Of the 8,000 infected, 22 percent were here in the city of 7.5 million, and 40 percent, actually 39 percent of the deaths, 299 people died in Hong Kong. Thirty-nine percent of the global deaths happened in Hong Kong. And SARS did not start in Hong Kong, it was imported into Hong Kong from southern China. And so SARS, again, deep, deep memory, but it was a massive turning point in the Hong Kong health care system and also the social practices of the city. And let me walk through some of that impact, because you can actually still see it, even before COVID-19, you see it every day. The health care system was able to really, very quickly, ramp up in capacity, because of preparation post-SARS. So after SARS, the Hong Kong health care authorities started preparing for greater capacity, especially for infectious diseases. There were new health alert systems, warnings and treatment protocols put in place. I can tell you that a lot of folks that were here before SARS will tell you that in Hong Kong hospitals, before SARS, it was actually rare to see even medical professionals wear face masks. And now surgical masks are ubiquitous, not only in hospitals, but across the entire city. Anytime, anywhere, it seems, especially right now. New channels of communication and data and information exchange were opened up with mainland Chinese authorities, and technology was implemented, including now a supercomputer that actually does contact tracing in Hong Kong. You could trace the existence of the supercomputer and this contact-tracing ability back to changes that happened post-SARS. On the social side, there was also a huge change. The first thing I have to talk about is, of course, masks. Now, I know that there is still not consensus everywhere in the world about whether or not masks actually help in this situation. I know that the World Health Organization as well as governments like the US, as well as Singapore, say that only medical personnel as well as people who are actually sick and showing symptoms need to be wearing masks. In Hong Kong, everyone wears masks. And the government, even though they flip-flopped a little bit during this epidemic, the general, the guidance is that everyone should be wearing masks. That started in SARS. Ninety percent of Hong Kongers during SARS wore masks, and that habit actually stayed with Hong Kongers, and so generally speaking, even outside of the pandemic, when people are sick and coughing, you'll see them wear masks out in public. On top of that, there was — it became systemic, or I should say systematic controls for hygiene in social and public spaces. So if you visit Hong Kong, again, before all of this happened, you would have noticed that public spaces are constantly being disinfected. One good example that everyone notices is that when you go into an elevator in public spaces, in buildings, they will either have one of two things, potentially both. They'll either have a sign that tells you how often the elevator buttons are disinfected, or there will be a plastic, piece of sticky plastic, like a plastic sheet over the buttons so it effectively becomes a flat surface. When you eat out, Hong Kong is obviously famous for its dim sum, and one of the most famous things about Hong Kong dim sum are the dim sum carts, which are also very popular in New York's Chinatown, as an example. Those dim sum carts, they pretty much went away after SARS. And so most dim sum restaurants that you'll go to in Hong Kong now, the vast majority of them, you have to order off of a menu, you don't have public carts going around because of hygiene issues. In most nice Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong now you will get, when you sit down, two pairs of chopsticks per person. And those two pairs of chopsticks are different colored, because one is used to grab food from the center of the table to your plate, and the other one is for you to take the food and put it in your mouth. And honestly, there are hand sanitizers and hand-washing notices literally everywhere, and this is just part of the social behavior after SARS. Safety protocols in offices, everyone knows how to shut down an office and control traffic really well. Most major offices have temperature-check machines at the very least available, and then, of course, social distancing. People understand social distancing is important, and so the moment there was fear of what was happening across the border, naturally, people started social-distancing activities and self-quarantine became pretty normal. So those are all the social things as well as the health system things that kind of changed, and because of that, Hong Kong was able to react really, really fast, not just the government, not just the health authorities but the people of Hong Kong, and I think that's the most important part, is that the entire city, that the community reacted and went into this mode where you wore masks, you washed your hands, you carried hand sanitizer, you stopped going to public places. WPR: I'm curious then, I think a lot of people who are listening at home and figuring out how can we apply some of those things here, and from where you sit, and when you see what's going on in other parts of the world, where maybe people are struggling to make some of these changes. You know, what are some of the specific things you think folks can adapt in their own cultures, in their own countries? GL: I think communication is a huge deal. If you talk to local Hong Kongers, they will likely opine that the communication from the Hong Kong government has not been top notch. But thankfully, there have been other authorities and certainly even just person-to-person communication has been pretty strong. A lot of corporates have done an incredible job in Hong Kong in communicating very transparently with their employees and insurance companies have also been making available all sorts of webinars and materials and made it actually quite easy for people to understand how to get tested, where to get tested, who to get tested. And so that communication, I think, has centralized, to some degree, the messaging. In a city like Hong Kong, everyone generally believes the same thing, and what they believe is generally true. Of course, there's still misinformation issues, as there are everywhere. But I think, possibly also because of SARS, because over the course of the 17 years, a lot of the misinformation has now been vetted, everyone knows what is true, so there is already, sort of, an internal radar or at least alarm bell for things that seem to be wrong. So I think communication is really important, from government, from corporates anywhere in the world. And I think if there is a recommendation for health systems, I know getting tests is really difficult. One of the things that has made testing in China and Hong Kong certainly so effective, is that there is point-of-care testing, that still really doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist in volume in the US. And so they have to save these tests and only a certain number of people can get tested, the triage system then becomes overflowing. Whereas here, generally speaking, everyone can get tested, and then of course, the contact tracing. Everyone knows that if somebody that you've been in contact with tests positive, you're going to be called in by the hospital authorities and you're going to be tested, and then if you're positive, everyone you've been in contact with for the last two weeks will also be called in. And people don't really see it as an annoyance, it's just what needs to be done. And I think because of that, again, the containment has been effective. WPR: Great. And we have a question from Chris here. CA: Gary, it actually builds on the point you just made, people are puzzled online, how is it that China avoided the explosion of cases in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, where people were coming there from Wuhan. How on earth did some of those cases not explode? Was it just down to really diligent contact tracing? GL: I think it was a combination of things. First of all, the shutdown of Hubei province certainly helped. And then, the major cities actually went into isolation and quarantine as well. Remember, it was Chinese New Year, so there was no one working that week. And so everyone just went home. And generally speaking, in most major cities, they locked their doors and they didn't leave. Now, China is very prepared for this, because the technology stack in China, including consumer site services, make it really easy to lock your doors and get everything delivered to you. This is infrastructure and this is consumer behavior that is already ingrained, especially in major cities across China. So people just went home. There was also a stigma issue, which is unfortunate for people from Hubei, and especially from Wuhan. But there are plenty of stories in the other major Chinese cities where anyone coming from Hubei or with any connection to Wuhan were ostracized during those early days, especially after the Wuhan lockdown. And so folks that might have been, in fact, carrying the virus, because they were from the epicenter, they were either self-quarantined, or they were forcibly quarantined, because no one was going to spend time with them anyway. So I think for a lot of those reasons, some of them social, some of them systemic, they made it so that there was much less person-to-person contact, especially after the authorities admitted that human-to-human transmission was possible. CA: Hospitals here in New York, there are warnings that they're about to get overwhelmed. What can we learn from what happened in Wuhan, some of the scenes from there were horrifying, but there were amazing stories as well. What should we learn from what happened there? GL: Well, it started off horrifying. So in the early days, post-lockdown, all the stories coming out of Wuhan, we had journalists that were there right before the lockdown, they got out about three hours before the lockdown happened, and we had people what ended up having to be quarantined, because they were stuck in Hubei. As well as a lot of citizen journalists that were documenting what was going on, and those images, like you said, Chris, were horrifying. There were videos showing people literally laying on the ground. Some were just so sick they couldn't move, others had already died and they were just covered with plastic sheets. There were nurses and doctors that were just crying in front of the camera, begging for help. And so, I think it's important to understand that China's health care system did not just immediately become effective. And certainly not in Wuhan. There was not that much information, people didn't know what they were dealing with. Certainly, the authorities were trying to help, I think at that moment, but again, the information flow was not that free. And during lockdown, people were screaming off of their balconies, because they couldn't get food, they couldn't even go to the hospital, because the public transportation systems got locked down. Remember, this is not, Wuhan is not a city like New York where most of New York is walkable. For people who don't have cars, and many, many of the Wuhan residents don't have cars, if the buses are locked down, then they might have to walk three, four hours, to get to a hospital. Maybe not that long, but they have to walk a long way to get to a hospital. And so a lot of people were just stuck at home, and they were unable to initially get any diagnosis or any health care. And so it was a disaster. But then the capacity actually ramped up. The triage system became extremely effective. I think most people have heard now that there were two massive hospitals with thousands of beds of capacity that were built within 10 days. And this is true, they came out of nowhere, they were literally just parking lots or flat ground, and two major hospital units were built up. To be clear, also, those were the triage units for those who have very mild symptoms. But that's really important. Being able to get people with mild symptoms out of the major hospital systems, so that they're not taking up the resources of nurses and doctors, they are not taking up the diagnostic equipment for the second confirmation tests, and also, especially, they are not taking up isolation wards and ventilators. And so the moment people started being moved out, the mild symptoms, the ones that were going to survive and they just really needed to be separate from family and have some antiviral medication, once they were moved out into these new hospitals, the main hospitals in Wuhan and across Hubei could deal with the primary patients, especially those that are critical, of the overall tested population and do their best and try and save them and make sure that they're not highly infectious. At the same time, I think that the health authorities in China, especially the nurses and the doctors, did a very good job of also protecting themselves. So there have been far fewer, by percentage, infections and deaths, of medical staff than there were during SARS. CA: I mean, to respond that effectively took a kind of top-down drive. Plus a willingness of a lot of people to risk their own well-being in a way for their perception of what they had to do for the public good. You are well aware of the cultural differences between China, Hong Kong and the West. Do you — how do you rate the chances of, say, the US responding effectively should things really explode here, as they seem like they may be about to? GL: In the health care system side, I have every confidence that the US health care system is going to be able to respond well. I have many, many friends who are medical professionals in the United States, and they are raising their hands and volunteering and going to hospitals to see where they can help. So I have full trust in the system, and the people that man those systems. Our health care capacity in the United States is also significantly greater, doctors per capita, than in China. And because of the fact that also, our health care system is not just relying on hospitals, but there are primary care physicians scattered all over the country, as long as the testing capacity and testing kits are available across the country, general practitioners can actually administer those. And it certainly sounds like more and more med tech start-ups in the US are now trying to create these home kits, so that people can start testing at home. That will help a lot. My hope is certainly that the citizens of the US, that people are going to take this very, very seriously and realize that it doesn't matter that you may not feel sick, it doesn't matter if you think you are young and that you are not prone to catching this virus, or that you're not in — you may not be fearful of dire consequences and death. Take it seriously and stay home. And don't go to public spaces, and don't be a carrier, because we now know that asymptomatic folks can be carriers and there is a possibility that you can be infectious as an asymptomatic carrier. So yeah, on the cultural side — I don't think it's really cultural. I would say that it's because of the impact of SARS, it's because of the social memory of SARS that has meant people are a little bit more selfless, and have just said, "OK, I will stay home, because I might have come in contact." CA: Yeah, weirdly, SARS seems to have acted as its own kind of vaccine, sort of just prepped the system enough for people to be ready. Yeah, social vaccine, amazing. Back to you, Whitney. WPR: OK, great, thanks so much, Chris. And so I think it's interesting, Gary, to hear you talk about some of the reactions in Wuhan and some of the stories that you've heard, especially running the "South China Morning Post" and running a news organization during this outbreak. You know, what are some of the — First, what is that like, to run a news organization, to report during this outbreak? GL: Well, running a news organization in a moment like this, so close to the initial epicenter where the outbreak started, is complicated. We were lucky, very, very lucky that most of our senior editors, and certainly the most senior editors, our editor in chief, our masthead leadership, they were all journalists and they were reporters during SARS. So there's a lot of pattern recognition in our newsroom. Which meant the moment that we got the first, sort of, the first stories coming out of China, starting on December 30, people already raising their hands in the newsroom saying, "Hey, we've got to report about this like it's going to be the next SARS. There's a high likelihood that this is it." And we did send people to Wuhan early on in January. Like I said, we also had reporters there right before the lockdown. After the lockdown, we were lucky enough to pull all of them out of Wuhan. But we actually did change very quickly the way that we report. Partially to make sure we got the story right, to dig deeper in the places that we knew we had to dig deeper, but also to protect our journalists and employees. So one of the things that we did do, and maybe other news organizations would disagree with our decision, was I think in late January or early February, even in Hong Kong, we said to our journalists, "You are not to go into hospitals." So no more in-hospital reporting. Because they were — we knew that it was highly infectious, we were worried that they were going to become you know, points of spread, and we just wanted to protect our employees and our company, so we did that. We also had a business continuity plan. Which meant that at the drop of a dime we could shut down the entire office and still operate this global news business. Some of the most interesting stories we've covered is actually how technology has played a huge role in China during this epidemic. Because it frankly has changed the way that diagnostics work, it changed the way that containment works, it certainly has changed the way that consumer life works. And of course, there's been a lot of instances of really interesting censorship, but also, more interestingly, how the Chinese netizens have fought that censorship and reacted to that censorship. And I do think that there's quite a lot of lasting impacts that are likely to happen because of technology deployment during this time. WPR: And so I think in talking about some of those lasting impacts, now that you as a country are sort of emerging from this and coming on into a different stage with this outbreak, what are some of the changes you're seeing to daily life, both as society, and maybe things that you're hearing that individuals are experiencing as a result of this? GL: Yeah, I think probably the two most interesting changes, actually, I should say three — The first one is on education. Now schools have been shut down across China for quite some time now and again, this might feel a little bit stereotypical, or a caricature of China, but education is extremely important to the country and extremely important to the citizens. And we were actually just about to come up to the national exams, which these students work 18 years for. And so online education — very, very quickly moved online. And part of that move online was that courses had to be, and classes had to be recorded. Which means that now, there's this huge repository of recorded classes. That means potential democratization of education material, and significantly lowered costs to get this type of coursework from the top tiered schools, whether it's high schools, universities or primary schools, to the entire country. Now whether or not China activates on that, we're still not sure, but the potential is there. The second major shift is really on distributed workforce. The idea of working remotely, office work remotely, is not much of a concept in China and across most of Asia. Certainly far less than in the United States. And I'm from the US tech industry, so it was pretty normal, it's pretty normal in the US tech industry even before this, in China much less so. But because of the lockdowns, not only in Hubei but across China, this has become much more normal. And people are kind of falling into a different rhythm of work. And most importantly, this has given rise to a whole new set of teleconferencing companies in China. Because most of the teleconferencing companies that we know of in the West, whether it's the Cisco systems, Google Hangouts, Zoom, that everyone uses, BlueJeans, Slack video, they're not available in China. They don't work in China. There is this mirror internet in China, behind the Great Firewall, and so there's a whole new set of teleconferencing systems that were used, but were not really commonplace, certainly not for distributed workforce, and now suddenly, over the last few months, they are. So it will be interesting to see how those companies and those services develop, and whether or not the workplace changes in China. And then finally, the third thing that is really interesting is that there was a huge internet response to this censorship issue in China over the course of the last two months. It especially exploded after this whistle blower, Dr. Li, died on February 7. All over the Chinese internet hashtags like "we want freedom of speech," "national hero Dr. Li," things like that just exploded everywhere. And there have been — And actually the Chinese government has had to respond, I think for observers, a lot of observers believe that Chinese government's change of narrative about Dr. Li was largely driven by this reaction from its citizens across the internet. There have been extremely creative examples of people getting around censorship. I think China is quite famous for using emojis to get around tech censorship. I think most people also know that the primary messaging app that the Chinese internet users use, called WeChat, it is heavily censored, it's not just text that's censored, images are censored really effectively, individual conversations are censored. And so when there are specific articles or specific posts that are about what's happening with the virus that people want to share, and the government thinks that it is detrimental to whatever, they will censor and it will be completely and very effectively removed. But this time around, Chinese citizens used emojis again. They translated these posts into ancient Chinese texts that the censoring machines couldn't pick up yet, they actually translated one version of this post into Tolkien's Elvish language, I don't even know the name of that language, they translated into that and the AI couldn't pick it up. And then finally, I think one of my favorite versions of this was they used the "Star Wars" intro, the angled text scrolling, it became a video, and they had the entire post about what was going on in Wuhan in that format, and that went all over the internet. So I do think that there is going to be an increased call. Academics now are speaking up about freedom of speech. So there's going to be this increased volume of netizens calling for freedom of speech. It will be very, very interesting to watch how the authorities in China deal with that. WPR: Great. And Chris, you have a question? CA: Yeah, it sort of picks up on that about, you know, the stories that could come out of this. I mean, there are definitely optimistic stories that people are feeling, that this could lead to more free speech of a certain kind in China. Certain things you can't suppress. Maybe in the US it might lead to the government taking scientific predictions more seriously, not clear that's happening yet. And there's hope that this whole thing, because it's a common enemy for the world, will actually bring the world together in some ways. But I'm curious how you think about this. President Trump started referring to this as the Chinese virus. I'm curious how that's being received in China, and how people are feeling on this issue. Do you think it's increased sympathy for other countries or actually dialed up animosity? GL: Well, it's certainly not being received well across China. I think one thing that is still really undercovered is the intensity of rising nationalism at the grassroots level across China over the last several years. And they're very protective of their country, and their people and their history. And President Trump's comments and the fact that so much of the US government is now referring to this as the Chinese virus is not received well. You know, my fear of course, is that even prior to the virus, the US-China conflict was escalating beyond anything that I think most of us as observers want to see. Trade, tech, military, ideology, and now we can add information conflict and health conflict, health tech conflict especially, to the list. Of course, the hope is that these heightened tensions will actually dissipate and that the two countries can actually, at this moment in time, choose to go down one of two paths. Either one that further damages the relationship or one that actually shows what the possibilities are if the two largest economies in the world, the two most powerful countries in the world, actually cooperate. You know, this week, Thursday is the G20 conversations that are going to happen remotely. It will be interesting to see how US and China actually coordinate, cooperate, how they communicate during those talks. CA: I think people want to know how you think this will play out. You've got a very special seat there, you know, looking at all parts of the world in it. What's your take on how this plays out? GL: I desperately want to be an optimist, Chris. But I think that everything we see, especially the data, shows that it is going to get far worse before it get better. And I'm very fearful for what's going on in the United States. It's because of the amount of data we have across all these different countries, you can very clearly layer countries and the way that the pandemic has been spreading, on top of one another, and we know that the US is a week and a half, maybe two weeks, behind Italy, and we know what happened in Italy and what's going on in Spain. The US is catching up on that spike and it's going to come much faster, and it's going to be much higher than I think most people originally believed or hoped for. So it will get worse. So the hope is that, again, this is going to be the optimistic side of me, that the nations will come together, that those in charge, our governments, will make the drastic, necessary moves, and we will be able to come out on the other side faster than it looks right now. Remember, when China went to shutdown, on January 23, there were only 830 confirmed cases. And even if those numbers are not exactly accurate, it's nowhere near the confirmed cases that we have in the US right now, that we see in the US. So that is something to be very, very concerned about. At 830 they shut down. And even after the shutdown, two weeks later, the cases had grown to 35,000, two weeks after that, it was at 75,000. So at this point, it is late in the US. But, we, you know — it can still be fixed. And I think most ... experts that we talk to believe that it can be fixed with fast and decisive action. CA: Yeah, people struggle with understanding the power of exponential growth. And a number can seem smallish today, but if you believe the science, yeah, you have to act. Gary, look, I hope somehow you will convey to whomever you can convey that regardless of what some people might say, in government or elsewhere, there are millions, there are tens of millions, there are probably hundreds of millions of people in the US, on both right and left, who are amazed by what happened in China. You know, yes, missteps early on, whatever. But they're amazed, you've really — you know, both the Chinese government, the Hong Kong government, several Asian governments, Singapore, South Korea, have shown astonishingly wise and disciplined action against this thing. And we're grateful, we feel there is much we can learn from you and so — People, most people want this to be a time of bringing the world together. I genuinely believe that, it's maybe the optimistic part of me believing it. But I believe in it, it's partly what these conversations are for, to try and make those kinds of connections. We want to keep in touch. You've got an amazing seat there, and I have loved listening to every word you've said today here. It's just I've learned so much from you. So thank you for that. GL: It was a great conversation. WPR: Thank you for your insight. CA: And thank you to our whole online audience, I mean, this is a journey, every day we're learning something new. And just in case anyone out there is feeling a little bit powerless, and afraid or you know, at the situation, I mean, the one thing that everyone can do right now, I think, is we can reach out to the people we know, we can encourage each of us to be our best selves in this moment. I really think it's what the world is going to need, when people are angry and fearful, we can turn into nasty people. But when we're — When we realize how much we need each other, and are willing to just reach out and share stories of hope and share what we're feeling and share possibilities, we can really impact each other, and I see so many incredible instances of that from around the world, whether it's Italians singing to each other joyfully from each other's balconies, or these sort of tales of heroism that some of our health workers have been engaged in all around the world. There's going to need to be a lot more of that. And honestly, every single person can play a part in how they are online, what they share, how they react. So I don't want to be overly, embarrassingly Kumbaya, but I kind of think we need that spirit right now a little bit. We need each other, and TED is going to try and play that role a bit. So if you hate that, maybe you don't need to be here, but I hope you don't hate that. I hope you like that and will be part of it. Whitney, it's so fun cohosting these, thanks to the rest of the amazing TED team who are everyone in our individual homes, they are sort of racing around, trying to make this stuff work technically. We're learning a bit each day, I hope. Thanks so much for being part of this. WPR: Thank you, everyone, thank you. We'll see you all back here tomorrow. |
How the world's longest underwater tunnel was built | null | TED-Ed | Flanked by two powerful European nations, the English Channel has long been one of the world’s most important maritime passages. Yet for most of its history, the channel’s rocky shores and stormy weather made crossing a dangerous prospect. Engineers of the early 1800's proposed numerous plans for spanning the 33 kilometer gap. Their designs included artificial islands linked by bridges, submerged tubes suspended from floating platforms, and an underwater passage more than twice the length of any existing tunnel. By the end of the century, this last proposal had captured European imagination. The invention of the tunnel boring machine and the discovery of a stable layer of chalk marl below the seabed made this fantastic tunnel more feasible. But the project’s most urgent obstacles were ones no engineer could solve. At the time, Britons viewed their geographic isolation as a strategic advantage, and fears about French invasion shut down plans for the tunnel. The rise of aerial warfare rendered these worries obsolete, but new economic concerns arose to replace them. Finally, 100 years after the initial excavation, the two countries reached an agreement— the tunnel would proceed with private funding. In 1985, a group of French and British companies invested the modern equivalent of 14 billion pounds, making the tunnel the most expensive infrastructure project to date. The design called for three separate tunnels— one for trains to France, one for trains to England, and one service tunnel between them. Alongside crossover chambers, emergency passages, and air ducts, this amounted to over 200 kilometers of tunnels. In 1988, workers began excavating from both sides, planning to meet in the middle. Early surveys of the French coast revealed the site was full of fault lines. These small cracks let water seep into the rock, so engineers had to develop waterproof boring machines. The British anticipated drier conditions, and forged ahead with regular borers. But only months into the work, water flooded in through undetected fissures. To drill in this wet chalk, the British had to use grout to seal the cracks created in the borer’s wake, and even work ahead of the main borer to reinforce the chalk about to be drilled. With these obstacles behind them, both teams began drilling at full speed. Boring machines weighing up to 1,300 tons drilled at nearly 3.5 meters per hour. As they dug, they installed lining rings to stabilize the tunnel behind them, making way for support wagons following each machine. Even at top speed, work had to proceed carefully. The chalk layer followed a winding path between unstable rock and clay, punctured by over 100 boring holes made by previous surveyors. Furthermore, both teams had to constantly check their coordinates to ensure they were on track to meet within 2 centimeters of each other. To maintain this delicate trajectory, the borers employed satellite positioning systems, as well as paleontologists who used excavated fossils to confirm they were at the right depth. During construction, the project employed over 13,000 people and cost the lives of ten workers. But after two and a half years of tunneling, the two sides finally made contact. British worker Graham Fagg emerged on the French side, becoming the first human to cross the channel by land since the Ice Age. There was still work to be done— from installing crossover chambers and pumping stations, to laying over a hundred miles of tracks, cables, and sensors. But on May 6, 1994, an opening ceremony marked the tunnel’s completion. Full public service began 16 months later, with trains for passengers and rail shuttles for cars and trucks. Today, the Channel Tunnel services over 20 million passengers a year, transporting riders across the channel in just 35 minutes. Unfortunately, not everyone has the privilege of making this trip legally. Thousands of refugees have tried to enter Britain through the tunnel in sometimes fatal attempts. These tragedies have transformed the tunnel’s southern entrance into an ongoing site of conflict. Hopefully, the structure’s history can serve as a reminder that humanity is at their best when breaking down barriers. |
How forgiveness can create a more just legal system | {0: 'Former Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow tackles the unintended effects of technology on those already impacted by discrimination and disadvantage.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | Would you ever forgive a person who kills a member of your family? In September of 2019, Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was sentenced for murder, and then the brother of the victim forgave her. Brandt Jean was 18 years old, and I joined the rest of the country watching on television in awe at that act of grace. But I also worried. I worried that people who are African American like Brandt Jean are expected to forgive more often than other people. And I worried that a white police officer like Amber Guyger receives a lesser sentence than other people who commit wrongful killings. But because I'm a law professor, I also worried about the law itself. The law leans so severely towards punishment these days that it's part of the problem. And that's what I want to talk about here. The powerful example of one individual's forgiveness makes me worry that lawyers and officials too often overlook the tools that law itself creates to allow forgiveness, when the principle should be the cornerstone of a thriving society. I worry that lawyers and officials do not adequately use the tools of forgiveness, by which I mean letting go of justified grievance. And those tools are many. They include pardons, commutations, expungement, bankruptcy for debt and the discretion that's held by police and prosecutors and judges. But I also worry — I worry a lot — (Laughter) I worry that these tools, when used, replicate the disparities, the inequities along the lines of race and class and other markers of advantage and disadvantage. Biases or privileged access are at work when United States presidents pardon people charged with crimes. Historically, white people are pardoned four times as often as members of minority groups for the same crime, same sentence. Forgiveness between individuals is supported by every religious tradition, every philosophic tradition. And medical evidence now shows the health benefits of letting go of grievances and resentments. As Nelson Mandela led South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy, he explained, "Resentment is like drinking a poison and hoping it will kill your enemies." Law can remove the penalties for those who apologize and seek forgiveness. For example, in 39 states in the United States and the District of Columbia, there are laws that allow medical professionals to apologize when something goes wrong and not fear that that statement could later be used against them in an action for damages. More actively, bankruptcy law offers debtors, under some conditions, the chance to start anew. Pardons and expungements sealing criminal records can, too. I have been teaching law for almost 40 years, hard to believe, but recently, I realized that we don't teach law students about the tools of forgiveness that are within the legal system, and nor do law schools usually explore the potential for new avenues for forgiveness that law can adopt or assist. These are lost opportunities. These are lost obligations, even, because the students that I teach will become prosecutors, judges, governors, presidents. Barack Obama, my former student, used his power as the President of the United States to give pardons. That released several hundred people from prison after the law changed to provide shorter sentences for the same drug crimes for which they had been convicted. But if he hadn't used his pardon power, they would still be in prison. Legal tools of forgiveness should be used more, but not without reason and not with bias. A "New Yorker" cartoon shows a judge with a big nose and a big mustache looking down at a defendant with the exact same nose and exact same mustache and says, "Obviously not guilty." (Laughter) Forgiveness could undermine the commitment that law has to treat people the same under the same circumstances, to apply rules evenly. In this age of resentment, mass incarceration, widespread consumer debt, we need more forgiveness, but we need a philosophy of forgiveness. We need to forgive fairly. Contrast the treatment globally of child soldiers with the treatment of juvenile offenders in the United States. International human rights condemn and punish adults who involve children in armed conflict as those most responsible, but treat the children themselves quite differently. The International Criminal Court, now with 122 member nations, convicted Thomas Lubanga, warlord in the [Democratic Republic of the] Congo, for enlisting, recruiting and deploying children, teens, as soldiers. Many nations commit to ensuring that people under the age of 15 do not become child soldiers, and most nations treat those who do become soldiers not as objects of punishment but as people deserving a fresh start. Compare and contrast how the United States treats juvenile offenders, where we severely punish minors, often moving them to adult courts, even adult prisons. And yet, like child soldiers, teens and children are drawn into violent activity in the United States when there are few options, when they are threatened or when adults induce them with money or ideology. The rhetoric of innocence is resonant when we talk about child soldiers, but not when we talk about teen gang members in the United States. Yet in both settings, youth are caught in worlds that are made by adults, and forgiveness can offer both accountability and fresh starts. What if, instead, young people caught in criminal activity and violence could have chances to accept responsibility while learning and rebuilding their lives and their own communities? Legal frameworks inviting youth to describe their conduct could also involve community members to hear and forgive. Called "restorative justice," such efforts emphasize accountability and service rather than punishment. Many schools in the United States have turned to use restorative justice methods to resolve conflicts and to prevent them, and to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. Some American high schools have replaced automatic suspensions with opportunities for victims to narrate their experiences and for offenders to take responsibility for their actions. As they describe their experiences and feelings about a theft or hateful graffiti or a verbal or physical assault, the victims and offenders often express strong emotions. And other members of the community take turns describing the impact of the offense on them. The leader is often a student peer, who is trained to deescalate the conflict and orchestrate a conversation about what the offender can do that would help the victim. Together, they come to an agreement about how to move forward, what the wrongdoer can do to repair the injury and what all could do to better avoid future conflicts. Consider this example, recently in a publication. A young woman named Mercedes M. transferred, in California, from one high school to another after she was so repeatedly suspended in her old high school for getting into fights. And here in her new high school, two other young women accused her of lying and called her the b-word. A counselor came over and talked to her and earned enough trust that she acknowledged she had stolen the shoes of one of the other classmates. Turns out, the three of them had known each other for a long time, and they didn't know any other way to deal with each other other than to fight. The facilitator invited them to participate in a circle, a confidential conversation about what happened, and they agreed. And initially, each of them expressed a lot of emotion. And then Mercedes apologized. And she said she had stolen the shoes, but she did so because she wanted to sell them and take the money to pay for a drug test so that her mother could show she was clean and try to regain custody of two younger children who were then in state protective care. The other girls heard this, saw Mercedes crying and they hugged her. They did not ask her to return what she'd stolen, but they did say they wanted a restart. They wanted a reason they could trust her. Later, Mercedes explained that she was sure she would have been suspended if they hadn't had this process. And her high school has reduced suspensions by more than half through the use of this kind of restorative justice method. Restorative justice alternatives involve offenders and victims in communicating in ways that an adversarial and defensive process does not allow, and it's become the go-to method in places like the District of Columbia juvenile justice system and innovations like Los Angeles's Teen Court. If tuned to fairness, forgiveness methods like bankruptcy would be available not only for the for-profit college that goes belly-up but also for the students stuck with the loans; pardons would not be given to campaign contributors; and black men would no longer have 20 percent longer criminal sentences than do white men, due to how judges exercise discretion. Forgiveness across the board is one way to avoid such biases. Sometimes, a society just needs a reset when it comes to punishment and debt. The Bible calls for periodic forgiveness of debts and freeing prisoners, and it recently helped to inspire a global movement. Jubilee 2000 joined Pope John Paul II and rock star Bono and over 60 nations in an effort to seek the cancellation and succeed in canceling the debt of developing countries, amounting to over 100 billion dollars of debt canceled, resulting in measurable reduction in poverty. In a similar spirit, there are people who are copying the techniques of commercial debt collectors who purchase debt for pennies on the dollar and then seek to enforce it. Late-night television host John Oliver partnered with a nonprofit group called RIP Medical Debt, and for only 60,000 dollars, they purchased 15 million dollars' worth of medical debt, and then they forgave it. (Applause) That allowed nearly 9,000 people to have a restart in their lives. This kind of precedent should trigger and encourage more such actions. It's time for a reset, given mass incarceration, medical and consumer debt and given indigent criminal defendants who are charged and put in debt because they're expected to pay for their own probation officers and their own electronic monitors. Forgiving violations of law or promises to pay back loans does pose risks. Forgiveness may encourage more violations. Economists even have a name for it. They call it "moral hazard." Should there be amnesty for immigration violations? Should a president offer pardons to protect himself or to induce lawbreaking? These are tough questions for our time. But escalating resentments hold their own dangers. So does attributing blame to individuals for circumstances largely outside their own control. To ask how law may forgive is not to deny the fact of wrongdoing. Rather, it's to widen the lens to enable glimpses of the larger patterns and to enable new choices that can go forward if we can wipe the slate clean. Thank you. (Applause) |
History vs. Sigmund Freud | null | TED-Ed | Working in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, he began his career as a neurologist before pioneering the discipline of psychoanalysis. He proposed that people are motivated by unconscious desires and repressed memories, and their problems can be addressed by making those motivations conscious through talk therapy. His influence towers above that of all other psychologists in the public eye. But was Sigmund Freud right about human nature? And were his methods scientific? Order, order. Today on the stand we have… Dad? Ahem, no, your honor. This is Doctor Sigmund Freud, one of the most innovative thinkers in the history of psychology. An egomaniac who propagated pseudoscientific theories. Well, which is it? He tackled issues medicine refused to address. Freud’s private practice treated women who suffered from what was called hysteria at the time, and their complaints hadn’t been taken seriously at all. From the women with depression he treated initially to World War I veterans with PTSD, Freud’s talking cure worked, and the visibility he gave his patients forced the medical establishment to acknowledge their psychological disorders were real. He certainly didn’t help all his patients. Freud was convinced that our behavior is shaped by unconscious urges and repressed memories. He invented baseless unconscious or irrational drivers behind the behavior of trauma survivors— and caused real harm. How’s that? He misrepresented some of his most famous case studies, claiming his treatment had cured patients when in fact they had gotten worse. Later therapists influenced by his theories coaxed their patients into "recovering" supposedly repressed memories of childhood abuse that never happened. Lives and families were torn apart. You can’t blame Freud for later misapplications of his work— that would be projecting. Plenty of his ideas were harmful without any misapplication. He viewed homosexuality as a developmental glitch. He coined the term penis envy— meaning women are haunted for life by their lack of penises. Freud was a product of his era. Yes, some of the specifics were flawed, but he created a new space for future scientists to explore, investigate, and build upon. Modern therapy techniques that millions of people rely on came out of the work he started with psychoanalysis. And today everyone knows there’s an unconscious— that idea was popularized Freud. Psychologists today only believe in a “cognitive unconscious,” the fact that you aren’t aware of everything going on at a given moment. Freud took this idea way too far, ascribing deep meaning to everything. He built his theories on scientific ideas that were outdated even in his own time, not just by today’s standards— for example, he thought individual psychology is derived from the biological inheritance of events in ancient history. And I mean ancient— like the Ice Age or the killing of Moses. Freud and his closest allies actually believed these prehistorical traumas had ongoing impacts on human psychology. He thought that the phase of cold indifference to sexuality during pubescence was literally an echo of the Ice Age. With fantastical beliefs like these, how can we take him seriously? Any renowned thinker from centuries past has ideas that seem fantastical by today’s standards, but we can’t discount their influence on this basis. Freud was an innovator linking ideas across many fields. His concepts have become everyday terms that shape how we understand and talk about our own experiences. The Oedipus complex? Ego and id? Defense mechanisms? Death wishes? All Freud. But Freud didn’t present himself as a social theorist— he insisted that his work was scientific. Are you saying he… repressed inconvenient facts? Freud’s theories were unfalsifiable. Wait, so you’re saying he was right? No, his ideas were framed so that there’s no way to empirically verify them. Freud didn’t even necessarily believe in the psychoanalysis he was peddling. He was pessimistic about the impact of therapy. What! I think I need to lie down! Many of Sigmund Freud’s ideas don’t hold up to modern science, and his clinical practices don’t meet today’s ethical standards. At the same time, he sparked a revolution in psychology and society, and created a vocabulary for discussing emotion. Freud made his share of mistakes. But is a thinker responsible for how subsequent generations put their ideas to use? Do they deserve the blame, credit, or redemption when we put history on trial? |
How you can help save the monarch butterfly -- and the planet | {0: 'In her book "Citizen Scientist," Mary Ellen Hannibal traces the origins of today’s tech-savvy citizen science movement back through centuries of amateur observations by writers and naturalists.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | Hi there. I'm in the habit of saying I would like it if butterflies could talk, but I've been recently reconsidering that, because we already have a pretty loud world. Can you imagine if butterflies were yakking out there all over the place? But I would like to ask butterflies one question, which is, what is the meaning of some of the stories that we humans tell about them? Because remarkably, all over the world, cultures have really similar stories, similar mythologies about butterflies having to do with the human soul. Some cultures tell us butterflies are carrying the souls of children who have died wrongly or too soon, and other cultures tell us that butterflies are carrying the souls of our ancestors among us. This butterfly is called a Kallima inachus. On one side, it looks like a beautiful butterfly, and on the other side, it looks like a leaf, and it folds up like a leaf to elude predators. So now you see it, now you don't, something hidden, something revealed. Maybe we got our ideas about the human soul from this butterfly. So it's possible that butterflies have some sort of outsized role in our afterlife. But in this life, in this world, butterflies are in really serious trouble. This is a moth. Moths and butterflies are related. Moths generally fly at night. This is called "praedicta," because Darwin predicted that it must exist. So today, more than 60 species of butterflies are endangered around the world, but even more than that, insects are declining, declining, declining. In the last 50 years, we've lost nearly 50 percent of the total number of bodies of insects. Now this is a disaster. It could impact us in a more serious way more quickly than climate change, because butterflies don't do that much in the ecosystem that we depend on, but they do things for other creatures that we do depend on, and that's the same story with all insect life. Insect life is at the very foundation of our life-support systems. We can't lose these insects. Biodiversity all over the globe is in a vast decline. Habitat loss, pesticides, herbicides and impacts of climate change. Habitat loss is very serious, and that's where we really have to get developing better, more mindfully. It's the worst of times, we are kind of overloaded with our problems. It's also the best of times — there's incredibly good news. We have exactly what we need. We have exactly the platform to save nature. It's called citizen science. So citizen science is generally a term used to mean people without a PhD contributing to scientific research. Sometimes, it's called community science, which gets at the communal purpose of citizen science, which is to do something for our commons together. It's amateur science. It's being turbocharged today by vast computing power, statistical analysis and the smartphone, but it's an ancient practice that people have always practiced. It's amateur science. Professional science has its roots in amateur science. Charles Darwin was a citizen scientist. He had no advanced degree, and he worked only for himself. So someone showed Darwin this Madagascar star orchid, which as a spur that's 12 inches long, and the spur is the part of a flower that the nectar is in. So this person showed this to Darwin and said, "This proves that evolution does not come about in a natural way. This flower proves that only God can make these incredibly bizarre and tricky-looking creatures on the earth, because no insect could possibly pollinate this. God must reproduce it." And Darwin said, "No, I'm sure that there is an insect somewhere with a proboscis long enough to pollinate that star orchid." And he was right. This is a map of the monarch butterfly. So, the monarch butterfly has a different story than that particular moth, but reflects the same kind of fundamental idea that Darwin had called coevolution, and coevolution is at the heart of how nature works, and it's also at the heart of what's going wrong with nature today. So over time, as the moth developed a longer proboscis, so the plant developed a longer spur. Over millions of years, the plant and the moth developed a relationship whereby they both make each other's chances of existence better. The monarch butterfly has a different kind of coevolutionary relationship, and today, it is at the heart of what's going wrong for the monarch butterfly. So this is a map of the monarch butterfly migration. The monarch does this amazing thing, and over the course of a year, it goes over the entirety of North America. It does this in four or five generations. The first generations only live a couple of weeks. They mate, they lay eggs and they die. The next generation emerges as butterflies and takes the next leg of the journey. Nobody knows how they do it. By the time the fifth generation comes back around — and that one lives longer, they overwinter in Mexico and California — by the time it gets there, those butterflies are going back to where their ancestors came from, but they've never been there before, and nobody that they're immediately related to has been there before either. We don't know how they do it. The reason we know they do this kind of migration — and we still have a lot of unanswered questions about the monarch migration — is because of citizen science. So for decades, people have made observations about monarch butterflies, where and when they see them, and they've contributed these observations to platforms like Journey North. This is a map of some observations of butterflies given to Journey North. And if you can see the dots are coded by what time of year those observations were made. So these massive amounts of data come into a place like Journey North, and they can create a map of this time of over a course of a year of where monarchs go. Also because of citizen science, we understand that monarch butterfly numbers are going down, down, down. So in the 1980s, the overwintering butterflies here in California, there were four million counted. Last year, 30,000. (Audience gasps) Four million to 30,000 since the 1980s. The monarchs on the east coast are doing a little better, but they're also going down. OK, so what are we going to do about it? Well, very organically, nobody really asking anybody to do it, people all over the continent are supporting monarch butterflies. The heart of the problem for monarchs is milkweed. It's another coevolutionary relationship, and here's the story. Milkweed is toxic. It has a poison in it that it evolved to deter other insects from eating it, but the monarch developed a different kind of relationship, a different strategy with the milkweed. Not only does it tolerate the toxin, the monarch actually sequesters the toxin in its body, thus becoming poisonous to its predators. Monarch butterflies will only lay their eggs on milkweed, and monarch caterpillars will only eat milkweed, because they need that toxin to actually create what they are as a species. So people are planting milkweed all over the country where we have lost milkweed due to habitat destruction, pesticide use, herbicide use and climate change impacts. You can create a lot of butterfly habitat and pollinator habitat on a windowsill. You go to a native nursery in your area and find out what's native to where you live, and you will bring beautiful things to yourself. Now, citizen science can do even more than rescue monarch butterflies. It has the capacity to scale to the level necessary that we need to mobilize to save nature. And this is an example. It's called City Nature Challenge, and City Nature Challenge is a project of the California Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. So for four years, City Nature Challenge has enjoined cities all over the globe to participate in counting up biodiversity in their cities. We're up to, like, a million observations of biodiversity collected by people around the globe this past April. The winner this year was South Africa, much to the chagrin of San Francisco. (Laughter) Look at them, they have more biodiversity than we do. It's kind of an interesting thing, what is revealed when you start seeing what are the natural resources where you live, because as we go forward, you want to live where there's more biodiversity. And by the way, citizen science is a very good tool for social justice and environmental justice goals, for helping reach them. You need to have data and you need to show a picture, you need to point to a cause and then you need to have the surgical strike to help support whatever that problem is. So City Nature Challenge, I think, should get a commendation from the UN. Has there ever been a global effort on behalf of nature undertaken in this coordinated manner? It's amazing, it's fantastic and it's really a pretty grassroots thing, and we get very interesting information about butterflies and other creatures when we do these bioblitzes. City Nature Challenge basically works with a tool called iNaturalist, and iNaturalist is your entry drug to citizen science. (Laughs) I suggest signing up for it on a laptop or on a desktop, and then you put the app on your phone. With iNaturalist, you take a picture of a bird, a bug, a snake, anything, and an artificial intelligence function and an expert vetting system works to verify that observation. The app gives the observation the date, the time, the latitude and the longitude, geolocates that observation. That's the data, that's the science of citizen science. And then that data is shared, and that sharing, that is the soul of citizen science. When we share data, we can see much bigger pictures of what's going on. There's no way to see that whole monarch migration without sharing data that's been collected over decades, seeing the heart and soul of how nature works through citizen science. This is a Xerces blue butterfly, which went extinct when it lost its habitat in Golden Gate Park. It had a coevolutionary relationship with an ant, and that's another story. (Laughter) I'll end by asking you, please participate in citizen science in some way, shape or form. It is an amazingly positive thing. It takes an army of people to make it really work. And I'll just add that I think butterflies probably really do have enough on their plate without carrying around human souls. (Laughter) But there's a lot we don't know, right? And what about all those stories? What are those stories telling us? Maybe we coevolved our souls with butterflies? Certainly, we are connected to butterflies in deeper ways than we currently know, and the mystery of the butterfly will never be revealed if we don't save them. So, please join me in helping to save nature now. Thank you. (Applause) |
Can you solve the sea monster riddle? | null | TED-Ed | According to legend, once every thousand years a host of sea monsters emerges from the depths to demand tribute from the floating city of Atlantartica. As the ruler of the city, you’d always dismissed the stories… until today, when 7 Leviathan Lords rose out of the roiling waters and surrounded your city. Each commands 10 giant kraken, and each kraken is accompanied by 12 mermites. Your city’s puny army is hopelessly outmatched. You think back to the legends. In the stories, the ruler of the city saved his people by feeding the creatures a ransom of pearls. The pearls would be split equally between the leviathans lords. Each leviathan would then divide its share into 11 equal piles, keeping one, and giving the other 10 to their kraken commanders. Each kraken would then divide its share into 13 equal piles, keeping one, and distributing the other twelve to their mermite minions. If any one of these divisions left an unequal pile or leftover pearl, the monsters would pull everyone to the bottom of the sea. Such was the fate of your fabled sister city. You rush to the ancient treasure room and find five chests, each containing a precisely counted number of pearls prepared by your ancestors for exactly this purpose. Each of the chests bears a number telling how many pearls it contains. Unfortunately, the symbols they used to write digits 1,000 years ago have changed with time, and you don’t know how to read the ancient numbers. With hundreds of thousands of pearls in each chest, there’s no time to recount. One of these chests will save your city and the rest will lead to its certain doom. Which do you choose? Pause the video to figure it out yourself. Answer in 3 Answer in 2 Answer in 1 There isn’t enough information to decode the ancient Atlantartican numeral system. But all hope is not lost, because there’s another piece of information those symbols contain: patterns. If we can find a matching pattern in arabic numerals, we can still pick the right chest. Let’s take stock of what we know. A quantity of pearls that can appease the sea monsters must be divisible by 7, 11, and 13. Rather than trying out numbers at random, let’s examine ones that have this property and see if there are any patterns that unite them. Being divisible by 7, 11, and 13 means that our number must be a multiple of 7, 11, and 13. Those three numbers are all prime, so multiplying them together will give us their least common multiple: 1001. That’s a useful starting place because we now know that any viable offering to the sea monsters must be a multiple of 1001. Let’s try multiplying it by a three digit number, just to get a feel for what we might get. If we try 861 times 1001, we get 861,861, and we see something similar with other examples. It’s a peculiar pattern. Why would multiplying a three-digit number by 1001 end up giving you two copies of that number, written one after the other? Breaking down the multiplication problem can give us the answer. 1001 times any number x is equal to 1000x + x. For example, 725 times 1000 is 725,000, and 725 x 1 is 725. So 725 x 1001 will be the sum of those two numbers: 725,725. And there’s nothing special about 725. Pick any three-digit number, and your final product will have that many thousands, plus one more. Even though you don’t know how to read the numbers on the chests, you can read which pattern of digits represents a number divisible by 1001. As with many problems, trying concrete examples can give you an intuition for behavior that may at first look abstract and mysterious. The monsters accept your ransom and swim back down to the depths for another thousand years. With the proper planning, that should give you plenty of time to prepare for their inevitable return. |
What it's really like to have autism | {0: 'Ethan Lisi believes we are all different and unique in our own way.'} | TED-Ed Weekend | Autism is something that many people know about. For example, some people think that autistic people are fair-skinned males that speak in monotone and constantly go on and on about the same topic. Some people think that autistic people do not know right from wrong, avoid attention and usually say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Some people think that autistic people are socially awkward and lack humor and empathy. Now if you agree with what I just said, I'm sorry to tell you, but you do not have the right impression of autism. How do I know? Because I have autism. I do have my own obsessions with things like electronics and public transit, but that does not define me. Each of us are different and unique in our own way. However, there is not a lot of information out there on what an autistic life actually looks like, so people often resort to stereotypes. And we see these often in the media. Some of the more common stereotypes in the media include being socially awkward, lacking empathy and even being a supergenius. And the lack of knowledge on autism doesn't stop there either. Did you know that some people are trying to find a cure for autism? That's because they see it as a negative thing, as a disease. Many people are challenging the idea and to us, we think autism is not a disease. It's just another way of thinking and looking at the world. Our brains function differently from most people's brains. Think of it like comparing and Xbox and a PlayStation. They're both highly capable consoles with different programming. But if you put your Xbox game in a PlayStation, it won't work, because the PlayStation communicates differently. When I look in the mirror, I see someone who thinks differently. Oh, and I also see nice hair. (Laughter) (Applause) But the question is, am I really diseased if I just think differently? The main problem with living autistic in today's society is that the world just isn't built for us. There's so many ways that we can get overwhelmed. For example, the thing that makes me overwhelmed all the time is loud noises, which means I never crank up my music really loud and I usually am not a fan of large parties. But other people on the spectrum might get overwhelmed with things like bright lights or strong smells or gooey textures that all have the potential to create anxiety. Think about all of the social gatherings you've been to in the past. Was there loud music playing? Were there really bright lights? Were there lots of different food smells going on at the same time? Were there lots of conversations happening all at once? Those things may not have bothered you guys, but for someone with autism, they can be quite overwhelming. So in those situations, we do something called stimming, which is like a repetitive motion or a noise or some other random fidgeting that may or may not seem normal. Some people will flap their arms or make a noise or spin. Ya, it's basically our way of zoning out. It can often feel necessary for us to stim. However, it's often frowned upon, and we're forced to hide it. When we're forced to hide our autistic traits like this, it's called masking. And some people mask better than others. I mask so well sometimes that people don't even know I'm autistic until I give them the big reveal. (Laughs) But at the end of the day, it gets really stressful. Even something like doing my homework at night becomes very tiring. Some people think, because of our ability to mask, that this is the cure to autism. However, all it really does is makes us ashamed of showing our true selves. Another common stereotype that is often associated with autism is that autistic people lack empathy. And again, this is not true. I actually have lots of empathy. I'm just not really good at showing it. Whenever a friend is trying to tell me some of the struggles that they're going through, I often don't know how to express my reply. And that is why I don't show as much empathy as my nonautistic friends do. Emotional expression, however much or however little, is difficult for me. And that is because I am bursting inside with every single emotion one feels at all times. Though of course, I cannot express it that way. Otherwise, let's say, happiness, for example, would come out as a huge burst of gleeful wheezing, hand flapping and loud vocal "woohoos." (Laughter) Whereas you may just smile. (Laughter) Whether it be receiving an awesome birthday gift or listening to a tragic story on the news, I cannot really express my reply without bursting, so once again, I have to mask it in order to appear normal. My inner feelings are unlimited, but my mind only lets me express extremes or nothing. So my ... I am not great with my emotions, and I communicate differently, and because of that, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. This diagnosis helps me and my friends and family to know how my mind works. And in the world, approximately one percent of the population is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. And this number is growing. However, we are still a big minority. And there's still lots of people that do not see us as equals to other people. This is my family. And in my family, there is one other person who is also autistic. My mother. Yes, adult women can also be autistic. My dad and my brother are both nonautistic. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult for us to communicate with each other, however. Sometimes I'll say something like, "Oh, Toronto's Union Station, right?" thinking that I can help them to remember certain aspects of it. When they get confused, I often have to elaborate myself on that. And we often have to say things in a number of different ways so that everyone understands. However, despite all that, we all love each other and respect each other as equals. In his book "NeuroTribes," author Steve Silberman states that autism and other mental conditions should be seen as naturally human, naturally part of a human spectrum and not as defects. And this is something that I agree to completely. If autism was seen as part of a natural human spectrum, then the world could be designed to work better for autistic people. I am not ashamed of my autism. And I may not think like you, or act like you, but I am still human and I am not diseased. Thank you. (Applause) |
It's OK to feel overwhelmed. Here's what to do next | {0: 'The author of "Eat, Pray, Love," Elizabeth Gilbert has thought long and hard about some big topics. Her fascinations: genius, creativity and how we get in our own way when it comes to both.', 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.', 2: 'Helen Walters is the head of curation at TED, where she has the immense privilege of overseeing the work of an absurdly talented group of specialist curators and deep thinkers to bring the very sharpest minds and ideas to the TED stage. '} | TED Connects | Chris Anderson: Well, hello, Helen. Very nice to see you. CA: You staying well? Helen Walters: How's it going? CA: These are mad, mad, mad, mad, mad days. So many emotions. Not all bad, happily, but I'm just so aware that, among the people listening to this, some are in really tough times right now. I hope this is going to be a beautiful hour of therapy and help in its own way, because we have with us just an extraordinary author, an extraordinary mind, Elizabeth Gilbert, obviously known for her astonishing best-selling success with "Eat, Pray, Love," although her favorite book from my point of view is called "Big Magic," where the subtitle is, "Creative Living Beyond Fear." "Creative Living Beyond Fear." Now when you think about it, that is a pretty good agenda for today's conversation, I think. Liz describes the emotional landscape of our lives, I think like no one else I've read, and I'm not even her target audience. She's really extraordinary in doing that. She gave an amazing TED Talk 11 years ago now, "In pursuit of your creative genius." It really reframed how to think of creativity. It's been seen, like, 19 million times or something, and it's really changed how a lot of people — they're just open to the creative genius coming from the outside. So it's a delight to welcome to the TED Connects stage Elizabeth Gilbert. Elizabeth Gilbert: Hey, Chris. CA: Great to see you. How are you? Where are you? Who are you living with or staying with? What's up? EG: I'm fine. I don't want to brag, but I'm in New Jersey, where anybody would want to be. I'm by myself. I've got a little house out in the country, and I think I'm on day 17 of no human contact other than virtually, and I'm well. I'm not anybody you need to be worrying about right now. So I'm good. CA: Wow. Well, so in a way, you're having a related experience to what so many people are having. I mean, these are days of isolation for many people, and that brings with it lots of difficult emotions, in a way. And we're going to go through many of them, I hope, in the next hour. So I'm hoping to talk with you about — I wrote down a list here: about anxiety, loneliness, curiosity, creativity, procrastination, grief, connection and hope. How about that? That's our agenda. Are you up for that? EG: I think that's the whole buffet. (Laughs) Just a little light tasting menu of all the mass of human emotions. Let's do it. Absolutely. CA: I think it's probably good to dive straight in with the anxiety that I know a lot of people are feeling right now. So many reasons to be anxious, both for yourself, your loved ones, and just for this time and for the world and how we all get through this. Have you been feeling anxiety, Liz? And how do you think of it? What can you say to us? EG: I have been, and I think you would have to be either a sociopath or totally enlightened not to be feeling anxiety at a moment like this. So I would say that the first thing that I would want to encourage everybody to do is to give themselves a measure of mercy and compassion for the difficult emotions that you're feeling right now. They're extremely understandable. I think sometimes our emotions about our emotions become a bigger problem, so if you're feeling frightened and anxious, and then you're layering shame on top of that because you feel like you should be handling it better, or you should be doing your isolation better, or you should be creating more while you're alone, or you should be serving the world in some better way, now you've just multiplied the suffering, right? So I think that the antidote for that, first of all, is just a really warm, loving dose of compassion and mercy towards yourself, because if you're in anxiety, you're a person who is suffering right now, and that deserves a show of mercy. The second thing that I would say about anxiety is this, that here's what I think is the central paradox of the human emotional landscape that I'm finding particularly fascinating right this moment, and it's really come to light for me. So there are these two aspects of humanity that don't match — hence the word paradox — but they really define us. And the first is that there is no species on earth more anxious than humans. It's a hallmark of our species, because we have the ability slash curse to imagine a future. And also, once you've lived on earth for a little while, you have the experience to recognize this terrifying piece of information, which is that literally anything can happen at literally any moment to literally any person. And because we have these vast, rich, colorful imaginations, we can see all sorts of terrifying movies in our heads about all of the possibilities and all of the scariest things that could occur. And actually, one of the scariest things that could occur is occurring. It's something that people have imagined in fiction and imagined in science, and it's actually happening right now, so that's quite terrifying. The paradox is that, in that level, we're very bad, emotionally, at fear and anxiety, because we stir ourselves up to a very heated degree because of our imaginations about how horrible it can get, and it get can get very horrible, but we can imagine it even worse. The paradox is that we're also the most capable, resourceful and resilient species that has ever lived on earth. So history has shown that when change comes to humanity — either on the global level, like it's happening now, or on the personal level — we're really good at it. We're really good at adaptation. And I think that if we can remember that, it can help to actually mitigate the fear. And you can remember it in a historical perspective, by looking at what humanity has gone through, and what we have not only survived but figured out how to thrive through. And you can also look at it at a personal level, where you can make an inventory of what you yourself have survived, and notice, as I often notice, my panic and my anxiety about the imagined future is deadly on my nervous system, but I actually have discovered that when there's an actual emergency in the moment, I tend to be pretty good at it. And I think most of us are like that. You'll see that repeated in history in so many examples. I think about those heartbreaking and devastating phone messages that people were leaving for their loved ones from the towers on September 11th, and you can hear the calm, the calm in peoples' voices. The biggest emergency ever was happening, and in that moment, intuition told them what to do. The important thing to do now is to make this phone call. And I think if you can trust that when the point of emergency actually arrives, you'll be able to meet it, and then when the world changes, you'll be able to adapt to it — it certainly helps me calm down. CA: I mean, I guess there's a reason why fear is there. It didn't just evolve by accident. It's supposed to direct our behavior and help us avoid danger, and it's just that sometimes, it gets out of control and actually gets in our way and damages us. I mean, any specific advice on how someone could turn their fear into something useful, at this moment? EG: Can I tell you a story that I'm using as a touchstone for myself right now and drawing wonder and inspiration from? So, some of you may have heard of a young woman named Amanda Eller. She was in the news recently, because she got lost in Hawaii in the wilderness for 17 days, and there was a massive, massive hunt for her, because she had left her car, she'd gone for a simple hike, had left her phone in her car, went up into the woods, took a wrong turn, and then had this disastrous 17 days, fell off a cliff, broke her leg, walked for 40 miles on a broken knee, lost her shoes in a flash flood. She had to sleep packed in mud in order to protect herself from the cold and the mosquitoes. She was eating moths. I mean, just a harrowing story of survival. I met her recently, and she was so lit and radiant with this kind of serenity and this kind of wonder and joy, and I said, "How are you like this? You went through one of the most traumatizing things that a person could go through." She said, "First of all, I discovered that I can survive anything," going back to this idea of how resourceful and adaptive humans actually are. But the piece of her story that I am using like a life raft right now is that she said, on her second day in the jungle, when she realized that she was truly and very much in trouble — she'd already spent one night in the woods and she was completely lost and she was totally alone and no one knew where she was, and she was full of terror — she said she closed her eyes and she prayed or asked or requested, she made a wish to herself, to consciousness, to the universe, and she said, "Please take my fear away, and when I open my eyes, have it be gone, and have it be gone and have it not come back." And she opened her eyes, and it was gone, and it was replaced by intuition. And I think intuition is a little bit the opposite of fear, because fear is the terror that you feel about a frightening imagined future. Intuition can only happen when you're in the moment. And so, from that point forward, she did not experience fear for the rest of the time she was in the woods. She just was guided by some deep intuitive sense, located somewhere between her sternum and her navel, and in every moment, she would ask it, "Right or left?" "Up or down?" "Eat this? Don't eat this?" And just trust it. Complete, absolute surrender to the intuition of the moment. And she said it hasn't returned, the fear hasn't returned, and she still guides her life that way. So it's a return to some sense that there's a navigational system within you that will, if you stay present in this actual moment, tell you what to do one moment to the next. Now, if you want to suffer, pop out of the moment and imagine a future, and then you can suffer indefinitely. So it is almost like a spiritual or meditation practice, and anybody out there who's done any spiritual or meditation practices, this is what you were practicing for. You were practicing for this moment, and those of you who haven't tried that, this might be a really [inaudible] to be centered in the instant. CA: Wow, that's a remarkable story, and I guess what I'm hearing is two things. It's one, just the reaching out to the universe there, but specifically, there was a decision to let go of the future and just to focus on the moment. EG: That's it, yeah. Nothing will bring you more pain than the future, and what I'm seeing happening right now — I said this to you the other day, Chris — is there's a relatively small percentage of the population who will suffer physically from this disease, and there's a larger percentage who are going to suffer economically from it. But then there's this massive, uncountable number of people who will and are suffering from it emotionally, and right now, those people are my concern, because they're really in pain, and there's millions and millions of them. CA: So you're living there by yourself, Liz, and many others are in that same circumstance right now. I suspect some are feeling, like, crushing loneliness. Talk about that. How do you handle loneliness in a situation like this, when it's so alien to everything that we as a social species are usually about? We crave other people. We crave touch. We crave hugs. We want to be there with people. How can we avoid this being a period of crushing loneliness? EG: I don't think you can avoid it, but I think you can walk toward it. And I think that, for me, I've deliberately, many times in my life, gone off into isolation in order to face those things. I've gone on long meditation retreats. This year, I was in India, and I spent 17 days alone with no contact with anybody, which was a weird practice run for what's happening right now. And as I see people really losing it and feeling like they're crawling out of their skin, either from anxiety, fear, boredom, anger, blame, loneliness, depression, all of these things that come up when you are forced to just be in your own presence. I know all of those feelings because, as a meditator, I've experienced all of those, in stillness. The hardest person in the entire world to be with is yourself, and so the only way that I learned, as a meditator, to be able to survive and endure my own company was with universal human compassion toward me, and to recognize that this is a person who is suffering right now from loneliness, and this person needs kindness from self towards self. And it's a very high teaching, but I think that it's a very interesting moment to practice that. And so what I would suggest to people — and again, this takes a certain amount of resolve and it takes a certain amount of curiosity about learning more about the human experience — what I'm seeing people do is people are spinning away from that isolation because they're so terrified of it. What happened with the world right now is that basically all of our pacifiers were yanked out of our mouths. Everything that we ever can do and reach for that can get us out of having to be in the existential crisis of being alone with ourselves was taken away. And I see people rushing to fill it, I mean, constant Zoom meetings and constant parties online and constant interaction, and all of that is lovely, but from a spiritual and psychological standpoint, from a creative standpoint, I would say if you have any curiosity about this, don't be in such a hurry to rush away from an experience that could actually transform your life. I think sometimes the experiences that can transform us the most intimately are the ones that we want to run away from, and I think of a story that the Dalai Lama told about one of his teachers. When the Chinese invaded Tibet, and all the monks were running into India for safety, one of his teachers, who was one of the great masters, the last glimpse that the Dalai Lama had of him was that he was walking into China — very patiently and very slowly, toward it. Everybody else was running away from it — he was walking toward it, and I think there's a level at which first responders do that, and in the real world, in an intimate way, they go into the emergency, they go toward the emergency. All the people who are trying to solve this now in worldly ways are walking toward the emergency. But there's a way that you can do it emotionally as well and that is to walk with curiosity and with an open mind toward your most difficult and painful emotions without resistance, and say, "What is it like for a person to feel like they don't have something to do for an hour?" (Laughs) And you can open up your compassion in that. There's so many lessons in compassion that can be found here. How about a general universal mercy that we can all feel toward people who are in solitary confinement. Let's have that be part of the conversation. Now you've experienced it for two days in your own house. Maybe it's time to change the prison system? You see how hard this is. Or you can have compassion toward people who have lost a loved one and they're alone. By feeling your own feelings, you can open up your feelings more universally toward the world. So I think there's a great opportunity here for growth on the personal level, but you have to have almost a whimsical curiosity to be the one walking into China rather than the one away from it. And that's how I'm doing it right now. CA: So let's follow up on that word "curiosity" that you've used a few times there. I mean, a lot of wisdom that I've heard sort of thrown around online right now is, "This is a great time to follow your passion and dive deep into whatever it is you've most been wanting to do." I mean, in "Big Magic," you made an argument that following your passion isn't necessarily the wisest strategy. You argued, no, don't do that, follow curiosity. Does that apply now? Make that case. EG: Yeah, you know, I've been on a personal crusade to rid the world of the world "passion" as an instruction for people on how as they should be living, because I know that in my case, it brings me nothing but anxiety. "Purpose" is another one that has become a cudgel that we use to bludgeon ourselves into thinking that we're not doing enough or that we're doing life right or that you're supposed to be more useful, more productive, you're supposed to be changing the world, or uncovering some particular talent that only you have and with it, you're supposed to transform everybody and monetize it, no pressure. I start to get hives even repeating that, but that's what we've been taught, that purpose and passion are everything. I would like to replace it with a far gentler word, and I think "curiosity" is very gentle, because the stakes are so much lower. The stakes of passion say you have to shave your head and move to India and get rid of all your possessions and start up, like — It's so intense. But curiosity is a very simple, universal experience that causes you to want to look at something just a tiny bit closer, and you don't have to change your life around it. You just look, and it might be taking a weekend to try something new for a little while. It's almost so easily missed, and I think so many times, we're looking way up at the sky for the sign from God of what our passion and what our purpose is supposed to be, and meanwhile, there's this lovely little trail of breadcrumbs of curiosity that if you can slow down — and again, this is about not rushing out of the experience of being silent, still and alone — if you can slow down, you might be able to see them. But if I could say one thing I'm noticing is an obstacle right now — because I think a lot of people thought, "Isolation, great, this is the perfect time for me to learn Italian and take that calligraphy class and start writing that novel," and they find that they're actually in a paralysis of anxiety and they're not creating anything or doing anything. First of all, again, like, a blanket of mercy on you. These are hard times, and it might take you a minute in your nervous system and your mind to adjust to the new reality. But the second thing I would say is that when people are saying they're having trouble with their creativity because they're in isolation, I might daringly suggest that perhaps you're not in enough isolation. And by that I mean, are you monitoring how much external stimulus you're bringing of this disaster into your home? So if you're sitting watching the news all day, what you're doing is you're bringing the disaster into your work space. You're bringing it into your soul. You're bringing it into your mind. And you're going to create the opposite of a creative environment, an environment of fear, panic and urgency. So I think if you're going to be a good steward of your creativity right now, you have to isolate a little bit from the news. And that doesn't mean disconnecting, it means I get up every morning and after I've meditated, I read the New York Times and I give myself 40 minutes with it, and then that's it for the day, because I know that if I bring in any more, I'm going to go into a traumatized state and then I won't be able to follow my intuition, I won't be able to help people, because I myself will be suffering, and I won't be able to be present for this very interesting moment in my life and in history, and I want to remain present for it as much as I can. So there's a discipline of being a good steward of your senses and deciding what you're going to put your senses in front of. CA: Helen. HW: Liz, there's an outpouring on Facebook of gratitude for you. People are so grateful, and grateful for the calm that you are instilling in us all, so thank you, from them and from me. We've also had a number of questions about grief. We're kind of dealing with grief at a different scale at the moment. One person has already lost five people to coronavirus. And so any thoughts of how to manage grief at this scale or how to process this in a way that honors both them and yourself? EG: First of all, my condolences. And I think any words that I would say about somebody who just lost five family members could only be inadequate. Grief is bigger than us. It's bigger than your efforts to manage it, and if you want to hold yourself and your family members compassionately through grief, you have to allow that it cannot be managed. And I think that grief management is something that we've kind of created in our very Western idea that if we can figure out something, we can avoid suffering from it, so if we can figure out how to translate grief and if we can figure out how to walk through grief, then we won't have to experience the magnitude of it. Many of you know that I lost the love of my life two years ago from pancreatic and liver cancer, and I was with her when she died, and I've been walking through my own path of grief, so I know what it feels like to lose the person in the world who is the most important to you, which is of course the biggest fear that we all have. I know that you can survive it, but I know that you survive it by allowing yourself to feel it. And again, to go back to the metaphor of the monk walking directly into China, into conflict rather than away from it, do you have the courage to let it break over you like waves? I wish I could remember her name. There's this extraordinary woman who wrote a book called "Here If I Need You," and she's a chaplain for the police department in Maine, and she's in charge of knocking on people's doors and giving them the worst news they're ever going to hear in their life, when she goes with the police when something happens. And she told a story once that I found very moving and very helpful for me in my grief. She said what she'd witnessed through years and years of sitting with people through what is literally the worst moment of their life, the nightmare of that loss, is that when she knocks on that door and tells that person, your daughter, your family member, your husband, your mother has been killed, there's this universal collapse where the person will just be — it is the tidal wave that comes and just takes you down and you lose all civilization, you lose all your attainments, all your wisdom. Nothing can stand up to that. You literally go to the floor. And you sob and you grieve, and she holds them through that. And then she said that what she's learned is the most astonishing thing, that that never lasts more than a half an hour, that first wave. It can't. You actually physiologically can't sustain that, and if you let it break over you and you just allow it, then within a half an hour, usually sooner — and she said this has happened every single time she's been with somebody with a loved one's death — the very next thing that happens is that that person calms down, they catch a breath, and the next question they ask is a very reasonable question. "Where is the body? What do we do next? When can we have the funeral? Who else was in the car?" And with that question, she says, they start to rebuild their new life already with this new piece of information that even an hour ago would have seemed unsurvivable. And she uses that as an example of, once again, the tremendous psychological resilience of a human being. And it doesn't mean that they will never grieve again. It doesn't mean that their grieving journey is over. It just means that, somewhere in their mind, that it's landed, and now, already, they're making a plan about, "OK, who do we need to notify, what's the next thing we need to do." And again, if you can remember this as you go through your panic, if you can remember that in the moment of emergency, there will be an intuitive, deep sense that will tell you there's going to be some next steps and it's time for us to take those next steps, and if you can also remember that resilience is our shared genetic and psychological inheritance — we are, each and every one of us, no matter how anxious you feel you are, no matter how ridden by fear you feel you are, every single one of us is the genetic survivor of hundreds of thousands of years of survivors. Each one of us came from a line of people who made the next correct intuitive move, survived incredibly difficult things, and were able to pass their genes on. So almost to the biological level, you can relax into a trust that when the moment comes where you will be faced with the biggest challenge, you will be able to draw on a deep reservoir of shared human consciousness that will say, "Now it's time to make the next move, and we can do this." HW: So beautiful. So many more questions. I will be back. EG: Thanks, Helen. CA: Thank you, Liz. I think the author's name was Kate Braestrup. EG: That's it. CA: I guess that's a book, if you need a book right now, "Here If You Need Me" by Kate Braestrup. EG: Very good, yeah. CA: Liz, you and I got to have a conversation a few months after Rayya passed away. It was actually the first-ever episode of the TED Interview podcast we did. And I found that it was probably my favorite episode ever of the TED Interview. And it was so moving how you spoke about your grief then. And I feel like that's a potential resource to people. I know we were both sitting there shedding tears, and I found that an extraordinary experience personally, to be sure. But somehow ... in this moment, if you follow this journey of curiosity, if you walk towards some of the harder moments, do you think that this actually can be a creative time for people if they're willing to do that? EG: Absolutely, and I don't think creativity in this case has to necessarily mean that you write the Great American Novel or start that business you always intended to start. It doesn't need to be so literal. We're going to be creating new worlds and new lives on the other side of this, and we're going to be doing that individually and we're going to be doing that collectively. I think of the shoots of small trees that can only come up after massive forest fires, where seed pods have to explode under great heat. We're in a kind of crucible moment right now, and I wouldn't begin to have the hubris to predict what sort of creativity will come, but look, if history is any measure, what we'll probably see is people at their best and people at their worst. But I think we'll see more of people at their best, because that's typically how it works. CA: I mean, your model of how creativity happens is that it doesn't all come from within. It's not like you have to sit there, saying, "OK, this is my moment to be creative. Come on. Be creative. Be creative." It involves, fundamentally, an openness to something coming to you, to be open, to be curious, listening, but then just to be open to that moment. Perhaps that could apply even more now than ever, just because we have this huge distraction of the news, some other distractions are taken away. Is there a chance that if people listened, they actually can receive more at this moment? EG: I think so, and I think, again, if you stop thinking about your self-isolation and your social distancing as quarantine and you start thinking of it as a retreat, you'll find that you can't really tell the difference between quarantine and retreat. You know, a lot of you out there have dreamed, I've heard you, because I talked about going to India to an ashram for four months and God, I can't tell you how many people I've heard say, "I wish I could do that." I'm like, "Well, you got it." And by the way, this is what it felt like. This is what it felt like to learn how to be present with yourself. I think my screen needs to move a bit. To learn how to be present with yourself means sitting in a lot of terror, sitting in a lot of anxiety, sitting in a lot of fear, sitting in a lot of shame, and being able to allow that without having to resist it, without having to reach outside yourself for something to numb yourself with. I also want to tell a story that a friend of mine, Martha Beck, told me about when she goes to South Africa and teaches animal-tracking courses. And she works with all these great African animal trackers, and these old men who have had these skills passed down for generations. And she was using it as an example of the difference between focus and openness. So I think sometimes the mistake people make when they want to be creative is they think they have to get really focused, and focus is an anxiety-producing energy as well. You've got to drill down and you feel your whole body tense. But what she described witnessing in these animal trackers is when they go out to hunt the lions, these old, old men, the very first thing they do is they sit down against a tree and they appear to go to sleep. They drop into a state that she calls and that the mystics call "wordless oneness." And wordless oneness, you can also call meditation. You can also call it the zone. But it's a stillness where you actually can drop your nervous system into such a quiet place that you have 360-degree awareness of your senses and of presence. And they'll sit like that, apparently doing nothing, for an extremely long time, just looking through half-lidded eyes at the world. And then, maybe an hour, two hours in, all of the sudden, they'll say, "The lion's over there." And so for me, I've learned to hold my creative wishes lightly in that same way. I'm between books right now and I don't have an idea for a book and in the past, that would have made me really anxious, but now I know — take a lot of naps, go for a lot of walks, do a lot of drawings. I'm doing weird little art projects as I'm sitting here, to distract my mind. CA: Wait, wait. Bring that back. Hold that up. EG: Owls. (Laughs) CA: Aww. EG: Aren't they dear? CA: They're beautiful. Goodness me. EG: Well, I'm just playing with color and texture because it calms me, and I think if you can't think of what to do right now, I would suggest doing what you used to do when you were 10 years old that made you feel happy and relaxed, and that's often creativity and play. And for many of us who were anxious children — and I was an anxious child — we learned at an early age that we could sedate ourselves with our curiosity and with our play, and then, usually around adolescence, the world taught us that there were faster and more immediate ways to bump out of that anxiety through sex or substances or distraction or workaholism or whatever we did and not have to sit with ourselves. And I think right now is a really good opportunity — You actually were on the right track when you were 10, whatever it was. So, you know, get some LEGOs. Get some LEGOs, get some coloring books, just get your hands in the mud, do whatever it is that will actually ground you into this, again, to take you out of the futurizing and the future-tripping that's going to cause you nothing but anxiety and not going to make you be of service. There's such a thing, too, that I just want to touch on if I can, for a minute, about empathetic overload and empathetic meltdown. We're taught that empathy is a good thing. I would suggest that in a case this traumatic, what you want to talk about replacing empathy with is compassion, and the difference is extremely important. So compassion means "I'm actually not suffering right now, you are, I see your suffering, and I want to help you." That's what compassion is. Empathy is "You're suffering, and now I'm suffering because you're suffering." So now we have two people suffering and nobody who can serve, and nobody who can be of help, and if you knew how your empathetic suffering actually makes you into another patient who needs assistance, you would be more willing to dip into compassion. And what underlies compassion is the virtual courage, the courage to be able to sit with and witness somebody else's pain without inhabiting it yourself so much that you become another person who is suffering and now, there are no helpers. And it takes an enormous amount of courage to be able to watch that without diving into it and joining it and becoming sick yourself. CA: I mean, if empathy is just a feeling, does compassion, your use of compassion imply that it's turning that feeling into something potentially practical to actually do something, if you can, for that person? EG: It's recognizing that if I feel your pain, I can't help you in your pain, because now my pain has taken over me, and sometimes, I think all you need to do is know that and it makes you turn the ship. Right? One of my favorite teachers, Byron Katie, says, "My favorite thing about my suffering is that it isn't yours." "My favorite thing about my suffering is that it isn't yours. My favorite thing about your suffering is that it isn't mine." So it will be, eventually, we all take a turn suffering. You cannot move through this earth without it. When it's your turn, you'll know. When it's not your turn, stay out of that field of somebody else's pain, because you can't help them when you're in pain yourself. And then see if you can find the inner resolve and courage. And I think some of that is just based on accepting the Buddhist First Noble Truth, which is that suffering is an unavoidable aspect of life on earth. We're all going to be in it at some point. We've all been in it at some point. And now, how can I help? I'm not saying this is easy. I'm just saying, also, if you're suffering from empathetic overload and empathetic meltdown, which means your adrenals are up, your stress is up, your endorphins are down, you're going into a parasympathetic collapse — this would be another time to discipline yourself to stay away from the news, because you actually will have a breakdown, and you won't be able to help the people around you who are the people who need help. CA: But have you seen any signs that if someone takes that empathy and compassion, let's say, and decides to act in some way, big or small, on behalf of someone, that actually shifts how they feel, that there's a healthiness to that? Or is that the language of just inducing more guilt in people? EG: No, I think there's a beautiful healthiness that can come from being of service, and that's also how I've been medicating my anxiety through this, by showing up in ways that I can with whatever resources I've got. Here's what you have to keep in mind, though, and this is what I keep reminding people. Right now, in my own personal sphere, there is more need than I have resources to fix. So I have to begin with that reality, and I have to have the courage to sit in that reality soberly and acknowledge that that's the case. The second thing I think emotional sobriety would require of me right now is to recognize that this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. And so the first week of the crisis, I had this deluge of all my really energized, let's-save-the-world friends, all my creative friends, everybody was e-mailing, texting, Zooming, and they all had a response. "Let's do this! Let's do this! Let's fix it this way!" And I found myself joining with some of them and not joining with others, just, again, based on my intuition, but I also found myself cautioning them, "Guys, this is a marathon." We're in mile one of what's going to be a very long marathon. So pace yourselves, and pace your resources. Don't overgive to the point where you collapse, because we're still going to need helpers two months from now, and we're still going to need helpers six months from now. And so, find a steady pace and be willing to be in it for the entire long haul. CA: Yeah. Helen. HW: Such great advice, Liz, and so many questions pouring in. One of them is from a therapist who confesses that she, and many of her clients, are having trouble with the letting go of control in this moment, and wonders if you have any advice on how to let go of control in order to be willing to feel everything that we're enduring. EG: Just this ... This sense that you had that you had control was a myth to begin with. And that may not be comforting, except that I find it very comforting. You know, control is an illusion, and there are times where we're able to fool ourselves because we're so good at technology, we're so good at creating safe worlds where we're able to trick ourselves into believing that we're in control of any of this. But we're not, and the paradox, for me, of surrender is how relaxing it is. Nobody ever wants to surrender, because nobody wants to lose control, but if you recognize that you never had control, all you ever had was anxiety, and then you let go of the myth of control, you'll find that, I find that if I even say that sentence, "I'm losing control," and then I remind myself, "You never had control, all you had was anxiety, and that's what you're having right now." So you're not letting go of anything. Surrender means letting go of something you never even had. So there's an awakening that's happening right now, where what's happening is not that you're losing control. What's happening is that, for the first time, you're noticing that you never had it. And the world is doing its job. The job of the world is to change, constantly, and sometimes radically, and sometimes immediately, and it's doing its job, and that is also the norm of things. And again, we are adaptive and we're resilient and we can handle it. But I don't kid myself for a minute to think that I'm in control of anything that's ever happening. My realm of control is extremely small. It's usually about, like, might be able to go get a glass of water right now. Like, there's not a lot that I'm in control of. And I'm actually (Inaudible) I've ever been. HW: One more question from online, if I may, and then I will jump off again. You know, Chris, you and I, we're all in a pretty privileged position. TED has been able to go remote. We're able to work remotely. But many, many, many millions of people in the US and beyond are not able to do that, and people are really suffering. How can we help? What are your thoughts about people who are not able to socially distance, who are losing their jobs, the global catastrophe that is unveiling? How can we think about that in a humane and compassionate way? EG: It's crushing, and again, as with the same case of the person who said they had lost five family members, I can't, sitting in this position of comfort and safety, say anything that I think is going to be accurate and appropriate to that, other than to say that I just think of this Indian proverb that I keep going back to, which is, "I store my grain in the belly of my neighbor." Western, capitalistic society has taught and trained us to hoard long before this, long before this happened and people were hoarding toilet paper and canned goods. Advertising and the whole capitalist model has taught us scarcity, it's taught us that you have to be surrounded by abundance in order to safe. The disconnect between those who have and those who have not has never been bigger, and never in my lifetime, and probably in any of our lifetimes, has there been an invitation, again, to release the stranglehold on your hoarding. This is not the time for hoarding. This is the time to store your grain in the belly of your neighbor, in a way that is emotionally sober and accurate to what you can give, and to look at that in a really honest way, to not put your own family in danger, to not put yourself in crisis, but to be able to say, "What can I offer in the immediacy?" And then, in the longer term, a conversation about redistribution of resources, and why do so few have so much and why do so many have so little? But that's not a conversation I can fix today. That's, again, outside of my realm of control. But what I can do is unleash the white-knuckled grip that I have on what's mine and make sure that I'm going into the world with an open hand — again, not a panicked open hand, where I'm going to destroy myself to save somebody else, because then there will be no helper left, but in a reasonable way. I cannot save everybody. I can save a few. And that's the tragic, but, I think, sobering reality that I can offer right now, and again, underlying all of that, undergirding all of that is a recognition that anything that I have to say about people who are in extraordinary suffering right now is not enough. HW: I'll be back. Thank you. EG: Thanks. CA: Liz, talk to me a minute about anger. Like, I think a lot of, just from the conversation we just had, or just listening to you there, there are so many reasons to feel angry right now about what's going on. And part of me feels we should be. That's what anger is for. It's to highlight things that are unjust and unfair and that we must pay attention to, and yet part of me is honestly scared of it. I think there could be an eruption of anger that's dangerous, both personally and for society. Have you felt anger? What are you doing with it? EG: I feel anger at every White House press conference, and I think all thinking people do. I feel angry that this wasn't taken more seriously early on. I feel angry at myself that I didn't take it more seriously early on. As much as I feel contempt and disgust for government officials who I feel were slow to recognize how serious this is, I also have to be really candid that three weeks ago, I was one of the people walking around saying, "Why is everybody overreacting to this so much?" So I think we also have to own our own piece of that, and I think there are rolling waves of awakening that are happening in people, and so a lot of the anger I feel right now is for people who aren't taking this seriously enough, who aren't quarantining themselves, who are putting other people in danger. But a month ago, that was me. I was in the Hong Kong airport, sallying through the Hong Kong airport while everybody was scurrying around in masks and gloves, and I was like, "What's the big deal?" It takes people as long as it takes them to come to awakening, and some people, we have to also acknowledge, never will. Anger has its place, and I think that righteous anger, which is the kind of anger that says a violation has occurred here, a humanitarian violation is occurring here, can be very stirring for transformation. Again, it's how comfortable can you be, sitting with these discomforting emotions, and what are you going to do with your anger? CA: Umh. EG: Are you going to lash out at the people you're quarantined with? Are you going to go on Twitter rants? Is that useful? Is that productive? And so I think — again, I keep using the words "emotional sobriety," but the emotional sobriety that would be required is to feel that anger, acknowledge it, to show yourself mercy for how uncomfortable it is, and then to steadily, recognizing, again, that this is a marathon not a sprint, do what you reasonably can do to change the situation. CA: I mean, the part of me that's constantly looking for the better narrative hopes that the anger we feel now could almost displace some of — I mean, the world's been an angry place for the last couple years. There's been so much anger inflamed online. We've made each other angry, often, probably, unnecessarily — outrage sparking outrage, disgust, etc. I mean, is there any hope that this is a massive societal shaking up? It's like, don't be so silly. Look at what actually matters here. And we can at least focus more attention onto the things that, yes, some things that we really should be angry about, but other things that maybe ... you know, could lead people to say human connection really matters in this moment. People from all sides, we need each other. We just have to use this as a moment when we come together. How do you think about that? Like, how do we turn some of these negative emotions into a force for good that at least gives us some permission to hope that something special comes out of all this. EG: Well, I think you have to give yourself permission to hope, and I don't think it's unreasonable to give yourself permission to hope, because, again, our resilience, our resourcefulness, and the way that history has shown how catastrophe can lead to transformation, gives us, actually, I think, reasonable cause to hope. One thing that I'm noticing that I'm, like, a little bit amused by is that when people start predicting what the post-pandemic world is going to be, I notice that their predictions seem to be, suspiciously, in exact alignment with their personal worldview. So my friends who are utopians are already living in this utopian future where this is going to be the big change. My friends who are dystopians are already predicting that this is the official beginning of the police state and the disastrous new world order. I think there's a lot of hubris in trying to imagine what that new world could be. A quote that I love that a friend of mine always says is "When people aren't busy being the worst, they're the best." And I think that gives me hope. And it's true the other way, too. When people aren't busy being the best, they're the worst. I'm terrible at social engineering, Chris, and you know this, and you have great, better minds than mine who can come on and talk about this on the global scale. The only world that I have a really intimate, familiar engagement with is this one, and on the individual level, what I understand is that the only world that any of us are ever going to live in is this one. And so minding this, and learning how to calm this, how to open this, how to get on the other side of the emotions that are causing harm to you and others, that's my work, you know? Personally, whatever role I have in the public sphere. CA: You're an extraordinary storyteller and you already told us one amazing story earlier on. Have you come across any other recent stories that have given you reason for hope, perhaps? EG: Well, I'll give you one, and this one, I delight in. Years ago, 20 years ago in New York City — 30 years ago, I was in my 20s — I was friends with a woman named Winifred, who was in her 90s. She was this really cool West Village bohemian artist who had lived in Greenwich Village for her entire life, had had a very storied and checkered and wild life, surrounding herself with intellectuals and poets and artists and adventure, and she'd had a lot of loss and a lot of gain, and she was this extremely passionate person who had friends of all ages, which was something I admired about her. I was friends with her. I was 25, she was 95. But I would call her my very good friend, and she had a lot of friends. She was so open to everything. And at her 95th birthday party, I asked her, "What have you learned, more than anything else?" Because she was such a creature of learning. I wrote about her in "Big Magic." I said to her one time, "What's your favorite book that you've ever read?" And she said, "I can't say my favorite book because there's been so many, but I can tell you my favorite subject, the history of ancient Mesopotamia, which I started learning when I was 80 and it changed my life." And it did. She'd gone on these expeditions to Jordan and Iraq. She was just so full of living, you know? And I said to her, "What have you learned in all of your experiences? What is the most central thing that you've learned?" And she said, "Human beings can adapt to anything. Human beings can adapt to absolutely anything." And then she said this great line: "If Martians landed on Earth tomorrow, it would be off the front pages of the newspaper by next Tuesday. We would already be used to it." Right? And there's a level at which I'm seeing this adaptation happening. And that is both a good and a bad thing. Right? We can get used to totalitarianism, but we can also get used to — I've gotten used to a world without the love of my life in it. We can adapt. And I keep using that line as a touchstone for myself, because I don't know, nor do I presume to know, what the world is going to be after this. I know that it will be different from the one before. I also just have to point out that all y'all had a lot of complaints about the world we had before, and I do a lot of talking, I do a lot of going around the world, and [I don't remember] any one of you raising your hand in any of the seminars I've taught over the last years, and saying, "We are living in a golden age and I'm so grateful and appreciative for all that I have," now you want that world back, right? So let's actually remember that as we go forward, that this moment, for some of us, that we're in right now, might be one that we look back later and say, "Wow, actually, that was pretty good, and I didn't have any gratitude for it." So personally, I'm just hoping that at an intimate level — and again, this is not a socioeconomic, global political level, but it's an invitation to actually be grateful for the safety that you have and the people that you have, and maybe carry that forward a little bit. Maybe. We're really good at forgetting. Once a crisis is over, we're really good at forgetting our gratitude. It's one of our great gifts. But you might want to make a note to actually try to be grateful for what you have. (Laughs) CA: Thank you, Liz. I think we have a last question from our online friends. HW: Yeah, what crisis, right? So Liz, just a request for a concrete strategy to try and reduce the fear or the shame that is coming at this moment. EG: I'll give you mine, and it may feel weird and out of reach and woo-woo, but I'm beyond that at this point, and it has been a game changer and a life changer for me. I have a 20-year-long practice of writing myself, every day, a letter from Love. Now this may not feel concrete. It may feel very airy. But what it does is that it helps me through my anxiety, and I need it every single day, because I'm anxious every single day. I wake up frightened every day. I wake up shamed every day. I wake up angry every day. All of the difficult emotions that run through the software of a human consciousness are running through my software all the time, and they cause me pain and they cause me fear, and they cause me distress, and they make me sick. So, 20 years ago, when I was going through a very bad divorce and a depression, I began this tactic, and the tactic is that I will sit down with a notebook and I will write to myself, from myself, a letter from Love. And what I mean by "Love" is not romantic love. It's the infinite, bottomlessly merciful source of all human compassion. And every single one of these letters begins the same way. It starts with me saying, "I need you." It's a dialogue. It starts with me saying, "I need you," and Love saying, "I'm right here." And then I say what I'm going through. "I'm really angry right now. I'm terrified. I'm spinning. I can't sleep. I'm anxious." And then I just allow to come through my hand whatever, if you could imagine the most loving, compassionate, merciful voice in the world, if they were in the room with you, what would you want them to say? And you say that to yourself. And so for me, that usually is a combination of these sorts of phrases: "I've got you. I'm right here. I see how distressed you are. It's all right. I don't need you to feel better." I think a lot of our anxiety is that we want to get out of that feeling as fast as we can, and what Love always says to me is, "It makes no difference to me whether you're anxious or afraid or angry or hurt. I'm with you, and I'll be with you through this entire thing for however long it takes. I'm not going anywhere. I've got nowhere better to be right now than sitting with you, loving you. I'll be with you at the moment of your death. I was here with you at the moment of your birth. There's nothing you can do to lose me. You can't fail. You can't do this wrong. You are infinitely, bottomlessly loved." And it's so interesting to me that the opposite of fear in my life, in my emotional landscape, on the color palette, the opposite of fear isn't courage, the opposite of fear is love. And that presence, a sense of, "I've got you," right? Which is the thing that we'd all want somebody to say. "I've got you, and it's going to be all right." I would love to know, neurologically, what actually happens in my mind when I do this, but what happens to me physiologically is that my mind, just hearing those words and seeing those words, settles, and then from there, I'm able to take the next intuitive right action the best that I can. CA: Liz, you can say no to this, it may be a totally inappropriate thing to ask, but you don't happen to have a letter from the last day or two that you'd consider reading, all or in part of? I don't know how long they are. EG: You're putting me on the spot. Let me see what we've got. Let's see. (Inaudible) OK, so here's one. So I was panicking because I want to offer my apartment in New York to a woman who is a COVID-19 nurse who's volunteered to come into New York City to help, and I'm afraid that I'll infect my neighbors if I let her come and stay there. So I was up in the middle of the night, thinking, ethically, is it appropriate for me to do this? So I wrote, "I need you." And Love said, "I'm right here." And then I said, "I want to offer that COVID-19 nurse my apartment, but I'm afraid that my neighbors will get infected, and I'm scared, and I don't know what the right move is. Help me." And Love said, "I don't actually know what the right answer to that is, but I'm with you." And I said, "But what do you think I should do?" And Love said, "Why don't you just sit with me right here for a minute and be with me and know that you're held no matter what, that you cannot make the wrong choice, that it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. You're my beloved, I've got you. I can see how much you're spinning, I can see how tired you are, and it doesn't matter to me whether you make this decision in the next minute, in the next day, or not at all. I'm with you, and I'll sit with you through this entire thing, and I'll love you no matter what you decide to do at the end of this. I will be just as much with you at the end of this decision as am I with you now." And then, I said, "So what do you think I should do?" And Love says, "I think you should go get a glass of water, and I think you should lie down and get some rest, and we'll talk about it some more in the morning." What I have found over the years of writing myself these letters from Love is that Love never gives advice. This is actually really good for all of you who love to give unsolicited advice to people. Love never gives advice beyond, "Why don't you get a glass of water? Why don't you rest? We'll try this again tomorrow. You're doing your best, this is a hard time, and I've got you." So I've got 20 years of those journals, and I'm assuming that I'm going to need it for the rest of my life. CA: Wow. I don't know, Helen, I think we might be done. I think I'm done. I can't ask any more after that. HW: How beautiful. Good grief. (CA laughs) CA: Liz, you're really phenomenal. You've just got this unique way of articulating what others can't articulate, and you've brought all of us to a very tender, intimate place, and thank you for that. EG: Thank you, Chris. HW: Thank you so much. EG: And thank you, Helen. Take care of yourselves, everybody. We're right here with each other through this. We can do this. CA: Thank you, Liz. Goodbye. HW: Thank you. CA: Oof. HW: Oof. (Laughter) HW: Deep breaths. CA: Yeah. No. That was special. That was special to me. I know that you are all in different circumstances online, and that there are so many elements to this thing. There's the problems that those of us who are isolated have, and in many ways, those are the luxurious problems, and we're really aware of that. But they're still problems, and we're going to give space on these TED Connects to many other voices as well. I think we're hoping to hear next week from a doctor at the front line, a voice from India, we hope, on some of the horrifying things that are happening there, and also some pretty amazing proposals for how the world could come out of this, like specific proposals on how we get past this period of lockdown to bring back the economy. All of this matters. So I guess we want Helen and everyone to come back, calendar this, share with friends, and help us figure out how to use this time best. HW: I also wanted to flag that I don't know if you were able to tune in for Susan David's conversation earlier in the week. We have launched a new podcast with Susan that launched on Monday. We're calling it "Checking In with Susan David," and she is going to be sharing daily tips on how to deal with this pandemic. And so you can find that wherever you find podcasts in this day and age. For this conversation, we will be archiving it. It will be on Facebook, and we'll also put it onto TED.com. You can find the TED Interview podcast that Chris and Liz did last year, which I confess just made me weep for ... too long. You can find that at go.ted.com/tedconnects. But that's it from us. And tomorrow, I want to flag that we have a very special treat, which is less chat, more beauty. We will be joined by the unbelievably talented Butterscotch, who is a beatboxer and a singer and a musician and a sage, and an all-around delight, and she is going to be giving us a glimpse into her world and delighting us all with some sonic deliciousness. So do tune in tomorrow. CA: Thanks so much, everyone. We're in this together. Stay safe. See you soon. HW: See you soon. Be well. |
The intangible effects of walls | {0: 'Alexandra Auer designs interactive experiences in physical environments. '} | TEDxEindhoven | Humankind loves to build walls. Have you ever noticed that? We build walls for everything: for shelter, for protection, for privacy. Over the past 70 years, the number of barriers between countries has doubled. Right now, there are more walls than at the end of the Second World War, more than during the Cold War. Growing up in Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall always felt to me like the introduction of a new world, a world without barriers. But since the attacks of 9/11, the construction has experienced an extreme rise. Since then, the amount has doubled, with about 30 new structures that were planned or built. Walls and fences are often built with the intention of security, security from another group of people, from crime, from illegal trades. But walls and fences only provide us with a feeling of security, which is different from real security. Even though they might make us feel safe, the structures themselves can't protect us. Instead, they do something else: they separate. They create an us and a them. They establish an enemy. Walls make us build a second wall in our head, a mental wall. And those mental walls slowly make us lose sight of all the things we have in common with the people on the other side. The other way around, mental walls can grow so strong that they encourage us to build, keep or strengthen physical walls. Physical and mental walls are closely interlinked, and one almost always comes with the other. It's a constant cycle: physical walls empower mental walls, and mental walls empower physical walls until at one point one part falls away, and the cycle is disrupted. When the Berlin Wall was being built, it was hard to tell who the wall was facing, because the people living around it identified as one. There was no us and them. There was no others. During the time of separation, both sides developed differently and formed individual identities. All of a sudden, there was an us and a them. A mental wall was built, and when the Berlin Wall fell again in 1989, this mental wall in the head of the people stayed. Eastern Germans had to be reintegrated into their own country, and even though they didn't have to move places, many still today feel like they have never fully arrived. Those remaining effects of the mental wall are also measurable. A study from the Freie University of Berlin in 2005 shows that even 15 years after the reunification, Germans still believed that cities on the other side of the former wall are further away than they really are. The interesting thing is that they found a link between political attitude and estimation of the distance. The more a participant was against the German reunification, the further away they estimated cities to be. It's the mental wall which keeps cities on the other side far away, and the higher and stronger this mental wall, the more difficult they seem to be reached. I tried to repeat this study with a group of young Germans who grew up without the wall to see if these effects are still measurable nowadays. And the results show that this generation, my generation, is just kind of bad at geography in general — (Laughter) East and West. But in our defense, this could be seen as an improvement, right? We never experienced the actual wall. This physical barrier was never able to make us build a mental wall in the first place. I would love to take this as a serious indication that there could be a future without a mental wall dividing Germany, but I think we have to face reality: this one wall could be disappearing, but in the meanwhile, a billion others are constructed. One global trend we are currently experiencing is the rise of gated communities. And in a way, gated communities can be seen the same exact way as countries, just on the small scale — neighborhoods surrounded by walls and fences to protect citizens from other citizens — and the only difference is, it's by choice. But the physical and mental effects on the people living inside and the people kept outside are the same, separating cities, neighborhoods and even playgrounds. In the spring of last year, I worked on a design project in Brussels at two elementary schools where this was the case. Both the schools share an entrance and the schoolyard. Both schools teach in Dutch. But one school is mainly visited by Belgian children, and the other school, by immigrant children. The schools are separated by walls and fences, leaving the children no point of interaction other than this fence on the schoolyard that separates them. When I started to work there, it made me sad to see children having to stand at a fence to talk to their friend on the other side. But what's even worse is that most of the children will never get the opportunity to even make a friend on the other side. School should be the place where children, all children, come together and learn — learn from the teacher, but more importantly, learn from each other. And the more diversity, the more there is to learn. In fact, school might be the only time in our lives where establishing a contact despite social differences is even possible. Separating children during this time of their development will make integration extremely difficult, if not impossible. And yet, somehow, I seem to be the only one having a problem with this fence in Brussels. Most of the parents, teachers and children stopped seeing or at least questioning the structure. It's just how it is. Nobody has ever seen it differently. And people are in favor of it. I once asked a boy if he would like to play with the other side, and he said, "No." Then I asked if he would play with them if the fence wasn't there, and he said, "Probably." But then he quickly added that the fence should stay, because the other side is mean and they never give back his ball. It's funny, because I talked to children from both sides, and everyone told me that the other side is mean because they never give back the ball. The children on both sides dislike each other, and there are regularly arguments breaking out at this fence, which is also the main reason why people feel the need for it to be there: it protects the children from each other, or at least their toys, and it prevents chaos. At some point, the children started to crawl beneath the fence to get their ball back, and the reaction of the schools was to put these metal plates there. Now they climb over. I don't know what came first in Brussels: a mental wall that grew too strong that it made them build a physical fence, or this fence that now emphasizes the social differences, even on the schoolyard. But what I did know when I started to work there was that I wanted to change something about the situation. I wanted to show both sides again how much they have in common. For children, this isn't very hard, because even though one schoolyard speaks Dutch and the other schoolyard, a mix of French, Turkish and Arabic, they all speak the universal language of play. And it turned out the desire to play is a lot stronger than all the supposed differences between them. I installed different games at the fence, which turned it into an interface, a common ground, instead of a barrier. And all of a sudden, children were drawing together, exchanging pencils and talking on the phone. Especially the phones were a great success, because they were so amazed by the fact that they can hear the other side through this device that they couldn't stop speaking. In the case of an elementary school, parents play a very big role in shaping the everyday life and the environment of their children. So I knew that if I wanted to make a difference, I had to somehow show them, too, how much they have in common with the other side. But for parents, this was a lot more difficult, because most of them speak different languages, work different jobs with different incomes, live in different social circles, believe in different religions, experience different cultures and share different values. And then there was me, a student, different in all of these aspects again. So how could I show them how much they have in common? I chose not to convince them myself but by letting their own children do the talking. I designed a picture exhibition on the schoolyard showing them their children playing together through the fence. At the end of this exhibition, I asked people to write down their thoughts, ideas and wishes on these big wooden boxes, and I labeled the boxes with, "What do you think?" A lot of people wrote "Yes" on it. Yes, what? I never mentioned my opinion or an action that should follow, so which question were they answering with yes? When I asked, they said yes, the fence should go. Yes, we want to play with the other side. The pictures implied enough to answer a question that was never proposed. People were seeing the absurdity of the situation again and felt how unnecessary this fence is without me forcing an opinion on them. The exhibition showed the two sides their similarities for once. That day, there was no us and them, there was no others. The mental wall started to crumble. I chose the word "crumbling," because breaking a mental wall is a long journey, and breaking a mental wall can be a lot more difficult than simply tearing down the physical one. We have to challenge our opinion and beliefs and maybe even admit our own wrongs. So what happened in Brussels was a big step, a step that has been taking generations in Germany. There are many examples from all over the world telling the same story I experienced in Brussels and Germany, enough examples from which we could have learned. But still, we seek walls as solutions for problems that they cannot solve, because walls don't fight the root of our problem. If anything, they reduce the symptoms. So the next time you are planning to build a wall or you are planning to support someone who wants to build a wall, I want you to remember the impact you are really having. Because, this simple structure will hardly create more security. Instead, it will affect the people living with it every day, people who, despite the geographic border, often share a lot of culture and values. For them, you are not building one wall but two, two walls which will take decades and generations to overcome again. Thank you. (Applause) |
The art forger who tricked the Nazis | null | TED-Ed | It was one of the strangest trials in Dutch history. The defendant in this 1947 case was an art forger who had counterfeited millions of dollars worth of paintings. But he wasn’t arguing his innocence— in fact, his life depended on proving that he had committed the fraud. Like many art forgers, Han van Meegeren was an artist whose original works had failed to bring him renown. Embittered towards the art world, van Meegeren set out to make fools of his detractors. He learned all he could about the Old Masters— their biographies, their techniques, and their materials. The artist he chose for his deception was 17th century Baroque painter Johannes Vermeer— an ambitious decision given Vermeer was famed for his carefully executed and technically brilliant domestic scenes. Working in secret for six years, the forger perfected his art, copying numerous works as practice. He mixed his own paints after researching the raw materials and pigments available in Vermeer’s time. He bought 17th century canvases, created his own brushes, and aged the works by applying synthetic resin and baking them to dry and crack the paint. A forensic test could have detected the synthetic resin. But at the time, such tests were neither advanced nor widespread, and even today verification of a painting’s authenticity relies on the assessment of art specialists. So it’s a matter of their subjective judgment— as well as their reputation. And this is where van Meegeren truly outwitted the art world. From his research, he knew historians believed Vermeer had an early period of religious painting influenced by the Italian painter Caravaggio. The leading authority on Vermeer, Abraham Bredius, was a huge proponent of this theory, though none of these works had surfaced. So van Meegeren decided to make one. He called it "The Supper at Emmaus." Bredius declared van Meegeren’s fake the masterpiece of Vermeer’s oeuvre. Van Meegeren’s forgery was not totally up to Vermeer’s technical standards, but these inconsistencies could be made to fit the narrative: this was an early work, produced before the artist had come into his own. With the stamp of approval from the art world, the fake was sold in 1937 for the equivalent of over $4 million in today’s money. The success prompted van Meegeren to forge and sell more works through various art dealers. As unbelievable as it may sound, the art world continued to believe in their authenticity. When the Nazis occupied Holland during the Second World War, Hermann Göring, one of Hitler’s top generals, sought to add a Vermeer to his collection of artwork looted from all over Europe. Van Meegeren obliged, selling him an alleged early Vermeer painting titled "Christ with the Adulteress." As the tide of the war turned, so did van Meegeren’s luck. Following the Allied victory, he was arrested for delivering a priceless piece of Dutch heritage to the Nazis— an act of treasonous collaboration punishable by death. To prove the painting wasn’t a national treasure, he explained step-by-step how he had forged it. But he faced an unexpected obstacle— the very expert who had enabled his scam. Moved to protect his reputation, Bredius defended the painting’s authenticity. With few options left, van Meegeren set to work on a "new" Vermeer. When he presented the fake to the court, they finally believed him. He was acquitted for collaborating with the Nazis— and sentenced to a year imprisonment for fraud. Though there’s evidence that van Meegeren did, in fact, collaborate with the Nazis, he managed to convince the public that he had tricked Göring on purpose, transforming his image into that of a folk hero who had swindled the Nazis. Thanks to this newfound notoriety, his works became valuable in their own right— so much so that they were later forged in turn by his own son. The same canvases went from revered classics to despised forgeries to works of art respected for the skill and notoriety of the forger. |
In uncertain times, think like a mother | {0: 'By partnering with community-based, women-led organizations on the frontlines of war and climate breakdown, activist Yifat Susskind is fighting for global rights for women.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | One morning, 18 years ago, I stepped out of a New York City subway on a beautiful day in September. The sun was warm and bright, the sky was a clear, perfect blue. I had my six-month-old son in one of those front-facing baby carriers, you know, so he could see everything. And when I turned right on Sixth Avenue, what he saw was the World Trade Center on fire. As soon as I realized that this was an attack, the first thing I did, without even really thinking about it, was to take my baby and turn him around in that carrier. I didn't want him to see what was going on. And I just remember feeling so grateful that he was still young enough that I didn't have to tell him that someone had done this on purpose. 9/11 was like crossing a border, a hostile border into dangerous, uncharted territory. The world was suddenly in this terrifying new place, and I was in this place as a new mother. I remember my thoughts kind of ping-ponging around from, "How am I ever going to protect this baby?" to, "How am I ever going to get some sleep?" Well, my son turned 18 this year, along with millions of other people who were babies on 9/11. And in that time, we have all crossed into this hostile, uncharted territory of climate breakdown, of endless wars, of economic meltdowns, of deep political divisions, of the many crises around the world that I don't need to list off, because they are blaring at you every single day from your news feed. But there is something I've learned in these 18 years of parenting and in my years leading a global women's rights organization. There is a way to face these big crises in the world without feeling overwhelmed and despairing. It's simple, and it's powerful. It's to think like a mother. Now, to be clear, you don't have to be a woman or a parent to do this. Thinking like a mother is a lens that's available to everybody. The poet Alexis De Veaux writes, "Motherhood is not simply the organic process of giving birth. It's an understanding of the needs of the world." Now, it's easy to focus on all of the obstacles to making this the world we want: greed, inequality, violence. Yes, there is all of that. But there's also the option to plant a seed, a different seed, and cultivate what you want to see grow, even in the midst of crisis. Majid from Iraq understands this. He is a housepainter by trade and someone who believes deeply in equal rights for women. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq where he lives, he worked with a local women's organization to help build an underground railroad, an escape network for women's rights activists and LGBTIQ folks who were targeted with assassination. And when I asked Majid why he risked his own life to bring people to safety, he said to me, "If we want a brighter future, we have to build it now in the dark times so that one day we can live in the light." That's what social justice work is, and that's what mothers do. We act in the present with an idea of the future that we want to bring about. All of the best ideas seem impossible at first. But just in my lifetime, we've seen the end of apartheid, the affirmation that women's rights are human rights, marriage equality, the fall of dictators who ruled for decades and so much more. All of these things seemed impossible until people took action to make them happen, and then, like, almost right away, they seemed inevitable. When I was growing up, whether we were stuck in traffic or dealing with a family tragedy, my mother would say, "Something good is going to happen, we just don't know what it is yet." Now, I will admit that my brothers and I make fun of her for this, but people ask me all the time how I deal with the suffering that I see in my work in refugee camps and disaster zones, and I think of my mom and that seed of possibility that she planted in me. Because, when you believe that something good is coming and you're part of making it happen, you start to be able to see beyond the suffering to how things could be. Today, there is a new set of necessary ideas that seem impossible but one day will feel inevitable: that we could end violence against women, make war a thing of the past, learn to live in balance with nature before it's too late and make sure that everybody has what they need to thrive. Of course, being able to picture a future like this is not the same thing as knowing what to do to make it come about, but thinking like a mother can help with that, too. A few years ago, East Africa was gripped by a famine, and women I know from Somalia walked for days carrying their hungry children in search of food and water. A quarter of a million people died, and half of them were babies and toddlers. And while this catastrophe unfolded, too much of the world looked away. But a group of women farmers in Sudan, including Fatima Ahmed — that's her holding the corn — heard about what was happening. And they pooled together the extra money that they had from their harvest and asked me to send it to those Somali mothers. Now, these farmers could have decided that they didn't have the power to act. They were barely getting by themselves, some of them. They lived without electricity, without furniture. But they overrode that. They did what mothers do: they saw themselves as the solution and they took action. You do it all the time if you have kids. You make major decisions about their health care, their education, their emotional well-being, even if you're not a doctor or a teacher or a therapist. You recognize what your child needs and you step up to provide it the best you can. Thinking like a mother means seeing the whole world through the eyes of those who are responsible for its most vulnerable people. And we're not used to thinking of subsistence farmers as philanthropists, but those women were practicing the root meaning of philanthropy: love for humanity. What's at the core of thinking like a mother shouldn't be a surprise: it's love. Because, love is more than just an emotion. It's a capacity, a verb, an endlessly renewable resource — and not just in our private lives. We recognize hate in the public sphere. Right? Hate speech, hate crimes. But not love. What is love in the public sphere? Well, Cornel West, who is not a mother but thinks like one, says it best: "Justice is what love looks like in public." And when we remember that every policy is an expression of social values, love stands out as that superstar value, the one best able to account for the most vulnerable among us. And when we position love as a kind of leading edge in policy making, we get new answers to fundamental social questions, like, "What's the economy for?" "What is our commitment to those in the path of the hurricane?" "How do we greet those arriving to our borders?" When you think like a mother, you prioritize the needs of the many, not the whims of the few. When you think like a mother, you don't build a seawall around beachfront property, because that would divert floodwaters to communities that are still exposed. When you think like a mother, you don't try to prosecute someone for leaving water for people crossing the desert. Because, you know — (Applause) Because you know that migration, just like mothering, is an act of hope. Now, not every mother thinks like a mother. When presented with a choice, some of us have made the wrong one, hiding behind weapons or barbed wire or privilege to deny the rest of the world, thinking they can see their way to safety in some kind of armed lifeboat fueled by racism and xenophobia. Not every mother is a role model, but all of us have a choice. Are we going to jump on that armed lifeboat or work together to build a mother ship that can carry everyone? You know how to build that mother ship, how to repair the world and ease the suffering. Think like a mother. Thinking like a mother is a tool we can all use to build the world we want. Thank you. (Applause) |
An ethical plan for ending the pandemic and restarting the economy | {0: 'Danielle Allen is an expert on the intersection of ethics and democracy.', 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.', 2: "Corey Hajim is TED's business curator, working with speakers for TED across multiple platforms. "} | TED Connects | Corey Hajim: Hi, Chris, how are you? Chris Anderson: I'm very well, Corey, it's absolutely lovely to see you. CH: It's great to see you, too. (Laughter) CA: Somehow, you're always smiling, no matter how dangerous, weird, crazy things are. Thank you for that. CH: You don't see me in the other room crying afterwards, but we'll leave that for the other [unclear]. So Chris, this is week three of these conversations, how are you thinking about the people we should be speaking with? CA: I mean, there are so many aspects to this, right? There's understanding the basic pandemic itself and all the science around that. There's the psychology that we're all going through, the mindset. And we've had speakers addressing both of these. And then I think increasingly, the conversation is going to be "what now?" "How do we dig ourselves out of this? What's the way forward?" And there's a couple of speakers this week focused on that. And I think it's — These conversations are incredibly rich, because I think one of the things that people have got growing consensus on is that step one, we kind of get, right? You shut things down, physically distance in whatever way you can, different countries have gone about it slightly differently, but basically that "flattens the curve," ultimately, the number of cases, the number of infections slows down. And, but then what? Because you can't go back to life as normal, when you're living at home completely. You could do some things, but you can't. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. CH: Right, it feels really hopeful to talk about some actions we can take besides just staying away from everybody else. So, well, I guess I'll pass it over to you to introduce the speaker, and I will come back a little bit later to share some questions from our audience. CA: Thanks so much, Corey, see you again in a bit. CH: Thank you. CA: And yes, if you know anyone out there who has just got stuck on, "But how do people get back to work?" "Where do we go from here?" Those are the people who you should, maybe invite them into this conversation right now, because I think they're going to be really interested. Our speaker, our guest is a professor at Harvard, Danielle Allen. She runs, among other things, she runs an institute for ethics there, the Safra institute. And fundamentally, she's thinking about the ethical questions about what's happening here, but she has pulled together an extraordinary multidisciplinary team of economists, business leaders and others who have put together a plan, and I've been obsessed with this whole thing and how we find our way out. This plan is as compelling a plan as I've seen anywhere. So let's dig into it without further ado, Danielle Allen, welcome here to TED Connects. Danielle Allen: Thank you, Chris, happy to be here. I'm really, really grateful to have the chance to have this conversation with you. CA: It's — It's so good, I just enjoyed our conversation over the last couple of days. This is such a complex problem. What I kind of want you to do is just go through it step-by-step, to see the logic of what it is that your team are putting forward. First of all — Just the problem itself of how we get the economy going again, just talk a bit about what's at stake there, because sometimes this is framed as "The economy? Who cares about the economy? People's lives are at stake. So let's just focus on that, don't worry about the economy." But it's not as simple as that. I mean, as an ethicist, what's at stake if we don't restart the economy somehow? DA: Well we have to recognize that we've actually faced two existential threats simultaneously. The first was to the public health system. If the virus had been allowed to unfold unimpeded, our public health systems would have collapsed and that would have produced a whole legitimacy crisis for our public institutions. So of course we shut down, we had to do that, it was a necessary self-defense action that has, however, really devastated the economy. And that is also an existential threat, we can't actually endure a closed economy over a duration of 12 to 18 months. Nor can we really endure a situation where we don't know whether we might have another two to three months of extensive social distancing. So we really need an integrated strategy, one that recognizes both of these existential threats and finds a way to control the disease at the same that we can keep the economy open. We call that combination of controlling the disease while keeping the economy open pandemic resilience. We think that's what we should be aiming for. CA: So people who aren't moved by the notion of the economy, capitalism, whatever, think instead about the millions and millions of jobs that were lost, the people who are desperate to make money. And I guess the lives that will be lost unless we solve this problem. DA: Absolutely, the economy is one of the foundational pillars for a healthy society with opportunity and with justice. You can't have a just society either, if you haven't secured a just and functioning economy that delivers well-being for people. So all we have to do is remember back to 2008, and think about the impacts on things like suicide and depression and so forth, that flowed from that recession, so the economy is a public health concern in the same way that the virus is a public health concern. CA: OK, so talk about why this is such an intractable problem. People isolate, in many countries in the world now you're starting to see the cases flatten and in many cases decrease. It looks like, whether it's happened now in your country or not, that will happen sooner or later. So why isn't that problem solved, we've beaten the virus, let's get back to work? DA: That's a great question and it really speaks to how new the experience for us is to encounter a novel virus. It just really hasn't happened to our society in a very, very long time. So we are what's called the susceptible population, meaning not any of us at the beginning of this had immunity. We were all susceptible to catching the disease. For a society to be safe, it needs to have what's called herd immunity. You could achieve that through vaccination or through people getting the disease. But it takes 50 to 67 percent of the population to get the disease in order to achieve that level of protection. We don't expect a vaccine anytime in the next 12 months, possibly 18 months, so we have to recognize that that pathway is not open to us. And to get a sense of the magnitude of what it would mean to live through the disease to get to herd immunity, think about this: In Italy right now they estimate that about 15 percent of the population has probably been exposed to the disease. So you'd have to repeat what Italy has done three or more times, to get to a place where you can reasonably think that there's herd immunity. And I think you can see that when you think of that picture, how destabilizing a process would be of just leaving things broadly open without disease controls. So the real trick is whether or not there's a substitute for social distancing as a method for controlling the disease. CA: Right. So Italy, even with that 15 percent has suffered at least 15,000 deaths, some people argue that it's underreported by 50 percent there, it might be 30,000 deaths plus there, and as they come down the curve, there will be more to come. Multiply that by five or six, say, for the bigger population size of the US and the herd immunity idea per se doesn't seem like a winning idea. I mean, it's a horrible idea. DA: It's a horrible idea, exactly. And we do have alternatives, that's the important thing, we actually do have a way of controlling the disease, minimizing loss of life and reopening the economy, so that's the thing we should all be focusing on. CA: And again, the initial problem is that if you just let people start coming back, as soon as they gather again in reasonable numbers, the risk is that this highly infectious bug just takes off again. DA: Exactly. CA: And so one scenario is that you have countries lurching from a little bit of activity here and then suddenly it explodes again and everyone has to retreat. That does not seem attractive, that also just doesn't work. DA: No, exactly. I mean, we described that as a freeze in place strategy for dealing with this. That is you freeze and you shut down all activity, and then that flattens the curve, you open up again, then you have another peak, you have to freeze again and so forth. So you have this repeated process of freezing, which just does tremendous damage to the economy over time. I mean the upfront damage is huge, but then there's never space to recover from it, because of great deal of uncertainty and repeated applications of economically ruinous social distancing. So I think you're really pointing to the features of the disease that make this situation a problem that it is. And there are really two that people should focus on. One is the degree of infectiousness. This is a highly infectious virus. So the comparison to the Spanish flu is a reasonable one from the point of view of degree of infectiousness. Then the second really important point about the disease is that it's possible to be an asymptomatic carrier. That is to be infectious, to carry the virus, and never show any symptoms yourself. Current estimates are still imprecise, but people think that about 20 percent of virus carriers are asymptomatic. And that is really the thing that makes it so hard to control. People don't know they're sick and then they become disease vectors, spreading it everywhere they go. CA: Yes, indeed. So talk a bit, Danielle, about your thinking about how we might outwit this thing. DA: So the alternative to social distancing as a strategy for controlling the disease is really massively ramped up, massively scaled up testing, combined with individual quarantine. So we are going to continue to need individual quarantine for those who are positive carriers of the virus, until such a point as we have gotten a vaccine. Now what does that mean exactly? It means that the standard quarantine that aligns with the incubation period, 14 days is often what people talk about, in the conservative picture you might say twice the incubation period length, 28 days for individual quarantine. And we need that quarantine for people who are symptomatic and for asymptomatic carriers of the virus. Now the only way that you can actually run an individual quarantine as opposed to a collective quarantine regime, is if you do massive testing. We really need to make testing in a sense universally available, so that we can be testing broadly across the population. There are ways to target test, make it more efficient and so forth, but in principle, what one should imagine, is really wide-scale testing, tens of millions of tests a day, connected with quarantine for those who test positive. (Coughs) Excuse me. CA: So weird. Anytime anyone coughs today, you go, "Oh, God, are you OK?" DA: Yeah, no, no, I'm fine, Frog in the throat, that's all it is. CA: (Laughs) So just to play out a thought experiment. If we had an infinite number of tests available, and after the curve has flattened and cases have gone down, everyone came back to work, but everyone was tested every day. Then what we think is that the tests will show up positive at the same time, or possibly even ahead of the time that people are infectious. But certainly, let's say at the same time, regardless of whether they're symptomatic. And so you could — Those people would immediately go back home and the rest of the population should be OK, we should be able to get work done, in that thought experiment, right? DA: Right, in that thought experiment, exactly, yeah. CA: But the trouble is, that that would mean doing, whatever, like, 200 million tests a day. DA: Right, exactly. CA: Which is many, many orders of magnitude more than we have and could even imagine ramping up to. So you have a proposal, and this is the ingenuity, the proposal, of how to potentially administer tests in a way that's much more efficient. Talk a bit about that. DA: Sure. So if you were going to use a purely random testing method to control the disease, you could probably actually get away with testing everybody every two or three days — I'm playing along with your thought experiment here — and bring the number down to 100 million tests a day. But even that is a magnitude that would take us multiple months to get to, let's just say if we even wanted to try to do something like that. So the thing that you really need is smart testing. So rather than testing the population at random, what you do is you use testing to identify people who are positive, and then you add to that contact tracing or contact warning, we think about it in both ways. And what this means is that once you know who's a positive test, you figure out who else has been exposed to that person over the previous two weeks, and they all get tested as well. So you start to identify a class of people who are a higher probability of being infectious and you test that group of people. So you move away from random testing, you target it through contact tracing or contact warning. And then, depending on the level of effectiveness of your contact-tracing and contact-warning strategy, you can reduce the numbers. So on a moderately effective contact-tracing regimen, you could imagine doing 20 million tests a day. On a highly effective regime of contact tracing and warning, you could get yourself down to the order of five to 10 million tests a day. CA: And some countries in Asia seem to have pulled off a version of this strategy that has been effective. But it requires one of two things, if I understand you right, Danielle, it requires either just this massively scaled up, or potentially quite intrusive sort of manual contact tracing where you have big teams who swoop in to anyone who's tested positive and try to unpack their complete recent social history. Or technology plays a role, and this is where it gets complicated, because you know, there are apps in some of the Asian countries, like, China has an app which most people are, I think, required to carry, certainly in Wuhan and elsewhere, where it's very good at predicting whether someone may need quarantine. And they will be required to do so. And so there are all these concerns about government control, government intrusion. You are in discussion about ways of doing some kind of technology that would be more acceptable in a democracy, and I'd love you to share what those are. DA: Sure, I'm happy to do that. So I think it's an important thing to say upfront that the rates at which we would need to test per capita are higher, much higher than Asian countries used, because prevalence is much higher here. They caught it earlier, they had these tools built before the pandemic hit. As a consequence, they're able to control it with a lower per capita rate of testing than will be the case for us. We just have to accept that fact at this point and recognize that massively scaling up is specific to our situation, because we weren't ready before it hit. So then, yes, OK, if we're trying to do the smart testing, trying to use tools, what can you do? So we're actually open to manual testing in the plan that we've developed, I want to just say that, and I think that society, we have a big choice to make, whether what we want is a big core of manual contact tracers who are tracing people's histories and figuring out who they've been in contact with and who they've been exposed to. Or if we want to try to use a technological system. The important thing is there is a diversity of options within the technology space. So it's really important to recognize that places like Singapore and China have used highly centralized data systems for supporting this. And so what happens is, sort of, you carry your phone around, and everybody is connected to a central data system, and then when somebody in the system has a positive test, that gets put into the app, and then their phone communicates to other phones that it's been in proximity with over the previous two weeks, to alert people that they too need to get a test, OK? That's the basic concept. In China and Singapore the data structure for doing this is highly centralized. There are, however, a lot of innovative apps under development right now that depend instead on a very privacy-protective structure where the data lives on the individual user's phone and through a combination of encryption and tokens users of phones can communicate with other users of phones, but the data is not centralized. So in that regard, it becomes more of a peer-to-peer sharing, sort of concept of friends warn friends that they should probably go get tested. Then you would have a central repository of test data, but the truth is, we already have that, because all influenza tests for example, already roll up into CDC and Health and Human Services databases, so that they can track influenza patterns every year. CA: So tell me if I understand this right. You would carry on your phone an app that would, when you got, say, within six feet of another human carrying that app, the phones would exchange a Bluetooth — using Bluetooth technology they exchange a kind of token that says, "Hi, we connected." But it's encrypted. And that is not communicated to a central server, that is on the phone. But if either of you in the next week or two tests positive, your phone will be able to communicate to all the people which it exchanged token with, to say, "Uh oh, someone who you were close to in the last two weeks has tested positive. You've got to isolate." That's basically how it works, it's done that way. DA: Exactly. CA: And then after, what, three or four weeks, the tokens can actually autodelete? They go, they're not there anymore. DA: They expire, that's right. Because you only need the most recent two weeks' information or data about where you've been and what other phones your phone has interacted with. So that's the really key thing. CA: Alright, we'll come back to that in a minute, but let's see what our friends are asking online. DA: OK. CH: Hi, Danielle, hi, Chris. Yeah, we've got a lot of great questions, people are super interested in how this is all going to work. There's a couple of questions I'm trying to cobble together here. I think people are really interested in your thoughts on the United States health care system. We have so many underinsured and uninsured people and the changes that you might make to that system, I mean, does that situation make things worse, and what changes would you make to the system so that we're not as vulnerable in the future? DA: So that's a great set of questions, and so just from the point of view of the testing program, it is absolutely critical that the testing be free. And so there is absolutely, a sort of necessary feature of this, which is about, kind of, universal access element to the health system. And so I'm sure there will be tweaking that's necessary in the existing health system to achieve that. We've also without any question seen vulnerabilities that relate to and stem from our fragmented health system. So I think there's a much bigger, longer-term question to be had, or conversation to have, about how we overcome that fragmentation. So yes, I do hope this moment will be a spur for that longer-term conversation about improving our health system and really achieving that universal coverage that we so badly need. CH: OK, thank you, I'll see you both again in a little bit. CA: Thanks, Corey. So let's stay with this tech issue for a bit. And the sort of civil rights or privacy questions that it might still raise in some people. So one concern is that surely, if your phone is able to contact these other phones, someone somewhere is ultimately going to reverse that and we'll have some kind of record of your, you know, everyone who you've connected with, and that might be concerning to some. Is that a legitimate concern? DA: I think it is, I mean, I think we've been working hard on this question and really trying to think it through and when you talk to legal experts and civil liberties experts and so forth, everybody starts with the same premise: assume failure. Assume that you'll have a data breach. Think for that and what kind of protection you want in that regard. And so when you think that way, you of course are trying to minimize any likelihood of that happening, so hence the privacy-protective structure of phones communicating with phones, data living on the hardware of the phone, not in the server, etc. And then also you would want a kind of democratic accountability feature, so for example having the Department of Health and Human Services have an auditing function to audit whoever is manning the server or controls the server through which the tokens are exchanged you would want to audit their functionality and how they're using the data. But then again, you presume failure, that somebody's reverse engineering, the audit system fails in some fashion. What's your protection then? The answer to that would appear to be upfront legislation that prohibits the commercialization of this COVID testing data. So that anybody who in any way tried to commercialize it in any kind of way, would be subject to legal penalty. So I think that's how you build the fence up upfront in the expectation that somebody would find the way to crack it. CA: And then there's a set of questions around how you get this app out there at scale, because it's only effective if, say, two thirds of the people who are working are carrying it, right, something like that. DA: Right. CA: And so short of authoritarian "everyone must have this app," I guess there are ways that are interesting to say to people, one, this is a really useful app, it will alert you quickly if you're at any risk. But two, to get to the kind of scale we're talking about, you might have to say to people, "Look, we're slowly going to come back to work, industry by industry, company by company, and the deal for you to come back and break isolation, the societal deal, is that you have to be willing to carry this app." And you could, for people who didn't want to do that, I guess you could have some protection, you can't lose your job for that. But, I mean, can you picture society making the choice that it is reasonable to require people who want to come back to work to carry that alert technology with them? DA: So this is the hardest question. We know we don't want an authoritarian model, such as the one used in China and Singapore, so we have to figure out instead how to activate that thing, which is sort of the most important democratic resource or asset, namely solidarity. So what is it that, from a solidarity perspective, it's reasonable for us to ask of each other? That has to be the frame for deciding how we approach this. And so one aspect of this is really, truly the building a culture of opting in to this. And there are examples of this. So for example, New York has tackled HIV testing through a program that goes by the label "New York Knows," and it started out with labels of "Manhattan Knows" or "Brooklyn Knows," and so forth, of the different burrows. And what this program is is one that is owned by community organizations, community partners, that do the job of spreading the word and recruiting people into testing programs. And New York has the goal of having every single New Yorker be tested for HIV, so in other words, it's established as an expectation, that universal participation, and it's activated a network of community partners and organizations, to cultivate that commitment to solidarity. And so I think, in all honesty, that that would be a really huge part of what you would need to do in order to tap into solidarity, to have this work. I'm sure that we would see some amount of requiring in different context, I think that's a very hard one, because you don't want to generate labor discrimination problems. And so the model there, to think about and to sort of figure out what are our parameters, what we think is fair, connects to things that schools currently do, for example, when they require that students show vaccination proof before they can start the school year and things like that. So there are multiple states that do that in schools for vaccines. Would schools do the same thing, what's the sort of labor, the workforce question like, I think that very much remains to be worked through, but it's a hugely important question. CA: I'd be curious what the watching audience thinks about this, maybe you could enter a comment on it. But I mean, is it reasonable, in the world that we're in right now, for a company, let's say, to say, "Look, we want to get back to work, but we want to do so and respect the safety of all our workers. That means that for you to come back to work, you need a test showing that you're negative. And you need to carry this app so that we alert people quickly if there's a problem." Is that — "We won't fire you if you don't come in, but if you want to come back to work, that's what you'll have to agree to." Is that a reasonable chance? I'm curious what people think. Is there any other way to get — Sorry. DA: I mean, again, there is precedent for this in the sense that drug testing works this way in many employment contexts, right. There are many roles where people have to do routine drug tests as a part of preserving their job. That was a hotly debated issue in the 1980s, people sort of think back when that sort of first came in, and there was a lot of concern about it. We have managed to develop a regime for that, that has achieved an equilibrium of a kind. So I imagine that something is possible in this space, but we would have to draw on the prior experience with things like drug testing in the workplace, I think. CA: I mean, one problem that we face when you think about these big systems introduced is that in the past, there's history where something got introduced, you think of the PATRIOT Act that came in after 9/11 and a lot of people have a lot of problems with that Act, and it gets renewed relentlessly, relentlessly, and here we are, nearly 20 years later, and it's still with us. So that creates quite a high bar for any standard that we push out here. How do we persuade people that this is custom-made for the current situation that we're in, and it's not going to be picked up and subsequently abused by companies or by government? DA: That's an absolutely critical question, and I think we have a lot to learn from places like Germany, which are really, really strong and rigorous on privacy protections. Perhaps having some of the highest privacy-protection standards in the world. And Germany, over the course of the last few weeks, has articulated an approach that definitely picks up several of these elements. So there are ways of building in privacy structures that are meeting the standards of the German privacy framework, and so I think for us, that's a really important place to look to, and learn from them how they're structuring it, to achieve those privacy protections. CA: Danielle, you're an ethicist, among other things, as well as a political theorist, and is it, as you think about how to apply ethical questions to this, is it inherent in a situation like this that there are going to be trade-offs, that there is no "perfect solution" that we just, you know — These things are fundamentally — You've got two goods that are fundamentally in conflict with each other or if you like, avoidance of two evils that are going to clash. And that we're not going to get away sort of untainted to some extent, we just have to try and make the least bad choice? DA: It's a great question, and I think, I tend to formulate things as being about hard choices and judgments, rather than being about trade-offs. I think trade-offs often suggest that you can precisely quantify this degree of monetizable harm against that degree of monetizable harm, and I think that's actually not as helpful to us in this current moment, to be honest. So in effect, I think the most important thing is that we clarify our core values. And so the way we've tried to articulate that is to say we have a fundamental value in securing public health. We have a fundamental value in securing a functioning, healthy economy. We have a fundamental value in securing civil liberties and justice and constitutional democracy. And so then the question is, given that set of fundamental values, what are the policy options that actually do secure all of those things? So in that regard, at the end of the day, you know, there's a bunch of libertarians in the group that we work on, and a lot of us come out very strongly, sort of, privacy protecting, liberty protecting point of view. And so we're not here to sacrifice those things. We're rather here to find a solution that aligns with the values that we bring in to this problem. So that's how we think about the decision making. CA: Talk a bit more, actually, about the group that you've pooled together over this. I know that there's a TED speaker Paul Romer, an economist at Stanford, who's, I think, a key member. Who else is in the group? DA: Well, Paul was a key member. I'm afraid we parted ways to some extent, because he's advocating random testing, so the sort of 100 million tests a day direction, and he's not a fan of the contact-tracing approach, so he does have, you know, he's sort of at one end of a kind of libertarian spectrum on that and my view, however, is that testing 100 million a day is far more intrusive than smart testing supported by privacy protective contact tracing. I also think it's really important to throw into the mix the fact that collective social distancing is a huge infringement on our civil liberties. We keep forgetting that. The alternative is not contact tracing versus nothing, it's contact tracing versus social distancing. We can't go out, we can't form associations where we get to be together in person, churchgoers can't go to church right now. You know, political parties are having their conventions postponed. If that's not infringement on our civil liberties, I don't know what is. So from my point of view, the civil liberties conversation is one about the contrast between the kind of infringement that is produced by social distancing versus the kind of infringement or reshaping that would be imposed by contact-tracing regime. I didn't answer your question about our group. CA: Go ahead, it's just amazing this thing is moving so fast in real time. Talk about some of the other people who are in your group. DA: Sure, so Glen Weyl is an economist at Microsoft, a political economist, he's a really key figure and he is really an innovative mechanism design thinker, who is really good at kind of, figuring out how to craft incentive structures and so forth that help people make choices in socially productive ways, in ways that are also freedom-respecting, and so forth. So he's really been helping us think about the design of the policy pathway, Rajiv Sethi is another economist, Lucas Stanczyk is a philosopher at Harvard who has been scrutinizing the civil liberties and justice questions. I mean, that is his line of work, those are the things he's most committed to, and that's what he's doing. We've reached out to a number of public health groups for regular consultations, so they're not as directly part of our group in the sense of advancing a policy, but in terms of informing our epidemiological understanding, we've relied a lot on folks at the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. So lawyers as well, Glenn Cohen, who directs the Petrie-Flom Center for law and bioethics has been a critical member, Andrew Crespo also at Harvard Law School, Rosa Brooks at Georgetown Law school, I could go on, I'm missing key people, critical scientists. Actually, there's a great paper on solidarity by Melani Cammett and Evan Lieberman that people should check out too. CA: It's exciting that one of the impacts of this, and I've seen it in other areas as well, this crisis is really breaking a lot of cross-disciplinary lines and bringing people together in unexpected combinations, which is good. DA: Yes. CA: So how, if this plan got general acceptance, how — I mean, obviously, the clock is ticking, this is urgent, what would it look like to move this forward? Give a sense of what you think it would cost, give a sense of who might own it, like, what would it take to actually activate this giant idea? DA: Alright, so it's a big price tag, so I hope you're sitting down — I'm glad you're sitting down. So over two years, based on conservative estimates of what you would need, that is to say maximal estimates for testing and things like that, it's got a price tag of 500 billion, which includes both the production of the tests and the personnel of test administration, contact tracing and all of that. So it's important to remember though, that that production ramp up and the contact tracing ramp up are employment possibilities, so in that regard, they would counteract the negative impact on employment of the social distancing. So it's a big price tag, but it would be multipurpose in that regard, contributing to jumping up the economy, as well as the testing program itself. It would be important that it be phased in, and phasing it in would actually give us a way of testing out the paradigm as we went. So for example, for a first phase of rollout, probably what you would want to do, ideally by the end of the next month, would be to have a full range of testing for a combination of everybody in the health care sector and everybody who might fill in and substitute for any health care workers who test positive. So in other words, your health care worker pool and a substitute pool, say a national service corps, of folks who can fill in for health care workers who test positive. If you can get those two groups, those two sectors fully under testing, contact-tracing regime, so you know that every health care worker is not positive, and anybody who is is immediately quarantined and so forth, we would stabilize our public health infrastructure, and that would already get about 30 percent of the workforce under this kind of testing and tracing regime. And then you'd move on, with that stabilized, to other critical and essential workers, etc. So the bad news, Chris, is you know, who would be the last people to be folded into this? It would be you, it would be me, the people who can actually telecommute for work, OK. Because we would have the least call on social needs to pull us back out into the workforce. So we'd be the last ones out. But that's a good thing, I think that's a part of making the point that we're all in this together and that there are sacrifices in different places, and service workers, care workers and so forth would be able to get out faster. CA: And that addresses what is definitely one of the most shocking and painful aspects of the current moment, which is, you know, for those of us working from home it feels traumatic, but it's nothing like what others are experiencing, whose livelihood depends on being out there, doing, you know, physical work. And so I think it's excellent, obviously, that the plan focuses on them first. How applicable is this to other countries? You're obviously talking — The plan is developed for the US. It's inspired by what's happened, in some ways, in some Asian countries. Is it applicable to other countries as well? DA: It absolutely is, and we're already seeing Europe move in this way. So Europe and the UK are ahead of the US on this point, I mean, the rough shape of the plan that we're proposing seems to be pretty much the rough shape of the plan that's emerging in Europe and the UK. So I think it's a really important moment to bring together those policy conversations, bring together those modeling conversations and help each other out on this one. CA: And I guess the reason I'm delighted that you're engaged in this is that it's — You know, it's fundamentally framed here as this is a discussion that society has to have. There are ethical choices we have to make here as part of this. And so we can't just leave it up to the scientists, as brilliant as they are. And the politicians, for goodness sake. We all need to understand what is at stake here, what the choices are, what the hard choices are and know that any direction is tricky, but we, you know — This really matters. DA: Absolutely. I think you've put it so well. I think that's what makes this kind of question different in a democracy. It really is important that we all collectively achieve understanding, have clarity about the directional options and have a sense of collectively moving in a direction that we desire, right. That we consent to, in a sense. CA: Corey. CH: Hi, I just wanted to come back and give you a little feedback on what people are saying online in terms of the testing, to be able to go back to work, you know, how people feel about that. Obviously, there's lots of questions about the app and privacy. Some people are hesitant about it, they're wondering whether it will be mandatory, which you touched on. Maybe you will opt in to be able to go back in the office. I'm in, I would test to be able to go back in the office myself, but I think people are wondering about that. But the general consensus is it seems like a reasonable possibility. There are a couple of questions. One I think you just touched on in terms of the global possibilities. Do you see some collaboration on the global landscape, do you see people talking to each other? Obviously, if we want international travel to come back, that seems like a key piece of it. DA: Yes. So I think travel is one of the hardest pieces of this, and actually I don't think that there are good, clear answers on that yet. Scientists are talking to each other across international boundaries without any questions. I think the scientific community is really well and at work, really connected, trying to think about these things. It's not clear to me how well-networked the policy-making community is, in all honesty. So I think there's probably a lot of room for building a tighter international network of policy makers on that front. And the hardest part is going to be the travel piece. And honestly, we haven't even talked about parts of the globe like Africa or India, South America, where they're not yet getting towards this policy paradigm. So the virus is going to live in the world, without any question. And live in the world probably in quite significant ways for a considerable period of time. So I think the role of travel restrictions is probably going to be with us for a spell. And so it really does matter that we get the design of those right. I think it's Hong Kong that has a particularly, what looks to me like a sort of, useful regime, where anybody who is coming into Hong Kong for longer than two weeks has to go into 14-day quarantine when they arrive. But for anybody who is coming for a shorter time, they have to be tested when they arrive and then they have to also go through active monitoring during the period of their time in Hong Kong, which means having temperature checks and so forth reported. So I think that's a reasonable thing to do in order to keep business travel up and running, even as we're all trying to deal with controlling the virus. CH: And you also mentioned solidarity and I think that touches on another question that someone brought up online about some of the social impacts after the 1918 epidemic and the fear, and the, you know, the fear of the other, and foreigners and all that. And how do we get through this without that kind of fallout and you know, how do we, kind of, keep ourselves together and looking out for each other? DA: I think that's such a hugely important question. And I mean, in one sense it's easy, because the virus is an adversary to every human being equally, right. We are all completely equal in relationship to it. And so what we are really all aspiring to here is sort of transformation of our basic socioeconomic infrastructure in a way that puts us all on a footing to be pandemic-resilient. So I've been using the metaphor we need to put ourselves on a war footing to mobilize the economy to fight the virus, and I stand by that in a sense that we do need to mobilize the economy. But really at the end of the day, it's not a war against a human adversary or anything of that kind. And so what we're really talking about goes back to the questions about the health infrastructure, health care. We're really talking about achieving a transformed peace situation where our economies and our societies are pandemic-resilient. That's the real goal here and it really does require an investment, so because of the 2003 SARS experience, Asian nations have been investing over the last five years or plus, in pandemic-resilient equipment and infrastructure. We haven't done that in the US, so we find ourselves in a position where we have to accelerate in a matter of months, something that has taken other people years to build and develop. So I think really focusing on that, and the goal is an economy that's not vulnerable to pandemic, right. I mean, because we don't want to leave this pandemic and have the economy be just as vulnerable to pandemic at the end of the pandemic as we were at the beginning of it. We don't want to be vulnerable this way. And so in that regard, the job is to build in that infrastructure for pandemic resilience ASAP. CA: Wow. CH: Thank you. CA: Danielle, given the price tag you're talking about on this, half a trillion dollars, basically, up to. That's significantly less than some of the multitrillion dollar numbers that are getting thrown around, so, I mean in terms of the scale of the problem, it's probably an appropriate number. But it sounds like, to have any chance of doing this, this would have to be a kind of federal initiative at some level. DA: Yes. CA: We have a problem that more than half the country fundamentally doesn't trust key parts of the administration, let's say. How could this be framed in a way that could build trust and make it feel like this is the country as a whole, that there's this coalition of trusted voices who are the final decision makers on this? DA: So we have this incredible federalist system, and we need to see it as an asset. It's modularized and flexible, and we need to activate that. We do need all the parts of the system working, so we do need the federal government working on behalf of this, we need the state governments working and municipal governments. On the federal end of things, we need Congress to fund. So in the first instance, there's a really big need for funding legislation, and also, Congress can really help by directing investment, not just in the testing program itself, but in the national service corps, probably flowing through state governments, through the national — The reserves in every state. That would be sort of health reserves. You know, really expand that program with a combination of employment program and backing up that sector. So there's a lot for Congress to do as a part of this. For the testing program, we really do need the kind of procurement order to produce capacity that the Defense Department is the best example of. So in the ideal, a sort of testing supply board that brought in leading figures who are masters of supply chain logistics from the private sector, working in close coordination with the federal government would be great. The White House has recently, in the last week or so, begun to put in pieces of architecture that goes in this way, sort of a testing supply czar, for example, an admiral, I believe. So we need people of that kind who are really superb masters of logistics, procurement, contracts and that sort of thing, to be able to ramp up an active, functional supply chain for testing to deliver at the order of tens of millions of tests a day. So we do need [unclear], absolutely is a key part of that, key driver of that. And so it's a time for all the parts of our government to come together and do their respective pieces. CA: So I'm kind of in awe at the scale at which you're thinking. I guess as we wrap up here, if I might, I'd love to just go to a bit more personal place. Like, I'm just curious about you and what is it in your past that is, sort of, is providing the fire right now, the drive to try to do this? How are you? How are you feeling about this? Tell us a bit about you, please. DA: Well, that's a very generous question. You know, I love this country. I'll admit that's where the motivation starts from, in the sense that, like, lots of people would say that I'm a global humanitarian, and watching the world succumb to the disease motivates me. I think of Paul Farmer for example, as an example. And I respect that and I get that, but at the end of the day, I love my country. And it hurt, just hurt, in the beginning of this, and what hurt particularly, was I was very clear, early on, that I was getting better information as a member of the Harvard faculty than my fellow parishioners, than the people who were serving me in restaurants and cafes, and it just like, that made me angry, in all honesty. As a combination of those two things, I was like, A, I want to understand this, and B, I want to share what I understand because it's not fair that people like me get it, and that's not being shared with other people. CA: Wow, that's powerful. I think all of us, we all feel this weird mixture of almost guilt at how fortunate a position some of us are in. Certainly a lot of gratitude, anger. Were you persuaded, Whitney, by this idea, by the possibility of it? CH: Sorry, you're meaning me. CA: Sorry! (Laughs) Did I say Whitney? CH: Totally OK. Whitney's your usual pal. CA: I'm the world's worst person on names, and Whitney and I have been hanging out here the last few weeks. Corey. CH: It's absolutely fine. Being mistaken for Whitney is a huge compliment. It's very persuasive, and I think so hopeful to hear a constructive plan and a feeling that there is a path out of this that is both possible for us as humans, to get back to being together, but then also as an economy and as a country. I'm really inspired by your work and so grateful to you for sharing it with us. DA: I appreciate that, thank you. I'm really glad to get a chance to talk about it and share the knowledge that our group has acquired over the last month. So thank you. CA: So if someone wants to keep in touch with the progress of this idea, what should they do? DA: OK, so now I should know our website URL by heart, but of course, I don't, I'm afraid. If somebody googles "COVID," "Safra," "Allen," that's my surname, our website will come up. So if you just remember those three words, "COVID," "Safra," "Allen," and Google that, you should get to our white papers, op-eds, things like that. We are hoping to have our full policy road map published by the end of the week. That's our target goal. CA: Yeah. It's: ethics.harvard.edu. DA: OK. Exactly, that takes you to the main landing page, and then to the COVID site. CA: And then to the COVID-19 from there, yeah. DA: Exactly. CA: Alright, well, thank you so much, Danielle, I found this absolutely fascinating. DA: Thank you. CA: It's going to take — I mean, this is not an ordinary idea. We don't often at TED have someone come and say, "Yeah, I've got this idea for how to spend half a trillion dollars, and it could make a difference between the US and other places around the world actually getting the economy going again. That's not usual, so this has been a gift to us today, thank you for that. DA: Thank you. CA: To everyone listening, this is an important debate. And it's not finished yet, there will be many other contributions to ideas like this, I think. DA: That's for sure. CA: Yeah, chip in, chip in. Thank you all so much for being part of this today. We're back again tomorrow. Corey, do you have details on that? CH: I do. And also, you can listen to this conversation on our website TED.com or on Facebook, and you can also listen to the recording of it through TED Interview. So if you missed any parts of it or you want to pass it along to a friend. We have some more amazing speakers coming up I might glance at my cheat sheet, but tomorrow we have Esther Choo, who is an emergency physician and professor and she is going to share with us what she's seen on the front lines of this crisis. On Wednesday, Chris and I will be speaking with Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, and he is going to address the market and economic implications of this pandemic. And on Thursday, we have two speakers, Gayathri Vasudevan, who is going to share with us what's happening in India, and Fareed Zakaria, a journalist. Friday, we'll wrap things up with a musician and artist Jacob Collier. So we have a lot of amazing things coming up. CA: We do, so calendar it if you can, apart from anything else, we just like your company here every day. We'll get through this together. Thanks so much for being part of this. Danielle, thanks again. DA: Thank you, goodbye. CH: Bye. |
How the Monkey King escaped the underworld | null | TED-Ed | In the depths of their underwater kingdom, the mighty Dragon Lords quaked with fear. Before them pranced Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. The legendary troublemaker been hatched from a stone, schooled in divine magic, and was currently brandishing the Dragon Lord’s most treasured weapon. This magical staff, originally large enough to measure the depth of a great flood, now obeyed the Monkey King’s will and shrank at his touch. Terrified of this bewildering power, the Dragons graciously allowed Sun Wukong to keep the staff. The Monkey King stowed the weapon away, and gleefully sped back to his kingdom to show this treasure to his tribe of warrior monkeys. After a lavish celebration, Sun Wukong fell into a deep sleep. But just as he began to dream, the Monkey King quickly realized two things. The first was that this was no ordinary slumber. The second was that he wasn’t alone. Suddenly, he found himself caught in the clutches of two grisly figures. At first the Monkey King didn’t know who his captors were. But as they dragged him toward their city’s gates, Sun Wukong realized his deathly predicament. These were soul collectors tasked with transporting mortals to the Realm of the Dead. This was the domain of the Death Lords, who mercilessly sorted souls and designed gruesome punishments. From here, the kingdom of death was laid out before him. He could see the Death Lord’s palaces, and the fabled bridge across the river Nai He. Manning the bridge was an old woman who offered worthy souls a bowl of soup. After drinking, the spirits forgot their previous life, and were sent back to the world of the living in a new form. Further below were the souls not worthy of reincarnation. In this twisting maze of chambers, unfortunate spirits endured endless rooms of punishment— from mountains spiked with sharp blades, to pools of blood and vats of boiling oil. But Sun Wukong was not about to accept torture or reincarnation. As the soul collectors attempted to drag him through the gates, the Monkey King whipped out his staff and swung himself out of their clutches. His battle cries and the clang of weapons echoed throughout the underworld. Sensing a disturbance, the ten Death Lords swooped upon him. But they had never met such resistance from a mortal soul. What was this unusual creature? And was he a mortal, a god— or something else? The Lords consulted the Book of Death and Life— a tome which showed the time of every living soul’s death. Not knowing what category this strange being was under, the Death Lords struggled to find Sun Wukong at first; but the Monkey King knew just where to look. Unfortunately, the records confirmed the Death Lord’s claim— Sun Wukong was scheduled to die this very night. But the Monkey King was not afraid. This was far from the first time he’d defied destiny in his quest for wisdom and power. His past rebellions had earned him the power to transfigure his body, ride clouds at dizzying speeds, and govern his tribe with magic and martial arts. In this crisis, he saw yet another opportunity. With a flash of his nimble fingers, the Monkey King struck his own name from the Book. Before the Death Lords could respond, he found the names of his monkey tribe and swept them away as well. Liberated from the bonds of death, Sun Wukong began to battle his way out of the underworld. He deftly defeated endless swarms of angry spirits— before tripping on his way out of the kingdom. Just before he hit the ground, Sun Wukong suddenly awoke in his bed. At first he thought the journey might have been a dream, but the Monkey King felt his new immortality surging from the top of his head to the tip of his tail. With a cry of triumph, he woke his warriors to share his latest adventure— and commence another round of celebration. |
A history of Indigenous languages -- and how to revitalize them | {0: 'Lindsay Morcom researches education, Aboriginal languages, language revitalization and linguistics. '} | TEDxQueensU | Dene elder Paul Disain said, "Our language and culture is the window through which we see the world." And on Turtle Island, what is now known as North America, there're so many unique and wonderful ways to see the world. As a person of Indigenous heritage, I'm interested in learning Anishinaabemowin, which is my heritage language, because it lets me see the world through that window. It lets me connect with my family, my ancestors, my community, my culture. And lets me think about how I can pass that on to future generations. As a linguist, I'm interested in how language functions generally. I can look at phonetics and phonology — speech sounds. I can look at morphology, or the structure of words. I can look at syntax, which is the structure of sentences and phrases, to learn about how humans store language in our brains and how we use it to communicate with one another. For example, Anishinaabemowin, like most Indigenous languages, is what's called polysynthetic, which means that there are very, very long words, composed of little tiny pieces called morphemes. So I can say, in Anishinaabemowin, "niwiisin," "I eat," which is one word. I can say "nimino-wiisin," "I eat well," which is still one word. I can say "nimino-naawakwe-wiisin," "I eat a good lunch," which is how many words in English? Five words in English, a single word in Anishinaabemowin. Now, I've got a bit of a quiz for you. In a one-word answer, what color is that slide? Audience: Green. Lindsay Morcom: What color is that slide? Audience: Green. LM: What color is that slide? Audience: Blue. LM: And what color is that slide? (Audience murmurs) Not trick questions, I promise. For you as English speakers, you saw two green slides and two blue slides. But the way that we categorize colors varies across languages, so if you had been Russian speakers, you would have seen two slides that were different shades of green, one that was "goluboy," which is light blue, one that is "siniy," dark blue. And those are seen as different colors. If you were speakers of Anishinaabemowin, you would have seen slides that were Ozhaawashkwaa or Ozhaawashkozi, which means either green or blue. It's not that speakers don't see the colors, it's that the way they categorize them and the way that they understand shades is different. At the same time, there are universals in the ways that humans categorize color, and that tells us about how human brains understand and express what they're seeing. Anishinaabemowin does another wonderful thing, which is animate, inanimate marking on all words. So it's not unlike how French and Spanish mark all words as either masculine or feminine. Anishinaabemowin and other Algonquian languages mark all words as either animate or inanimate. The things that you would think to be animate are animate, things that have a pulse: people, animals, growing plants. But there are other things that are animate that you might not guess, like rocks. Rocks are marked as animate, and that tells us really interesting things about grammar, and it also tells us really interesting things about how Anishinaabemowin speakers relate to and understand the world around them. Now, the sad part of that is that Indigenous languages are in danger. Indigenous languages that posses so much knowledge of culture, of history, of ways to relate to one another, of ways to relate to our environment. Having been on this land since time immemorial, these languages have developed here and they contain priceless environmental knowledge that helps us relate well to the land on which we live. But they are, in fact, in danger. The vast majority of Indigenous languages in North America are considered endangered, and those that are not endangered are vulnerable. That is by design. In our laws, in our policies, in our houses of governance, there have been stated attempts to eliminate Indigenous languages and cultures in this country. Duncan Campbell Scott was one of the architects of the residential school system. On tabling a bill that required mandatory residential school attendance for Indigenous children in 1920, he said, "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department; that is the whole object of this Bill." The atrocities that occurred in residential schools were documented. In 1907, P.H. Bryce, who was a doctor and an expert in tuberculosis, published a report that found that in some schools, 25 percent of children had died from tuberculosis epidemics created by the conditions in the schools. In other schools, up to 75 percent of children had died. He was defunded by federal government for his findings, forced into retirement in 1921, and in 1922, published his findings widely. And through that time, Indigenous children were taken from their homes, taken from their communities and forced into church-run residential schools where they suffered, in many cases, serious emotional, physical and sexual abuse, and in all cases, cultural abuse, as these schools were designed to eliminate Indigenous language and culture. The last residential school closed in 1996. Until that time, 150,000 children or more attended residential schools at 139 institutions across the country. In 2007, the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement came into effect. It's the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history. It set aside 60 million dollars for the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The TRC gifted us with the ability to hear survivor stories, to hear impacts on communities and families and to gain access to research that explored the full effect of residential schools on Indigenous communities and on Canada as a whole. The TRC found that residential schools constituted what's called cultural genocide. They state that, "Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, biological genocide is the destruction of that group's reproductive capacity. And cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group." The stated goals of Duncan Campbell Scott. So they find that it's cultural genocide, although as children's author and a great speaker David Bouchard points out, when you build a building, and you build a cemetery next to that building, because you know the people going into that building are going to die, what do you call that? The TRC also gifted us with 94 calls to action, beacons that can lead the way forward as we work to reconciliation. Several of those pertain directly to language and culture. The TRC calls us to ensure adequate, funded education, including language and culture. To acknowledge Indigenous rights, including language rights. To create an Aboriginal Languages Act aimed at acknowledging and preserving Indigenous languages, with attached funding. To create a position for an Aboriginal Languages Commissioner and to develop postsecondary language programs as well as to reclaim place names that have been changed through the course of colonization. At the same time as the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement came into effect, the United Nations adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2007. It states that Indigenous people have the right to establish and control their own education systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning. In 2007, when that was brought into effect, four countries voted against it. They were the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Canada adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2010. And in 2015, the government promised to bring it into effect. So how are we collectively going to respond? Here's the situation that we're in. Of the 60 currently spoken Indigenous languages in Canada, all but six are considered endangered by the United Nations. So, the six that aren't are Cree, Anishinaabemowin, Stoney, Mi'kmaq, Dene and Inuktitut. And that sounds really dire. But if you go on to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger through the UNESCO website, you'll see a little "r" right next to that language right there. That language is Mi'kmaq. Mi'kmaq has undergone significant revitalization because of the adoption of a self-government agreement that led to culture and language-based education, and now there are Mi'kmaq children who have Mi'kmaq as their first language. There's so much that we can do. These children are students in the Mnidoo Mnising Anishinabek Kinoomaage, an immersion school on Manitoulin island, where they learn in Anishinaabemowin. They arrived at school in junior kindergarten speaking very little, if any, Anishinaabemowin. And now, in grade three and grade four, they're testing at intermediate and fluent levels. At the same time, they have beautifully high self-esteem. They are proud to be Anishinaabe people, and they have strong learning skills. Not all education has to be formal education either. In our local community, we have the Kingston Indigenous Language Nest. KILN is an organization now, but it started six years ago with passionate community members gathered around an elder's kitchen table. Since then, we have created weekend learning experiences aimed at multigenerational learning, where we focus on passing language and culture on to children. We use traditional games, songs, foods and activities to do that. We have classes at both the beginner and intermediate levels offered right here. We've partnered with school boards and libraries to have resources and language in place in formal education. The possibilities are just endless, and I'm so grateful for the work that has been done to allow me to pass language and culture on to my son and to other children within our community. We've developed a strong, beautiful, vibrant community as well, as a result of this shared effort. So what do we need moving forward? First of all, we need policy. We need enacted policy with attached funding that will ensure that Indigenous language is incorporated meaningfully into education, both on and off reserve. On reserve, education is funded at significantly lower levels than it is off reserve. And off reserve, Indigenous language education is often neglected, because people assume that Indigenous people are not present in provincial schools, when actually, around 70 percent of Indigenous people in Canada today live off reserve. Those children have equal right to access their language and culture. Beyond policy, we need support. And that doesn't just mean financial support. We need space where we can carry out activities, classes and interaction with nonindigenous populations as well. We need support that looks like people wanting to learn the language. We need support where people talk about why these languages are important. And to achieve that, we need education. We need access to immersion education primarily, as that is most certainly the most effective way to ensure the transmission of Indigenous languages. But we also need education in provincial schools, we need education for the nonindigenous populations so that we can come to a better mutual understanding and move forward in a better way together. I have this quote hanging in a framed picture on my office wall. It was a gift from a settler ally student that I taught a few years ago, and it reminds me every day that we can achieve great things if we work together. But if we're going to talk about reconciliation, we need to acknowledge that a reconciliation that does not result in the survivance and continuation of Indigenous languages and cultures is no reconciliation at all. It is assimilation, and it shouldn't be acceptable to any of us. But what we can do is look to the calls to action, we can look to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and we can come to a mutual understanding that what we have, in terms of linguistic and cultural heritage for Indigenous people in this country, is worth saving. Based on that, we can step forward, together, to ensure that Indigenous languages are passed on beyond 2050, beyond the next generation, into the next seven generations. Miigwech. Niawen’kó:wa. Thank you. (Applause) |
How understanding divorce can help your marriage | {0: "Jeannie Suk Gersen writes on the legal complexities of the United States's evolving attitudes towards women's rights, sexual harassment and the interplay between law and politics."} | TEDWomen 2019 | "Till death do us part." When we get married, we make vows. To love, to honor, to forsake all others. Or as a friend of mine put it, "Not to leave dirty socks all over the house." (Laughter) We may fall short of some of our promises some of the time, but one that will always hold true is that first one: "Till death do us part." Because spouses are bound together by their decisions, in marriage and in divorce. So, a mentor of mine once told me, "You should always marry your second husband first." (Laughter) What did that mean? It didn't mean that Mr. Right is somehow waiting behind door number two. It meant that if you want to understand what makes a marriage work, you should think about how a marriage ends. Divorce makes extremely explicit what the tacit rules of marriage are. And everyone should understand those rules, because doing so can help us build better marriages from the beginning. I know, it doesn't sound very romantic, but sometimes the things we do out of love can be the very things that make it hard for that love to last. I am a family-law professor. I have taught students, I've been an attorney, I'm a mediator and I've also been divorced. And I'm now happily married to my actual second husband. (Laughter) The reason that I think this is so important is that I think everyone should be having some of these very painful conversations that divorced people experience. These are painful conversations about what we contributed, what we owe, what we are willing to give and what we give up. And also, what's important to us. Those conversations should be happening in a good marriage, not after it is broken. Because when you wait until it's broken, it's too late. But if you have them early on, they can actually help build a better marriage. Three ideas that I want to put on the table for you to consider. One, sacrifice should be thought of as a fair exchange. Two, there's no such thing as free childcare. And three, what's yours probably becomes ours. So let me talk about each of these ideas. The first one, sacrifice should be a fair exchange. Take the example of Lisa and Andy. Lisa decides to go to medical school early in the marriage, and Andy works to support them. And Andy works night shifts in order to do that, and he also gives up a great job in another city. He does this out of love. But of course, he also understands that Lisa's degree will benefit them both in the end. But after a few years, Andy becomes neglected and resentful. And he starts drinking heavily. And Lisa looks at her life and she looks at Andy and she thinks, "This is not the bargain I wanted to make." A couple of years go by, she graduates from medical school, and she files for a divorce. So in my perfect world, some kind of marriage mediator would have been able to talk to them before Lisa went to medical school. And at that point, that mediator might have asked, "How exactly does fair exchange work? What does it look like in your marriage? What are you willing to give and what are you willing to owe?" So in a divorce, Lisa now probably is going to owe Andy financial support for years. And Andy ... no amount of financial support is going to make him feel compensated for what he gave up, and the lost traction in his career. If the two of them had thought about their split early on, what might have gone differently? Well, it's possible that Lisa would have decided that she would take loans or work a part-time job in order to support her own tuition so that Andy wouldn't have had to bear the entire burden for that. And Andy might have decided to take that job in that other city and maybe the two of them would have commuted for a couple of years while Lisa finished her degree. So let's take another couple, Emily and Deb. They live in a big city, they have two children, they both work. Emily gets a job in a small town, and they decide to move there together. And Deb quits her job to look after the children full-time. Deb leaves behind an extended family, her friends and a job that she really liked. And in that small town, Deb starts to feel isolated and lonely. And 10 years later, Deb has an affair, and things fall apart. Now, the marriage mediator who would have come in before they moved and before Deb quit her job might have asked them, "What do your choices about childcare do to the obligations you have to each other? How do they affect your relationship? Because you have to remember that there is no such thing as free childcare." If the two of them had thought about their split beforehand, what would have gone differently? Well, maybe Deb would have realized a little better how much her family and her friends were important to her precisely in what she was taking on, which is full-time parenthood. Perhaps Emily, in weighing the excitement of the new job offer might have also thought about what that would mean for the cost to Deb and what would be owed to Deb as a result of her taking on full-time parenthood. So, let's go back to Lisa and Andy. Lisa had an inheritance from her grandmother before the marriage. And when they got married, they bought a home, and Lisa put that inheritance toward a down payment on that home. And then Andy of course worked to make the mortgage payments. And all of their premarital and marital property became joined. That inheritance is now marital property. So, in a split, what's going to happen? They're going to have to sell the house and split the proceeds, or one of them can buy the other out. So this marriage mediator, if they had talked to them before all of this happened, that person would have asked, "What do you want to keep separate and what do you want to keep together? And how does that choice actually support the security of the marriage? Because you have to remember that what's yours, probably, will become ours, unless you actually are mindful and take steps to do otherwise." So if they had thought about their split, maybe they would have decided differently, maybe Lisa would have thought, "Maybe the inheritance can stay separate," and saved for a day when they might actually need it. And maybe the mortgage that they took on wouldn't have been as onerous, and maybe Andy wouldn't have had to work so hard to make those payments. And maybe he would have become less resentful. Maybe they would have lived in a smaller house and been content to do that. The point is, if they had had a divorce-conscious discussion about what to keep separate, their marriage might have been more connected and more together. Too often in marriage, we make sacrifices, and we demand them, without reckoning their cost. But there is wisdom in looking at the price tags attached to our marital decisions in just the way that divorce law teaches us to do. What I want is for people to think about their marital bargains through the lens of divorce. And to ask, "How is marriage a sacrifice, but an exchange of sacrifice? How do we think about our exchange?" Second: "How do we think about childcare and deal with the fact that there is no such thing as free childcare?" "How do we deal with the fact that some things can be separate and some things can be together, and if we don't think about it, then it will all be part of the joint enterprise." So basically, what I want to leave you with is that in marriage or divorce, people should think about the way that "till death do us part" marriage is forever. Thank you. (Applause) |
How does alcohol make you drunk? | {0: 'Professor of Psychology, Researcher in Neuroscience and Addiction, Author of "Never Enough"'} | TED-Ed | Ethanol: this molecule, made of little more than a few carbon atoms, is responsible for drunkenness. Often simply referred to as alcohol, ethanol is the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages. Its simplicity helps it sneak across membranes and nestle into a many different nooks, producing a wide range of effects compared to other, clunkier molecules. So how exactly does it cause drunkenness, and why does it have dramatically different effects on different people? To answer these questions, we’ll need to follow alcohol on its journey through the body. Alcohol lands in the stomach and is absorbed into the blood through the digestive tract, especially the small intestine. The contents of the stomach impact alcohol’s ability to get into the blood because after eating, the pyloric sphincter, which separates the stomach from the small intestine, closes. So the level of alcohol that reaches the blood after a big meal might only be a quarter that from the same drink on an empty stomach. From the blood, alcohol goes to the organs, especially those that get the most blood flow: the liver and the brain. It hits the liver first, and enzymes in the liver break down the alcohol molecule in two steps. First, an enzyme called ADH turns alcohol into acetaldehyde, which is toxic. Then, an enzyme called ALDH converts the toxic acetaldehyde to non-toxic acetate. As the blood circulates, the liver eliminates alcohol continuously— but this first pass of elimination determines how much alcohol reaches the brain and other organs. Brain sensitivity is responsible for the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral effects of alcohol— otherwise known as drunkenness. Alcohol turns up the brain’s primary brake, the neurotransmitter GABA, and turns down its primary gas, the neurotransmitter glutamate. This makes neurons much less communicative, and users feel relaxed at moderate doses, fall asleep at higher doses, and can impede the brain activity necessary for survival at toxic doses. Alcohol also stimulates a small group of neurons that extends from the midbrain to the nucleus accumbens, a region important for motivation. Like all addictive drugs, it prompts a squirt of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens which gives users a surge of pleasure. Alcohol also causes some neurons to synthesize and release endorphins. Endorphins help us to calm down in response to stress or danger. Elevated levels of endorphins contribute to the euphoria and relaxation associated with alcohol consumption. Finally, as the liver’s breakdown of alcohol outpaces the brain’s absorption, drunkenness fades away. Individual differences at any point in this journey can cause people to act more or less drunk. For example, a man and a woman who weigh the same and drink the same amount during an identical meal will still have different blood alcohol concentrations, or BACs. This is because women tend to have less blood— women generally have a higher percentage of fat, which requires less blood than muscle. A smaller blood volume, carrying the same amount of alcohol, means the concentration will be higher for women. Genetic differences in the liver’s alcohol processing enzymes also influence BAC. And regular drinking can increase production of these enzymes, contributing to tolerance. On the other hand, those who drink excessively for a long time may develop liver damage, which has the opposite effect. Meanwhile, genetic differences in dopamine, GABA, and endorphin transmission may contribute to risk for developing an alcohol use disorder. Those with naturally low endorphin or dopamine levels may self-medicate through drinking. Some people have a higher risk for excessive drinking due to a sensitive endorphin response that increases the pleasurable effects of alcohol. Others have a variation in GABA transmission that makes them especially sensitive to the sedative effects of alcohol, which decreases their risk of developing disordered drinking. Meanwhile, the brain adapts to chronic alcohol consumption by reducing GABA, dopamine, and endorphin transmission, and enhancing glutamate activity. This means regular drinkers tend to be anxious, have trouble sleeping, and experience less pleasure. These structural and functional changes can lead to disordered use when drinking feels normal, but not drinking is uncomfortable, establishing a vicious cycle. So both genetics and previous experience impact how a person experiences alcohol— which means that some people are more prone to certain patterns of drinking than others, and a history of consumption leads to neural and behavioral changes. |
What coronavirus means for the global economy | {0: 'Ray Dalio is the founder, chair and co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, a global leader in institutional portfolio management and the largest hedge fund in the world.', 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.', 2: "Corey Hajim is TED's business curator, working with speakers for TED across multiple platforms. "} | TED Connects | Corey Hajim: Are you there? Ray Dalio: Hi. CH: Thank you so much for being here, Ray. RD: Do you see me? CH: I see you. You look great. Thank you so much for being here, we really appreciate it. RD: My pleasure. CH: OK, so lay it on us, Ray, how bad is it, how worried should we be? RD: Well, I think you could look at this like a tsunami that's hit — the virus itself and the social distancing. And then what are the consequences in terms of the wreckage, when you look at it? And I think you have to think of that as incomes and balance sheets, you know? So it was a tremendous income hit. And then the balance sheets losses. And who has what savings and so on. And then how is that dealt with. In order to understand that, you have to realize that there are these holes. These holes in income, and the holes in the balance sheets. And then you have to realize that there is the production of money and credit. And who produces that money and credit. OK, the money and credit comes in different flavors. There is US dollar money and credit. There is Euro-dollar money and credit. And so when you look at the world, and you're seeing it, you're seeing a situation that is the same as existed, really, in the 1930 to '45 period, in that now we're seeing the production of a lot of debt, a lot of borrowing by the government. We're seeing zero interest rates and not the traditional kind of monetary policy. But the producing of a lot of money and credit — so the Federal Reserve is buying the Treasury's debt. And the Treasury is getting that money to, mostly, Americans, in some imperfect but remarkably large way. And the Europeans are doing the same in their way. That bank is a smaller bank, because the world lives with about 70 percent dollars, and only a small percent euro, and they will produce theirs for theirs, and there aren't many banks around the world. And so the rest of the world is going to have gaps, holes that won't be filled. So if you think about that and you say, "American printing of money and the borrowing will leave us with a lot of debt and monetization," that's something interesting to talk about, and we need to talk about that. Who will pay these bills, and how will that be shared, will be something we need to talk about. But you will know that you will get that money. And the Europeans will get their versions of that money. But we are in a new world. And that world is most similar to the 1930-45 world, and a lot of the world will not get that money in credit. So there will be a big differentiation as to which entities benefit and which entities don't. And there will be a big collaboration as to how we will deal with that bill and who will end up with what. A big question of wealth distribution, and all of that. So that's the big thing that's going to be happening. CH: How confident are you that some of that collaboration can happen right now? RD: We're now at one of those defining moments that I've seen repeatedly. The 1930-45 period, if you go back in history, there's nothing new to this. And it's a defining moment in terms of how people are with each other. So when you look at it, will people come together or, when it comes down to it, really, will there be a taking care of oneself and what does that define, and how will that go? That will be, I think, a defining moment. So I look at these histories. If I can take a minute, I'd like to just paint a template for you that takes us, you know, over the last thousand years, the things that have happened over and over again. There was one pattern that I'd like to convey. May I take a moment and do that? CH: Absolutely. RD: There are four things that are the driving forces of our economy and our lifestyle and wealth. And the first and most powerful is productivity, which comes from people learning and inventing and doing things well, just as Marko [Russiver] described. OK? And it grows slowly. You know, one or two or three percent a year. It grows slowly, and it's not volatile, because knowledge isn't volatile. But it grows, and that raises our living standards over a period of time. Then there's the short-term debt cycle. The short-term debt cycle is, you know, recessions and expansions and booms and recessions — that. They last about eight, ten years. And then there's a long-term debt cycle. And that long-term debt cycle, which goes on about once every 50 to 75 years, is when you begin a new type of money and a new type of credit. That began in 1945. The new world order at the end of World War II, and with the Bretton Woods monetary system, created a new monetary system in 1945, a new money. So they wiped out, pretty much, the old money, or they largely disposed of it, and they began anew. And that's the new world order, which was the American world order, and we have seen it, and still, 70 percent of the money and credit that exists in the economy is running by dollars, and what you have, traditionally, is the breakdown. And then the fourth influence is politics. And politics is largely how we deal with each other. And there's internal politics, and there's external politics. The internal politics is, how do you deal with the wealth gap? How do you deal with the values gap? Do you have a common mission? Do we have an American dream that we can agree on and that we're pursuing that together, or do you fight over wealth, and so on. And so when you look at history, that's what revolutions are in their various ways. And there's always a revolution in one of these. Sometimes those are peaceful revolutions and sometimes they are disruptive. But it's a wealth shift that needs to take place. Roosevelt shifted policies and changed taxes and so on in that way. And then in other countries, there was the turning over democracy. Hitler came to power because of that gap. So how people deal with each other internally. There's also external politics, so that politics means between countries. And you have a situation when there's a rising power challenging existing power. There is competition, and there is a risk of war. And so how they deal with each other. Whether there's a greater good, or whether they are fighting with each other is the defining moment. There are always stress tests, these big stress tests that come along once every 75 years. And when they happen — And this is a stress test. And I think that what you're going to see is how we deal with each other. There's enough wealth to go around. But what do you do when you're outside the ring of support? Let's say of the US dollar. And what is that going to be like for those entities? Or if you're within the ring of support, how will that bill be divided? And how will we be with each other? I think we're going to have to reconsider who has what, what is it about education, and so on. So that's what we're in, I think. CH: And I want to get to — because you've written extensively about how capitalism needs to change, and some of the things that we should be thinking about and doing, and I want to definitely get to that a little bit later on, but I am curious right now, just from a practical level, do you think that we're headed into a global depression? RD: Yes, but I want to be careful about what I use — the word. CH: Absolutely. RD: To be technical. The word is an evocative word. And it can be scary and so on. So what do you mean by a "depression," OK? Something like happened in the 1930s, so just to repeat: 1929 to 1932, there was a fall in the economy. And double-digit unemployment rates. And a magnitude of fall in the economy, like, about 10 percent. Do I think we're in that? Yes. How was that dealt with, 1933? What they did is they printed a lot of money. And the government came out with the same type of programs that we're having now. Yes, OK, same thing. Interest rates hit zero. Same thing, OK, same dynamics. And then, there is — That money causes an expansion from that point. How long does it take for the stock market to exceed its highs? Or how long does it take for the economy to exceed its former highs? A long time. OK. Do I think that's what we're in? Yes, that's what we're in. We've seen that happen repeatedly in history. Saw it many, many times; it's just the most recent one. And there's a structure to that. So yes, this is not a recession. This is a breakdown, an operation that I'm just describing in terms of how it's dealt with, the production of money and credit and all of that. That's what we're in. CH: And so you've talked about, there are sort of four levers to recovery after a depression: cutting spending, also known as austerity; debt restructuring, or forgiveness; redistribution of wealth through taxes, potentially; and printing of money, some of these things you've mentioned. Will those things get us out of this situation, since, as you feel, it's happened before? But how would you think about balancing these tools right now? RD: Yeah, those are the tools since eternity, basically, since recorded history. Those are the ones that operated, and I think what you're going to see is a combination you're seeing, of printing money and redistribution. And I think it will last ... These things happen pretty quickly, they last maybe a couple or three years in terms of that process. And then you have a rebuilding. And they're dealt with with creativity. The greatest force, through time, is inventiveness, human inventiveness, adaptability. So you're going to see these restructurings happen, and you're going to see the kind of inventiveness that you just saw from Marko, OK? And it's the power of that adaptation that is the greatest power. I did a study, which is on LinkedIn if anyone wants to see it, and it goes back 500 years. And it shows real GDP. In other words, the economic activity going back there. And there's a line. And you don't see these depressions, as we're calling them, even on that line that barely wiggles. When you go into it and you look at that piece, that's what it looks like. GDP falls 10 percent, unemployment goes up, and it passes. And because the greatest force is the force of adaptation and inventiveness, if we can operate well together. So that's what I think it's going to look like over this period of time. It will pass, the world will be very different, there will be a new world order, but it will pass, and we'll be inventive, because what we're dealing with now is just money and credit. Money and credit is just digital. I mean, there's no — There is real good services, you know, those are real. But everything else is just accounting. And so when you change the digits, and you work those things out, and you work yourself through, that takes, you know, a couple of years at most, kind of. And then you come back into a restructured environment. And it could be said that it is really healthy in many ways. Because it is a stress test. Because if you look at history, people have gotten — sometimes they get weaker, or they're not prepared in many ways. Weaker in terms of, maybe they don't build enough savings and they operate that, or maybe they emphasize luxuries over necessities. It's a reorienting type of experience that, in many ways, makes us healthy. Even appreciating the basics of life. Chris Anderson: Ray, just popping in here with a couple of questions from our online audience. I mean, the main question early on was just, how difficult do you think the days ahead are for the economy. And you've answered that very vigorously. Like, using that word, "depression," that's a very strong word. Tell me if I have this right — it feels to me like what you just said there is stronger than most people in the market seem to believe. The market is behaving as if, you know, we've had the bad news, and it sort of, kind of wants to come back and a lot of people seem to think that within, I don't know, a year, we'll kind of be back where we are. You're saying, no, it's going to take longer. Does that imply that there is basically sort of some systemic shots that the market hasn't yet fully seen, perhaps to do with the inability of some players to handle the extreme levels of debt that are piling up right now, as people can't work? RD: Yeah, I can't speak for what everybody's thinking out there, you know, the markets are off, depending on what market and depending on what country you're in, you know, something in the vicinity of 25 to 45 or 50 percent, depending what currency you're managing. And so if you're talking about emerging markets, they're worse, because they're not going to get as much, and so on. I can describe what I see, OK? We see something like 20 trillion dollars of losses. OK, we see — If you work that through, and you say you don't have money, and you don't have credit, your business can fail. You know this, we see this all around us. So there can be failures when there can't be payments. And so the question is, who gets what check to make those payments and get past it, but we're going to have a giant restructuring of the IOUs and we're going to work out. When hospitals can go broke — because this is terribly costly for hospitals, and they will not fully recover their losses, hospitals will go broke, even though we know that they need them. So you have to go entity by entity through this. And then you'll go through the process of who will pay. So this is not — You know, some people mistake this as — There is a virus, and the virus may come and go, OK? Maybe we never see it again. I don't think that's likely, but people tell me, but who knows. But if it never came back again, there will be those who are broke and who will have loss of income. We're going to change how we operate, in a way. The supply lines are going to change. In other words, self-sufficiency. What is self-sufficiency now going to mean? Do we have enough of this and that? We're going to restructure our economy. And restructure the financial system in ways that mean we are not going to go back to the way it was. CA: So do you see systemic threats to the financial industry as great or greater than happened in 2008? RD: Yeah, this is bigger than what happened in 2008. I'll distinguish it. In 2008, we had banks. It's the same thing, meaning, you have a certain amount of leverage, things go down, too much leverage means you're broke, in accounting terms. So then you look around and you say, who are the systemically important entities that you don't want to go broke? Because, do you want to lose those banks at this time? And then you can make up money and make up credit and you can keep them alive in some way, and you did it with banks, and through the banks, there were the mortgages, and that's what it looked like. This is more complex than that, because there are the banks, and then there are those, all of those that are beyond banks. All the little businesses, all of those in all the different places that are beyond it. And it's a bigger crisis. And we have a less effective monetary policy, because interest rates declines have reached their limit. And just buying financial assets by the central bank and buying the normal financial assets won't work. They have to buy the debt of the government and the government, or the many governments, have to be effective in getting buying power and production to those who need it around the world. CA: I have one last question, and then I'll be back at the end of the hour, Corey, and it's back to you. So, given how bleak that is, people are asking, what kinds of industries, organizations, companies have the best prospects of thriving, going forward? RD: Well, you see, that's the beauty of it. There are two types, basically. There are those that are stable, meat-and-potatoes, not-leverage kind of companies, you know, the Campbell soup equivalent, you know, everybody's going to use them all the time, kind of thing. And then, there are the innovators. The innovators like, we're talking about Marko. You had Marko on before. And that new innovation, those who can adapt well and innovate well, and don't have balance sheet problems, in other words, they have strong balance sheets so they're going to be able to play the game without having that. They will be great winners. And so there's always new inventions, new creativity, that is the new adaptation that becomes a company and an entrepreneur. And they're going to do great, plus the stuff that we're always going to need. Those are the things that are going to do great. CA: Thank you, Ray. Corey. CH: Thank you, Chris. So I guess I'd like to stay with the market for a minute. Obviously, it's something that interests so many people. The state of the market doesn't always correlate with what's going on in the economy. And the market and its players have changed so much over the past, you know, 70 years or so, 70, 90 years. So many more algorithms, and machines and passive investing. And how do you think that affects how the market is behaving right now, how it's going to recover over the next, you know, few years, as the economy recovers? RD: The basic fundamentals of money credit crisis, who has what income, who has what expenses, who has what balance sheet, and how do we deal with money and credit — those things, which people often lose sight of, because they happen only once in one's lifetime. This period, you have to go back to the 1930s as the last period. Those fundamentals of what a bank is, and the associated process, have existed all through time. Then it's, like, technology changes. Technology evolves. And so the capacity to take one's thinking and to put them in algorithms — we've been doing this for 25 years. The way we operate is to take a principle, "How would I deal with that situation," and write it down, put it into an algorithm, and then, because the capacity to think has been radically enhanced, because the human mind has a capacity problem. It's unique in inventing. But it can only process so much in so [much] time. So when worked in partnership with the computer, which has the capacity to take that thinking and replicate it and do all of that leverage thinking, and thinking in advanced way, that is the advancement of our time. And so you're seeing that. So when you think algorithmic, you know, you've got to break it down as to what it is. Is it sensible cause-effect relationships that are being dealt with? It all comes back to "Do you have understanding, and are you successfully betting on a cause-effect relationship?" Because that's the only way you're going to make money. But the computer can do it, process that thing, in a much more advanced way. So that's what's going on. There will be people who will make the mistake of just applying machine learning to the markets. And that generally won't work because of certain things. I guess I should explain, because you asked, so ... On algorithmic decision-making, there are two ways you can get your algorithm. You can specify the instruction to the computer and have it follow that and that will enable your thinking. Or you can have the algorithm come from putting a lot of data into the computer, and asking, "Computer, what would you do, and what's your algorithm?" The key difference between those is do you have understanding of the cause-effect relationships? You must have understanding of the cause-effect relationships to know what to believe in. Because you can't always get that in your sample size. For example, what's happening now, you could not have run your computer and have it in your sample size, because you would have to go back to the 1930s to have an analogous period. So what you — It is how you do that, but the capacity to learn, to invent, and to get, you know, that leverage in decision-making, is greater than ever before. And that's the power of our time. Some will do it well, some will do it poorly, but it really comes down to do you have the understanding of those cause-effect relationships, so that you know how to place the right bet. CH: But that's very different from the passive investment market, which is such a huge part of it now, and that's where most people, you know, the average person has their money. And I know that everything is changing day-to-day, but I also know that everyone is going to have this question on their minds. So I'm going to ask you — I'm not going to ask for specific investment advice, but everyone's thinking about their 401(k)s. Do you have any general thoughts about how people should approach this time period with that kind of money? RD: Yeah. First of all ... an investor must understand that they probably will not be able to play the game well. They probably will not be able to decide how to move in and out of things. In order to be successful in the markets, it is more difficult than getting a gold medal in the Olympics. You wouldn't think about competing in the Olympics, but everybody thinks they can compete in the markets. But there's more money competing. It's like a zero-sum game and there's more money doing it, and the worst thing you could do is think you can time all of these movements. I guarantee you, the game is a tough game. We put hundreds of millions of dollars into the game every year. And it's tough. So what the individual investor needs to do is know how to diversify well. So the word that I would — Know how to diversify well and in a balanced way. The greatest mistake of all investors is to think that what has done well lately is a better investment, rather than more expensive. And what has done worse lately is the worst investment, "get me out of it," rather than "it's cheap." And unless you know how to deal with the differences of those, which most people don't, they're going to be in trouble. So understand that wealth, total amount of wealth in the world, essentially doesn't change very much, OK? And that one thing goes up, another thing goes down. And to know how to diversify. To diversify it in asset classes, to diversify it in countries. To diversify it in currencies. To know how to diversify that well, so that you have wealth diversification, is important. Do not think that cash is a safe investment. Most people think, "Look, I just want safety. And those bonds aren't giving me an interest rate," and so on, "So where do I get safe?" Cash is a seductive investment, because it doesn't have as much volatility. But it taxes you and your buying power about two percent a year. And so cash is almost always the worst investment. So you have to think about that. You should think a little bit unconventionally. Do you have a little bit of gold? Do you have a little bit of, in case this monetary system breaks down and money is redefined, do you have a little bit of that? I can't get into all the different ways that one can diversify well. I try to convey those things in my books, or posts on LinkedIn, particularly. But I would say, diversify well, be humble, don't market time and be conscious of the dangers of cash. CH: Right, that's great advice. I want to ask one more, sort of, big-picture question before we start getting into how we should fix capitalism. We can talk about that in a minute, tackle that one. But I have been reading your series on LinkedIn, "The Changing World Order." It's really fascinating. I'm curious what you think about, there's been, sort of, this retreat from globalization as something we should all get behind, and I'm curious what you think about that in terms of our recovery. This seems like something that is going to require a coordinated effort, you know, financially, spiritually, in so many different ways. If we retreat from globalization right now, does that make everything harder going forward? RD: If we retreat from globalization, which we certainly will do, it will certainly make things very hard. And so we get down to comparing idealism with reality. So when you say globalization, will that — who will write what checks to people in countries that will be outside of their domain? And there are large numbers of those people. You know, my wife and I are trying to help people in Connecticut. And you know, I can rattle off all that is, what a job that is, and so on. And so, when you have congresses and presidents and they start to say, who will we help, and how will that be, and what will that mean, it gets down to real practical questions. And the reality is, a lot of those people won't be helped. And then you'll deal with, how will they behave for each other? One country's vulnerabilities, another country's opportunities. In such times, this is the case, because — You know, Graham Allison wrote a book about the Thucydides trap, and he reminds us, over the last 500 years, there have been 16 countries in which there's been a rivalry of an empire challenging another. In 12 of those cases, there have been wars. Because, at the end of the day, there's not even a global legal system. Power is what is the currency of that. So when you get into how do you resolve the dispute as to who gets what, that becomes a very complicated question. So I'm a globalist. Meaning, I have a dream and a wish that the best of the best can operate together and work together for that common good and so on. But it's dying, because we're in an interconnected, fragmented world. The fragmentation of this, "Can I depend on somebody else to give me something I need?" Or "Can I depend on them not taking advantage of me?" No, you can't make those dependencies anymore. And that exists within countries as well as between countries. CH: Yeah, I mean, it seems like, you talk about productivity and the importance of productivity for us all to have a better life, and it just seems like on a global level, the same should hold true. If we're all focused on being more productive together, and in that interconnected way, we'll all do better, as opposed to, kind of, hoarding one asset or one set of resources. RD: You're certainly true. That has always been true, but never more true than today. And at the same time, read history. And understand the mechanics and the issues and the challenges of this. This separation began before we had this isolation of the United States relative to the rest of the world. This deglobalization began before we had this that fosters more of it, right? And it happened for reasons, OK? So don't overlook those reasons, and don't overlook the reading of history, just because we wish it can happen. If you want to wish it happens, everything is all dependent on the behavior of those who have their hands on the levers of power. I would tell you, like, for example, right now — I've been going to China for a long time, and the Chinese, in many ways, are helping, in many ways, things that are needed in this crisis and all that. To even say that is a politically challenging thing, OK? Because we're in a world that is so fragmented that even to publicly say "thank you," and "thank you" to many people and many companies — It's almost dangerous to say "thank you" to those who are helping, because we're now in an environment in which there are enemies. And who is evil? And do you fall into that category? And so, the history of these is there's demonizations of different people. OK? Now you must see it around you. It exists. And so how we come out of this will be how we behave with each other. CH: Yeah. That's such an important point, and I think all of us here would say "thank you" to, you know, the different people helping out in this situation. We do need each other. I do want to get to this issue of capitalism. Because when we talked a few days ago, you mentioned — and earlier in this conversation as well — how, you know, this period of time we can emerge stronger and better than before. And about a year ago, you wrote a piece about how capitalism needs to be reformed, focused a lot on the wealth gap, the growing wealth gap and the problems that that's causing. So what's our opportunity here, what changes can we make? RD: Well, you know, what I was seeing was, do we want the outcomes that we're getting, that the system is producing? Do we have — What is our American dream? What is that? We're not even almost talking about that. When I was growing up — So again, I was born 1949, right after the new world order was created. New world order was created 1945. In 1945. And that was when there was the breakdown of the system and then we had a new world order. We didn't have as much debt, we came back [from] the war, and there was an environment of equal opportunity. And that notion of equal opportunity. And there was an American dream. And there was a harmony and a going through it together. And by the way, that's not a one-off. If you read histories, you see these periods of collapse and clash and fighting, followed by these periods of — You know, you construct the balance sheets, you change the system and then you begin a new system and you come back and you work together. And then I'm seeing, around me, children in school and education systems in poor neighborhoods are sharing — They don't have adequate resources. There's no excuse. And so the idea that the profit system can accomplish everything is not right. Because resource allocation goes to those who have the resource. And so throughout all history, you go back hundreds of years, you see that any system works for those who tend to control the system. So let's say we have a capitalist system, and we have entrepreneurs, and you acquire money, and all that. And then, working with those in government, and they have a symbiotic relationship and it works well for them. So it's self-perpetuating, because the education of those who are those, is better than the education of those who aren't those. So, for example, in our system, those in the top 40 percent on average, spend five times as much money on their children's education than those who are in the bottom 60 percent. And so it becomes self-perpetuating. And so when I look at that, I'm saying, "I'm a capitalist, please understand, I'm a capitalist, I believe in the system, I believe you can increase the size of the pie and you can divide it well, and if we talk about how to do that effectively, we need to do it." But there comes a time that there needs reforms. And those reforms have to create productivity. It doesn't mean just give money away. It means, how do you make those people productive, so that they're also psychologically productive as well as physically productive and producing output. You need to do that system. And so for reasons I wrote on that page, that post — it's on LinkedIn if people want it — that you need to restructure it. Now we are restructuring it, OK? It's the inevitable consequence of what we're doing here. We will come out of that. There has been a tremendous transfer of wealth, whether people realize it or not, through the production of all of that borrowed money. And all of that producing of money, that is a big force. We will come out of here, and the thing we will talk about over the next couple of years, and probably sooner rather than later, is how we do that restructuring. And my worry now is the same as my worry then. Whether that will be done in a civil, bipartisan way that will both increase the size of the pie and divide it well, rather than damage the economy, because you lose productivity. There are certain things that are great investments, education is a great investment. The more people you have that are well-educated, and you have equal education, the more people you are going to have who have the chance to compete with each other, and raise that over a period of time. It's a hell of an investment. It will produce more productivity than it ever will cost, if it's done well. But what happens is, states and localities think of it as a budget item. So they look at expenses. And they penny-pinch on the education. Because if you're in a rich town, your kids will get a good education. And if you're not — And a large percentage of the population is losing that. So that has to be engineered well, so that they are productive, as well as divide the pie well, and everybody believes that the system is fair. We can get there. Am I optimistic that we will get there? You know, I don't know. I would say, I'm 60-40 pessimistic that we'll be good enough with each other to do that. But there's that possibility. This is our test. This is our stress test. CA: Ray, there's so much interest in this question of how we emerge from this, whether it's genuinely possible to rebuild the economy in a way that's fairer. I just want to read one last question, this one's from my Twitter feed. "Do you think that the current crisis is showing that low-paid and/or unskilled workers are what holds countries together, even more so than banks and hedge funds? And if so, as part of the rebuilding, can we build an economy that raises their interest higher?" RD: Those — The heroes are those kind of people. OK, really. But it takes everyone, OK? It takes the efficient allocation of resources for — As you probably have seen behind the scenes, we see those who control a lot of resources being able to make contributions. We're giving 60,000 computers to poor students, so that they can learn. You know, the difference between a rich and a poor student is having a computer and having the ability to learn. And I want to thank those who would be embarrassed and almost afraid to hear it of how they contributed to that process. And at the same time, those other people, who are every day serving in so many ways, so it's good character and it's that — You know, when people came back from war, they built the greatest generation. It's that type of character that brings our country together, but each has to recognize their roles in doing that. So there's a CEO and then there's somebody who's really a great hero on the front lines, and they better damn work well together, so yeah. And then, they have to have usefulness. And we've got to appreciate them. We have to establish — just the reality, I think — that there is a level of basics. Basic education, basic health care — Basics that you cannot fall below. OK? Otherwise, when you go below that level, there is no opportunity, and actually, the costliness of it, in the form of crimes and incarceration. Like, to bring it personal, our mission is to help high school kids who dropped out of high school and can have jobs, to get them in that high school and through that, in jobs. And we believe that we can do that and save a lot of money, because the average cost of incarceration, it goes from about 40,000 dollars a year up to 120,000 dollars a year, depending on the form. And if you get them in and move them into a job, you're going to save a lot of money, and we could do that cost-effectively. But philanthropists can't do this alone. The amount of money is enormous. So if our country did those kinds of things, I think ... I think it would be great. CA: Wow, thank you for that, Ray. Corey, what do you think? Have you got any other questions there before we wrap up? CH: No, I think we're good, I mean, I think we're going to get through it, I guess is what we're saying, but we also have an opportunity here to make some changes and do better and emerge stronger. And as you said, take a look at things and the structures that we have in place and see where we can improve, but it's going to take a collective action and cooperation. CA: Yeah, Ray, I'm definitely inspired by the actions that you're taking as a philanthropist in this moment. And some of your peers, you know, there are amazing stories out there. I was really struck by Jack Dorsey's announcement yesterday of his huge philanthropic contribution. And, I mean, that's awesome, but equally important, I was — RD: But it's not nearly enough. CA: Exactly, and I'm — CH: It would be good to see more. CA: I'm kind of dismayed, in a way, to hear you say that you're 60/40 leaning pessimistic, like, it feels like your voice in these conversations that are going on in the corridors of power and you know, where the big money is, around whether this turns into fundamentally, cooperation between countries and between companies and between, you know, big-money controllers, or whether it turns into a fistfight, is so important. And hearing you talk about the gratitude we should be feeling towards some aspects, let's say, of what China has done, the extent — Do you find yourself in conversations, like, raising this, trying to take the view that, "No, no, no, you're needlessly sparking friction here, take a more generous view"? Because it feels to me like there's so much at stake between how many people are trying to nudge that type of conversation versus the hostile, fearful conversation. RD: I think there's a general mistaken belief — I communicate a lot with the people that you're saying, people in positions of power, whether they're both in government or other places, and so on. I think what you basically have to realize is that very few people are making decisions based on the quality of the argument. That most people are — Most of those are in a war of some kind or have a particular objective. And that the information that comes out, even in the media — you know, you could almost see which side each media outlet or each person is on. How many people do you really believe don't have a side? Almost everybody has — they're on one side or another side. And the idea of being able to see things from both sides and come together, is, in this time and through history, perceived as almost being weak or a threat. Because you've got to get on one side or the other side and so on. And so it's not easy to just say — Like, all the people, and China for example, I would say, "Thank you very much," you know how many respirators and masks and all these things that have come? But almost that's politically challenging. Because there will be people out there, and threatening, why am I doing this? People will be out there and they will say, "OK, he's a China lover" or "he's an enemy," "he goes on the other side." Because there will be people on the other sides, and those people — And so I think I'll turn to you, Chris. You have a forum. Bring in the other sides, OK? Bring in those that are those who, let's say, have the most offensive policies that you think that are in positions of power. And have that together, so that you can have thoughtful disagreement. I'm a believer in thoughtful disagreement. Open, thoughtful disagreement to try to get at the right answer and have collectiveness. But it isn't easy in this world. CA: Well, that's a good challenge to us, and I'm also a believer in [thoughtful] disagreement, I think, Corey, we're passionate disbelievers in the spreading of irrational hatred. Like, instinctual irrational hatred and I feel like the stakes are so high right now, that if — RD: But will you fight for that? In other words, when somebody's going to punch back — Because this is what's needed. If somebody's going to punch back because you're saying something that's true and controversial, that will be the test — Can you punch back for collective, you know, decision-making comment, decision making and then punch back? CA: I'm not going to say punch, I'm going to say fight back, absolutely. RD: OK, fight back, that's good. CA: With every fiber we have. If it means that we look weak or we're a threat, so damn well be it, because you know, this is the moment. I mean, everyone is impacting everyone else. We have a shot to nudge each other to be our better selves. And to look at the stories of inspiration, the stories of humans reaching out to humans, of companies doing incredible things, letting go of the profit motive for a moment, of countries trying to help each other — there are stories about that. I think we need to amplify some of those stories more. And we're certainly down to do that. We're trying to do that every day. And Ray, I loved hearing you talk about some of the good things that China is doing, all the rest of it. Thank you for your voice and for spending this time and for being, you know, honest and vigorous with us. And thank you, everyone, for listening. RD: I appreciate it. CA: A big damn deal. If you're listening, it sounded like you just got a warning that this could be a multiyear recession, depression. That's scary, and more than ever, we need to be in this together, as we've said again and again. RD: Well, in conclusion, — I know we're wrapping up — yes, I believe this is a defining moment, we will get through it fine, we will be restructured in important ways. So that's fine. And thank you for, you know, sharing ideas worth considering, you know. CA: Thank you, Ray. Thanks so much, everyone, for listening. Corey, we've still got more days to the week. There's an amazing program tomorrow, we're going to take a much more global look there that I'm superexcited about. We have a report from the head of LabourNet, which is an organization in India looking at mobile workers who just are facing this horrific situation right now, where they're having to, in the lockdown, having to maybe walk home hundreds of miles, or face police action. We've got a report right from the front lines there as to what that's like in a country with a very different set of trade-offs they're having to make between lockdown and giving the most impoverished a chance. And then, a wide-ranging discussion with Fareed Zakaria, who, you know, has this global view — you will have seen him on CNN — he's got this very broad-ranging global view as to how to think about this thing. And to compare the different responses of different countries. I think it's going to be an amazing conversation, I urge you to come back for that. CH: It's so amazing — you know, we were talking about this in a meeting this morning — this is a crisis that the whole world is going through together, and I think that's what's so unusual about it and there's so much to dig into, so much to learn about how it's affecting everybody in different ways. So I'm glad we're continuing. CA: Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Ray. And you can see a recording of this, if you didn't [see] the whole thing, by going, I think it's to go.ted.com/tedconnects. And if you want to look at Ray's work on this, just google Ray Dalio LinkedIn, and there's a whole series of resources there. That's "Dalio" with one "L." Ray, thank you so much for this. This was really, really, really interesting. Thank you so much. Thanks, all. CH: Thank you. |
The galactic recipe for a living planet | {0: 'Karin Öberg studies how chemistry and physics interact during planet formation to shape the compositions of new planets.'} | TED@NAS | So I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one in this room who at some point have found myself, you know, looking up towards the stars, and wondered, you know, "Are we it, or are there other living planets out there such as our own?" I guess it is possible that I'm then the only person who has obsessed enough about that question to make it my career. But moving on. How do we get to this question? Well, I would argue the first thing to do is to turn our eyes back down from the sky to our own planet, the Earth. And think about just how lucky did the Earth have to be to be the living planet it is. Well, it had to be at least somewhat lucky. Had we been sitting closer to the Sun or a bit further away, any water that we have had would have boiled off or frozen over. And I mean, it's not a given that a planet has water on it. So had we been a dry planet, there would not have been a lot of life on it. And even if we had had all the water that we have today, if that water had not been accompanied by the right kind of chemicals to get life going, we would have a wet planet, but just as dead. So it's so many things that can go wrong, what are the chances that they go right? What are the chances that the planet forms with at least the basic ingredients needed to have an origins of life happening? Well, let's explore that together. So if you're going to have a living planet, the first thing you're going to need is a planet. (Laughter) But not any planet will do. You're probably going to need a rather specific and earthlike planet. A planet that is rocky, so you can have both oceans and land, and it's sitting neither too close nor too far away from its star, but at the just-right temperature. And it's just right for liquid water, that is. So how many of these planets do we have in our galaxy? Well, one of the great discoveries of the past decades is that planets are incredibly common. Almost every star has a planet around them. Some have many. And among these planets, on the order of a few percent are earthlike enough that we would consider them potentially living planets. So having the right kind of planet is actually not that difficult when we consider that there's about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. So that gives you about a billion potential living planets. But it's not enough to just be at the right temperature or have the right overall composition. You also need the right chemicals. And what the second and important ingredient to make a living planet is — I think it's pretty intuitive — it's water. After all, we did define our planet as being potentially living if it had the right temperature to keep water liquid. And I mean, here on Earth, life is water-based. But more generally, water is just really good as a meeting place for chemicals. It is a very special liquid. So this is our second basic ingredient. Now the third ingredient, I think, is probably a little bit more surprising. I mean, we are going to need some organics in there, since we are thinking about organic life. But the organic molecule that seems to be at the center of the chemical networks that can produce biomolecules is hydrogen cyanide. So for those of you who know what this molecule is like, you know it's something that it's a good idea to stay away from. But it turns out that what's really, really bad for advanced life forms, such as yourselves, is really, really good to get the chemistry started, the right kind of chemistry that can lead to origins of life. So now we have our three ingredients that we need, you know, the temperate planet, water and hydrogen cyanide. So how often do these three come together? How many temperate planets are there out there that have water and hydrogen cyanide? Well, in an ideal world, we would now turn one of our telescopes towards one of these temperate planets and check for ourselves. Just, "Do these planets have water and cyanides on them?" Unfortunately, we don't yet have large enough telescopes to do this. We can detect molecules in the atmospheres of some planets. But these are large planets sitting often pretty close to their star, nothing like these, you know, just-right planets that we're talking about here, which are much smaller and further away. So we have to come up with another way. And the other way that we have conceived of and then followed is to instead of looking for these molecules in the planets when they exist, is to look for them in the material that's forming new planets. So planets form in discs of dust and gas around young stars. And these discs get their material from the interstellar medium. Turns out that the empty space you see between stars when you are looking up towards them, asking existential questions, is not as empty as it seems, but actually full of gas and dust, which can, you know, come together in clouds, then collapses to form these discs, stars and planets. And one of the things we always see when we do look at these clouds is water. You know, I think we have a tendency to think about water as something that's, you know, special to us. Water is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe, including in these clouds, these star- and planet-forming clouds. And not only that — water is also a pretty robust molecule: it's actually not that easy to destroy. So a lot of this water that is in interstellar medium will survive the rather dangerous, collapsed journey from clouds to disc, to planet. So water is alright. That second ingredient is not going to be a problem. Most planets are going to form with some access to water. So what about hydrogen cyanide? Well, we also see cyanides and other similar organic molecules in these interstellar clouds. But here, we're less certain about the molecules surviving, going from the cloud to the disc. They're just a bit more delicate, a bit more fragile. So if we're going to know that this hydrogen cyanide is sitting in the vicinity of new planets forming, we'd really need to see it in the disc itself, in these planet-forming discs. So about a decade ago, I started a program to look for this hydrogen cyanide and other molecules in these planet-forming discs. And this is what we found. So good news, in these six images, those bright pixels represent emissions originating from hydrogen cyanide in planet-forming discs hundreds of light-years away that have made it to our telescope, onto the detector, allowing us to see it like this. So the very good news is that these discs do indeed have hydrogen cyanide in them. That last, more elusive ingredient. Now the bad news is that we don't know where in the disc it is. If we look at these, I mean, no one can say they are beautiful images, even at the time when we got them. You see the pixel size is pretty big and it's actually bigger than these discs themselves. So each pixel here represents something that's much bigger than our solar system. And that means that we don't know where in the disc the hydrogen cyanide is coming from. And that's a problem, because these temperate planets, they can't access hydrogen cyanide just anywhere, but it must be fairly close to where they assemble for them to have access to it. So to bring this home, let's think about an analogous example, that is, of cypress growing in the United States. So let's say, hypothetically, that you've returned from Europe where you have seen beautiful Italian cypresses, and you want to understand, you know, does it make sense to import them to the United States. Could you grow them here? So you talk to the cypress experts, they tell you that there is indeed a band of not-too-hot, not-too-cold across the United States where you could grow them. And if you have a nice, high-resolution map or image like this, it's quite easy to see that this cypress strip overlaps with a lot of green fertile land pixels. Even if I start degrading this map quite a bit, making it lower and lower resolution, it's still possible to tell that there's going to be some fertile land overlapping with this strip. But what about if the whole United States is incorporated into a single pixel? If the resolution is that low. What do you do now, how do you now tell whether you can grow cypresses in the United States? Well the answer is you can't. I mean, there's definitely some fertile land there, or you wouldn't have that green tint to the pixel, but there's just no way of telling whether any of that green is in the right place. And that is exactly the problem we were facing with our single-pixel images of these discs with hydrogen cyanide. So what we need is something analogous, at least those low-resolution maps that I just showed you, to be able to tell whether there's overlap between where the hydrogen cyanide is and where these planets can access it as they are forming. So coming to the rescue, a few years ago, is this new, amazing, beautiful telescope ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter and submillimeter Array in northern Chile. So, ALMA is amazing in many different ways, but the one that I'm going to focus on is that, as you can see, I call this one telescope, but you can there are actually many dishes in this image. And this is a telescope that consists of 66 individual dishes that all work in unison. And that means that you have a telescope that is the size of the largest distance that you can put these dishes away from one another. Which in ALMA's case are a few miles. So you have a more than mile-sized telescope. And when you have such a big telescope, you can zoom in on really small things, including making maps of hydrogen cyanide in these planet-forming discs. So when ALMA came online a few years ago, that was one of the first things that I proposed that we use it for. And what does a map of hydrogen cyanide look like in a disc? Is the hydrogen cyanide at the right place? And the answer is that it is. So this is the map. You see the hydrogen cyanide emission being spread out across the disc. First of all, it's almost everywhere, which is very good news. But you have a lot of extra bright emission coming from close to the star towards the center of the disc. And this is exactly where we want to see it. This is close to where these planets are forming. And this is not what we see just towards one disc — here are three more examples. You can see they all show the same thing — lots of bright hydrogen cyanide emission coming from close to the center of the star. For full disclosure, we don't always see this. There are discs where we see the opposite, where there's actually a hole in the emission towards the center. So this is the opposite of what we want to see, right? This is not places where we could research if there is any hydrogen cyanide around where these planets are forming. But in most cases, we just don't detect hydrogen cyanide, but we detect it in the right place. So what does all this mean? Well, I told you in the beginning that we have lots of these temperate planets, maybe a billion or so of them, that could have life develop on them if they have the right ingredients. And I've also shown that we think a lot of the time, the right ingredients are there — we have water, we have hydrogen cyanide, there will be other organic molecules as well coming with the cyanides. This means that planets with the most basic ingredients for life are likely to be incredibly common in our galaxy. And if all it takes for life to develop is to have these basic ingredients available, there should be a lot of living planets out there. But that is of course a big if. And I would say the challenge of the next decades, for both astronomy and chemistry, is to figure out just how often we go from having a potentially living planet to having an actually living one. Thank you. (Applause) |
The hidden life of Rosa Parks | null | TED-Ed | In 1944, 11 years before her fateful decision on a Montgomery Bus, Rosa Parks was investigating a vicious crime. As an emissary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she had traveled to rural Alabama to meet with Recy Taylor, a young woman who had been sexually assaulted by six white men. It would be difficult enough to convince an Alabama court that even one of these men was guilty, but Rosa was undeterred. She formed a committee to defend Recy in court, flooding the media with testimony and sparking protests throughout the South. When a jury failed to indict the attackers, Parks demanded the governor assemble a new grand jury. She wrote, “I know that you will not fail to let the people of Alabama know that there is equal justice for all of our citizens.” Throughout her life, Parks repeatedly challenged racial violence and the prejudiced systems protecting its perpetrators. But this work came at an enormous risk— and a personal price. Born in 1913, Rosa was raised by her mother and grandparents in rural Alabama. But outside this loving home, the fear of racial violence cast a long shadow. The Ku Klux Klan frequently drove past their home, and Jim Crow laws segregated public spaces. At 19 she settled in Montgomery and married Raymond Parks, a barber who shared her growing fury at racial injustice. He was involved with the local chapter of the NAACP; a role many avoided for fear of persecution. At first Raymond was eager to keep Rosa safe from the potential dangers of activism. But as she grew more incensed at the limitations imposed on African Americans, she could no longer stand by. When she officially joined the NAACP in 1943, Parks and Johnnie Rebecca Carr were the only women in the Montgomery chapter. She began keeping minutes for their meetings, and soon found herself elected secretary of the chapter— formally beginning her secret double life. By day, Rosa worked as a seamstress to support her mother and husband. By night, she researched and documented numerous civil rights cases, from local policy disputes to high-profile murder cases and hate crimes. As secretary, she prepared public responses on behalf of the Montgomery chapter, battling the harsh sentencing, false accusation and smear campaigns frequently used against African Americans. In addition to her legal work, Parks was a brilliant local strategist. As advisor to the NAACP youth group council, she helped young people navigate segregated systems including voter registration and whites-only libraries. Through the cover of the NAACP, Parks strived to bring clandestine civil rights activities into the open. She advocated for civil disobedience training and spoke out against racial violence, particularly the murder of Emmet Till. In 1955, her refusal to move to the back of a segregated bus helped ignite the grassroots movement she had hoped for. Parks was arrested and jailed for her one-woman protest, where she was visited by local activists. Together they planned a twenty-four hour bus boycott. It lasted for three hundred and eighty-one days. Park’s simple act had transformed nascent civil rights activism into a national movement. In 1956, the boycott ended when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating public transport. But this victory for the movement had come at a great cost. Rosa had been receiving vicious death threats throughout the campaign, and was unable to find work in Montgomery because of her political reputation. In 1957, she moved to Detroit to continue working as a seamstress, until being hired by Congressman John Conyers to help support his burgeoning civil rights campaigns. Ever vigilant in the fight against racial inequality, Parks remained active for the next 40 years. She wrote several books, traveled across the country giving talks to support other activists, and established an institute for the education of young people in her late husband’s memory. Today, Rosa Parks is remembered as a radical spirit who railed against the most powerful people and policies. Her call to action continues to resound: “knowing what must be done does away with fear.” |
The wonders of the molecular world, animated | {0: "Janet Iwasa's colorful, action-packed 3D animations bring scientific hypotheses to life."} | TED2019 | I live in Utah, a place known for having some of the most awe-inspiring natural landscapes on this planet. It's easy to be overwhelmed by these amazing views, and to be really fascinated by these sometimes alien-looking formations. As a scientist, I love observing the natural world. But as a cell biologist, I'm much more interested in understanding the natural world at a much, much smaller scale. I'm a molecular animator, and I work with other researchers to create visualizations of molecules that are so small, they're essentially invisible. These molecules are smaller than the wavelength of light, which means that we can never see them directly, even with the best light microscopes. So how do I create visualizations of things that are so small we can't see them? Scientists, like my collaborators, can spend their entire professional careers working to understand one molecular process. To do this, they carry out a series of experiments that each can tell us a small piece of the puzzle. One kind of experiment can tell us about the protein shape, while another can tell us about what other proteins it might interact with, and another can tell us about where it can be found in a cell. And all of these bits of information can be used to come up with a hypothesis, a story, essentially, of how a molecule might work. My job is to take these ideas and turn them into an animation. This can be tricky, because it turns out that molecules can do some pretty crazy things. But these animations can be incredibly useful for researchers to communicate their ideas of how these molecules work. They can also allow us to see the molecular world through their eyes. I'd like to show you some animations, a brief tour of what I consider to be some of the natural wonders of the molecular world. First off, this is an immune cell. These kinds of cells need to go crawling around in our bodies in order to find invaders like pathogenic bacteria. This movement is powered by one of my favorite proteins called actin, which is part of what's known as the cytoskeleton. Unlike our skeletons, actin filaments are constantly being built and taken apart. The actin cytoskeleton plays incredibly important roles in our cells. They allow them to change shape, to move around, to adhere to surfaces and also to gobble up bacteria. Actin is also involved in a different kind of movement. In our muscle cells, actin structures form these regular filaments that look kind of like fabric. When our muscles contract, these filaments are pulled together and they go back to their original position when our muscles relax. Other parts of the cytoskeleton, in this case microtubules, are responsible for long-range transportation. They can be thought of as basically cellular highways that are used to move things from one side of the cell to the other. Unlike our roads, microtubules grow and shrink, appearing when they're needed and disappearing when their job is done. The molecular version of semitrucks are proteins aptly named motor proteins, that can walk along microtubules, dragging sometimes huge cargoes, like organelles, behind them. This particular motor protein is known as dynein, and its known to be able to work together in groups that almost look, at least to me, like a chariot of horses. As you see, the cell is this incredibly changing, dynamic place, where things are constantly being built and disassembled. But some of these structures are harder to take apart than others, though. And special forces need to be brought in in order to make sure that structures are taken apart in a timely manner. That job is done in part by proteins like these. These donut-shaped proteins, of which there are many types in the cell, all seem to act to rip apart structures by basically pulling individual proteins through a central hole. When these kinds of proteins don't work properly, the types of proteins that are supposed to get taken apart can sometimes stick together and aggregate and that can give rise to terrible diseases, such as Alzheimer's. And now let's take a look at the nucleus, which houses our genome in the form of DNA. In all of our cells, our DNA is cared for and maintained by a diverse set of proteins. DNA is wound around proteins called histones, which enable cells to pack large amounts of DNA into our nucleus. These machines are called chromatin remodelers, and the way they work is that they basically scoot the DNA around these histones and they allow new pieces of DNA to become exposed. This DNA can then be recognized by other machinery. In this case, this large molecular machine is looking for a segment of DNA that tells it it's at the beginning of a gene. Once it finds a segment, it basically undergoes a series of shape changes which enables it to bring in other machinery that in turn allows a gene to get turned on or transcribed. This has to be a very tightly regulated process, because turning on the wrong gene at the wrong time can have disastrous consequences. Scientists are now able to use protein machines to edit genomes. I'm sure all of you have heard of CRISPR. CRISPR takes advantage of a protein known as Cas9, which can be engineered to recognize and cut a very specific sequence of DNA. In this example, two Cas9 proteins are being used to excise a problematic piece of DNA. For example, a part of a gene that may give rise to a disease. Cellular machinery is then used to basically glue two ends of the DNA back together. As a molecular animator, one of my biggest challenges is visualizing uncertainty. All of the animations I've shown to you represent hypotheses, how my collaborators think a process works, based on the best information that they have. But for a lot of molecular processes, we're still really at the early stages of understanding things, and there's a lot to learn. The truth is that these invisible molecular worlds are vast and largely unexplored. To me, these molecular landscapes are just as exciting to explore as a natural world that's visible all around us. Thank you. (Applause) |
The bug that poops candy | null | TED-Ed | This is Mabel. Mabel is an aphid, a small insect in the same order as cicadas, stink bugs, and bed bugs. All these bugs pierce their prey and suck out vital fluids. Aphids’ prey are plants. And what aphids are after is buried within the plant, flowing in tubes made from single cells strung end-to-end. These are called sieve tubes and together they form the plumbing system for a plant’s most valuable resource: sap. Sap is mostly water and sugar. Some species’ sap has as much sugar per liter as a can of soda. Photosynthesis is constantly producing sugar. You can think of it as a chemical “pump” which generates incredibly high pressure— up to 9 times that of a car tire— in the sieve tubes. To feed, Mabel uses her stylet, which is a long, flexible needle. She slowly worms it into the tissue, between the plant’s cells, until she pierces one of those sieve tubes. Because the sap is under so much pressure, Mabel doesn’t even have to suck it out of the plant. She just opens a valve in her head and lets the pressure push the sap through her digestive system. We’ll come back to what comes out of her butt, but for now, you should know that plants don’t want to be punctured and sipped. So they try to defend themselves. One defense is the sap itself. To see how that works, let’s hypothetically hook up some other insect’s digestive tract to a steady stream of sap. When that sap touches the insect’s cells, its high sugar content encourages the water in the cells to come out by osmosis… exactly like salt encourages water to come out of a slug. The more sap that passes through the insect, the more water it loses. Eventually, it shrivels up and dies. Mabel’s gut, however, is packed with an enzyme called sucrase, which takes two molecules of sucrose and converts them into one molecule of fructose and one of… this three-unit sugar. Mabel burns the fructose for energy, leaving the three-unit-sugar behind. Now, how does that help her? The more molecules of sugar that are dissolved in the sap, the more water it can suck out of Mabel’s cells. By reducing the number of molecules of sugar in the sap, Mabel reduces its ability to suck water out of her cells. Plant sap neutralized. Now that means Mabel can feed for days, getting all the energy she needs to reproduce. Some aphid species have an incredible life cycle. For example, the green peach aphid. During the fall, males and females mate, and the females lay eggs. But in the spring, when the eggs hatch, all the nymphs that emerge are female. When those females reach maturity, they don’t lay eggs. Instead, they give birth to live young… that are clones of themselves… and already pregnant… with their own clones. So, these female aphids have two generations of baby aphid clones forming inside themselves at the same time. Scientists call this telescopic development. That means that aphids can make more of themselves fast— there can be 20 generations within a single season— and that means lots of aphid poop. Mabel can poop her entire body weight every two hours, making her one of the most prolific poopers on the planet. Some aphid populations can produce hundreds of kilograms of poop per acre. Now, aphid poop is not like your poop. Chemically, it’s not all that different from sap; it’s a clear and colorless sweet, syrupy liquid. You might already know it by a different name: honeydew. Other species love honeydew. Some species of ants love it so much they sort of herd and defend entire aphid colonies. In return, the ants get a steady supply of sweet honeydew, which they can drink directly from the aphids’ butts. Bottom’s up! Humans love honeydew, too. Several Native American tribes used to harvest it from tall reeds and make it into cake. And some species of bee make honey from honeydew, which humans then harvest and eat. So plants make the sap, which is eaten and pooped out by aphids, regurgitated by bees, harvested by humans, and dolloped into a cup of Earl Grey tea. |
How to spark your curiosity, scientifically | {0: 'Nadya Mason is a physics professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.'} | TED@NAS | A friend called me a few weeks ago with bad news. She dropped her cell phone into the toilet. Anyone here done that before? (Laughter) So it was a bad situation. You know, without getting into the details of exactly how that happened or how she got it out, let's just say it was a bad situation. And she panicked because, like for many of us, her phone is one of the most used and essential tools in her life. But, on the other hand, she had no idea how to fix it, because it's a completely mysterious black box. So think about it: what would you do? What do you really understand about how your phone works? What are you willing to test or fix? For most people, the answer is, nothing. In fact, one survey found that almost 80 percent of smartphone users in this country have never even replaced their phone batteries, and 25 percent didn't even know this was possible. Now, I'm an experimental physicist, hence the toys. I specialize in making new types of nanoscale electronic devices to study their fundamental quantum mechanical properties. But even I wouldn't know where to start in terms of testing elements on my phone if it broke. And phones are just one example of the many devices that we depend upon but can't test, take apart, or even fully understand. Cars, electronics, even toys are now so complicated and advanced that we're scared to open and fix them. So here's the problem: there's a disconnect between us and the technology that we use. We're completely alienated from the devices that we most depend upon, which can make us feel helpless and empty. In fact, it's not surprising then that one study found that we are now more afraid of technology than we are of death. (Laughter) But I think that we can reconnect to our devices, rehumanize them in a sense, by doing more hands-on experiments. Why? Well, because an experiment is a procedure to test a hypothesis, demonstrate a fact. It's the way that we use our senses, our hands, to connect the world and figure out how it works. And that's the connection that we're missing. So let me give you an example. Here's an experiment that I did recently to think about how a touchscreen works. It's just two metal plates, and I can put charge on one of the plates from a battery. OK. And I can measure the charge separation with this voltmeter here. Now — let's make sure it's working. So when I wave my hand near the plates, you can see that the voltage changes just like the touchscreen responds to my hand. But what is it about my hand? Now I need to do more experiments. So I can, say, take a piece of wood and touch one of the plates and see that not much happens, but if I take a piece of metal and touch the plate, then the voltage changes dramatically. So now I can do further experiments to see what the difference is between the wood and the metal, and I should find out that the wood is not conducting but the metal is conducting like my hand. And, you see, I build up my understanding. Like, now I can see why I can't use a touchscreen with gloves, because gloves aren't conducting. But I've also broken down some of the mystery behind the technology and built up my agency, my personal input and interactions with the basis of my devices. But experimenting is a step beyond just taking things apart. It's testing and doing hands-on critical thinking. And it doesn't really matter whether I'm testing how a touchscreen works or if I'm measuring how conducting different types of materials are, or even if I'm just using my hands to see how hard it is to break different thicknesses of materials. In all cases, I'm gaining control and understanding of the basis of the things that I use. And there's research behind this. For one, I'm using my hands, which seem to promote well-being. I'm also engaging in hands-on learning, which has been shown to improve understanding and retention, and even activate more parts of your brain. So hands-on thinking through experiments connects our understanding, even our sense of vitality, to the physical world and the things that we use. Looking things up on the internet does not have the same effect. Now, for me this focus on experiments is also personal. I didn't grow up doing experiments. I didn't know what a physicist did. I remember my sister had a chemistry set that I always wanted to use but she never let me touch. I felt mentally disconnected from the world and didn't know why. In fact, when I was nine years old, my grandmother called me a solipsist, which is something I had to look up. It means that you think that yourself is all that exists. And at the time I was pretty offended, because whose grandmother calls them that? (Laughter) But I think that it was true. And it wasn't until years later, when I was in college and studying basic physics, that I had a revelation that the world, at least the physical world, could be tested and understood, that I started to gain a completely different sense of how the world worked and what my place was in it. And then later, when I was able my own testing and understanding through research, a big part of my connection to the world was complete. Now, I know that not everyone is an experimental physicist by profession, but I think that everyone could be doing more hands-on experiments. And actually I think we sort of — I'll give you another example. I was recently working with some middle school students, helping them learn about magnetism, and I gave them a Magna Doodle to take apart. Remember one of these things? So at first, none of them wanted to touch it. They'd been told for so long not to break things that they're accustomed to just passive using. But then I started asking them questions. You know, how does it work? What parts are magnetic? Can you make a hypothesis and test it? But they still didn't want to break it open. They wanted to take it home with them, really. Until, one kid finally sliced it through and found really cool stuff inside. And so this is something we can do here together. They're pretty easy to take apart. See, there's a magnet inside, and I can just cut this open. Cut it open again, you can split it. OK, so when I do that — I don't know if you can see this, but there is sort of — there it is, this oozy white stuff in here. Now you can see it on my finger. And when I drag the pen on it, you can see that these filaments are attached to it. So the kids saw this, and at this point they're like, this is really cool. They got excited. They all started ripping them open and taking them apart and yelling out the things that they discovered, how these magnetic filaments connected to the magnetic pen and that's how it wrote. Or, how the oozy white stuff kept things dispersed so it could write. And as they were leaving the room, two of them turned to me and said, "We loved that. Me and her are going home this weekend to do more experiments." (Laughter) Yeah, I know, the parents in there are worried about it, but it's a good thing! Experimenting is good, and actually I found it extremely gratifying, and I think hopefully it was very life-enriching for them. Because, even a basic magnet is something that we can experiment with at home. They're both simple and complex at the same time. For example, you can ask yourself, how can the same material both attract and repel? If I take a magnet, is it useful if I can get one of them to rotate the other, for example? Or, you can take this dollar bill over here, and I can take a set of magnets, and you can see that the dollar bill gets lifted by the magnets. There's magnetic ink hidden in here that prevents counterfeiting. Or, here I have some crushed-up bran cereal. OK? And that's also magnetic. Right? That has iron in it. (Laughter) And that can be good for you, right? OK, here's something else. This thing over here is not magnetic. I can't lift it up with the magnet. But now I'm going to make it cold. The same thing in here, cold, and when I make it cold, and put it on top of the magnet, so — (Applause) It's amazing. That's not magnetic, but somehow it's interacting with a magnet. So clearly understanding this is going to take many more experiments. In fact, this is something that I've spent much of my career studying. It's called a superconductor. Now, superconductors can be complex, but even simple experiments can connect us better to the world. So now if I tell you that flash memory works by rotating small magnets, then you can imagine it. You've seen it. Or, if I say that MRI machines use magnetism to rotate magnetic particles in your body, you've seen it done. You've interacted with the technology and understood the basis of these devices. Now, I know that it's hard to add more things to our lives, especially experiments. But I think that the challenge is worth it. Think about how something works, then take it apart to test it. Manipulate something and prove some physical principle to yourself. Put the human back in the technology. You'll be surprised at the connections that you make. Thank you. (Applause) |
The Gauntlet | {0: 'Alex Rosenthal takes everyday experiences and turns them into mind-bending puzzles.'} | TED-Ed | Their fall from the tower sends Ethic and Hedge spinning into the rapids of a river of pure energy. This torrent flows from the Bradbarrier all the way to Huxenborg. There an entire city’s worth of factories build the robots and house the Node of Memory, the last of the three powerful artifacts Ethic needs to collect. After a long day and a longer night they find themselves in a canyon of brick and steel. Just when they’re about to reach the end of the line, a rope catches them. Their savior, Lemma, has been waiting for them. When Ethic claimed the Node of Creation from the forest tower, radios all across the land came back to life. Adila, the resistance leader, immediately started contacting her allies, none more important than Lemma, a brilliant scientist working from within Huxenborg to bring down the machines. Unfortunately, the radios also tipped off the robots. So they’ve taken defensive measures to protect the final artifact in its home in the very heart of the city. There’s only one way to get there: the gauntlet of forking paths. It’s a deadly series of luminous conveyors that wind underneath Huxenborg. Starting from the current position, each section runs for a distance, then splits in two. Every branch does the same thing, again and again. There are thousands of branches. Only one path leads to the artifact; all the others to destruction. Fortunately, the Node of Creation has granted Hedge a strange power: he can produce slightly smaller versions of himself. Each version can do only two things: radio information back to its parent, and produce slightly smaller versions of itself… which can do the same two things, as can their children, for as many generations as needed. A patrol is closing in on their position, so Ethic’s time is limited. What instructions should she give Hedge to find the one safe path? Pause the video to figure it out yourself. Hint in 3 Hint in 2 Hint in 1 Programmers have an elegant tool in their arsenal called recursion. Recursion is when you have a set of instructions that refers back to itself. It’s like using a word in its own definition, except where that’s frowned upon, this is incredibly effective. Recursion involves repetition, but in a different way than loops. Where a loop takes one action and repeats it again and again, recursion will start an action, and before it’s finished, use it again, and before that’s finished, use it again, and so on. It keeps doing this until some end state is reached. It then passes the information back up, layer after layer, until it reaches the top and ends the cycle. Recursion is ideal for problems that involve self-similarity, where each part resembles the larger whole. Like, for example, a deadly defense system designed to end any person or thing who dares tread upon it. Pause the video to figure it out yourself. Solution in 3 Solution in 2 Solution in 1 Ethic’s conundrum seems sprawling on the surface, but there’s a remarkably simple solution to it using recursion. In order to find it, let’s first look at the simplest version of this puzzle: what if the entire maze were just two paths? If Hedge copies himself, the copy that goes the wrong way will be destroyed. So the other one, which will reach the artifact, can radio back the path it took, and then no matter which way is correct, that’s the answer Hedge will receive. This is called the "base case" of the recursion. Now, suppose the maze branches twice from the starting point, and at every intersection, Hedge’s copies— let’s call them Twig 1 and Twig 2— make more copies— let’s call them Leaves 1 through 4. Three Leaves will be destroyed. The one that reaches the artifact will radio back the right answer, but only to its parent. So if Twig 1 or 2 is waiting at an intersection and hears something over the radio, that’s the right way to go to the artifact from where it is. To tell Hedge the right answer from his perspective, the Twig should say which way it went, and then the route it just heard over the radio. This same process will work no matter how many times the maze branches. Any answer a copy hears on the radio must be the way to the control room from its location, and if it then adds the branch it took, it can tell its parent how to get there as well. We can sum up the instructions in an action called Pathfinder that every version of Hedge will follow: 1. If you’ve reached the artifact, radio to your parent whether you got there by going left or right. 2. When you reach an intersection, move off the conveyor and send new copies down the left and right paths. Have them each run Pathfinder. This is where recursion comes in, and this may happen many times before the last instruction triggers, which is: 3. If you hear anything over the radio, you should radio to your parent whether you got to your spot by going left or right, then repeat everything you just heard. Pathfinder is an example of what programmers call functions, subroutines, or procedures. No matter the terminology, the idea is the same— it’s a set of instructions given a label so that it can be easily reused— perhaps even by itself. And in our case that’ll work perfectly— an entire network of paths mapped using just three instructions. So here's what happens. By the time the patrol rounds the corner, Ethic and Lemma have improvised disguises. They try to confuse the bots long enough to buy Hedge time. Finally, Hedge’s radio crackles to life with a series of directions. The three dive onto the conveyor and flee for their lives, with a squadron of enforcer bots in hot pursuit. |
Racism has a cost for everyone | {0: 'Heather C. McGhee designs and promotes solutions to inequality in America, showing what individuals, governments and the private sector can do to help the country live up to its ideals.'} | TEDWomen 2019 | I am a public policy wonk. I investigate data that points to problems in the American economy — problems like rising household debt, declining wages and benefits, shortfalls in public revenue. And I try to pinpoint solutions to make our economy more prosperous for more people. I geek out about tax policy and infrastructure investments, and I get really excited by a gracefully designed regulatory regime. (Laughter) These are the kinds of topics that I was talking about on a public television live call-in show in August of 2016. I was about halfway through the program when a man called in, identified as Gary from North Carolina and he said ... "I'm a white male, and I'm prejudiced." He then went on to detail his prejudice, talking about black men and gangs and drugs and crime. But then he said something that I'll never forget. He said, "But I want to change. And I want to know what I can do to become a better American." Now remember, my career is about economic policy, as translated into dollars and cents not personal thoughts and feelings. But when I opened my mouth to respond to this man on live television, the most surprising words came out. I said ... "Thank you." I thanked him for admitting his prejudice, for wanting to change and for knowing, somehow, that that would make him a better American. The exchange between Gary and me went viral. It's been viewed over eight million times and inspired waves of social media commentary and news coverage. And I think people were surprised that a black woman would show such compassion for a prejudiced white man, and they were surprised that a white man would admit his bias on national television. Not long after Gary and my viral moment, we met in person. He said that he had taken my advice. He said that my words had been like someone wiped the dust from a window and let the light in. Over the years, Gary and I have become friends. And Gary would tell you that I've taught him a lot about systemic racism in America and public policy. But I've learned a lot from Gary, too. And the biggest lesson for me has been that Gary's prejudice has caused him to suffer. Fear, anxiety, isolation. And it's made me rethink many of the economic problems I've been focusing on my entire career. I wondered, is it possible that our society's racism has likewise been backfiring on the very same people set up to benefit from privilege? Driven by this question, I've spent the past few years traveling the country, researching and writing a book. My conclusion? Racism leads to bad policymaking. It's making our economy worse. And not just in ways that disadvantage people of color. It turns out it's not a zero sum. Racism is bad for white people, too. Take, for example, America's underinvestment in our public goods, the things that we all need, that we share in common — our schools and roads and bridges. Our infrastructure gets a D plus from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and we invest less per capita than almost every other advanced nation. But it wasn't always this way. I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, and there, I saw how racism can destroy a public good and the public will to support it. In the 1930s and '40s, the United States went on a nationwide building boom of public amenities funded by tax dollars, which in Montgomery, Alabama, included the Oak Park pool, which was the grandest one for miles. You know, back then, people didn't have air conditioners, and so they spent their hot summer days in a steady rotation of sunning and splashing and then cooling off under a ring of nearby trees. It was the meeting place for the town. Except the Oak Park pool, though it was funded by all of Montgomery citizens, was for whites only. When a federal court finally deemed this unconstitutional, the reaction of the town council was swift. Effective January 1, 1959, they decided they would drain the public pool rather than let black families swim, too. This destruction of public goods was replicated across the country in towns not just in the South. Towns closed their public parks, pools and schools, all in response to desegregation orders, all throughout the 1960s. In Montgomery, they shut down the entire Parks Department for a decade. They closed the recreation centers, they even sold off the animals in the zoo. Today, you can walk the grounds of Oak Park, as I did, but very few people do. They never rebuilt the pool. Racism has a cost for everyone. I remember having that same thought on September 15, 2008, when I learned the breaking news that Lehman Brothers was collapsing. Now Lehman was, like the other financial firms that would go under in the coming days, done in by overexposure to a toxic financial instrument based on something that used to be simple and safe — a 30-year fixed-rate home loan. But the mortgages at the center and the root of the financial crisis had strange new terms. And they were developed and aggressively marketed for years in black and brown middle-class communities, like the one that I visited when I met a homeowner named Glenn. Glenn had owned a home on a leafy street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland for over a decade. But when I met him, he was near foreclosure. Like nearly all of his neighbors, he'd received a knock on the door from a broker promising to refinance his mortgage. But what the broker didn't tell him was that this was a new kind of mortgage. A mortgage with an inflated interest rate, and a balloon payment and a prepayment penalty if he tried to get out of it. Now, the common misperception, then and still today, is that people like Glenn were buying properties they couldn't afford. That they themselves were risky borrowers. I saw how this stereotype made it harder for policymakers to see the crisis for what it was back when we still had time to stop it. But that's all it was. A stereotype. The majority of subprime mortgages went to people who had good credit, like Glenn. And African Americans and Latinos were three times as likely — even if they had good credit — than white people, to get sold these toxic loans. The problem wasn't the borrower — the problem was the loan. After the crash, most of the nation's big lenders, from Wells Fargo to Countrywide, would go on to be fined for racial discrimination. But that realization came too late. These loans, superprofitable for the lenders but designed to fail for the borrowers, spread out past the confines of black and brown neighborhoods like Glenn's and into the wider, whiter mortgage market. All of the nation's big Wall Street firms bet on these loans. At its peak, one out of every five mortgages in the country was in this mold, and the crisis, the crisis that my colleagues and I saw coming ... would go on to cost us all. Nineteen trillion in lost wealth. Pensions, home equity, savings. Eight million jobs vanished. A home-ownership rate that has never recovered. My years of advocating in vain for homeowners like Glenn left me convinced: we would not have had a financial crisis if it weren't for racism. In 2017, I traveled to Mississippi, where a group of auto-factory workers was trying to organize into a union. Now the benefits they were fighting for — higher pay, better health care coverage, a real pension — they would have helped everybody at the plant. But in person after person that I talked to — white, black, for the union, against the union — race kept coming up. A white man named Joey put it this way. He said, "White workers think I ain't voting yes if the blacks are voting yes. If the blacks are for it, I'm against it." A white man named Chip told me, "The idea is that if you uplift black people, you're downing white people." It's like the world's got this crab-in-a-barrel mentality. Now, the union vote failed. Wages at the plant are still lower than their unionized peers', and people there still worry about their health care. You know, it's tempting, perhaps, to focus on the prejudiced attitudes of the men and the workers that I heard in Mississippi. But I'm more interested in holding accountable the people who are selling racist ideas for their profit than those who are desperate enough to buy it. My travels also took me to places where I saw, however, that it doesn't have to be this way. I went to Maine, the whitest state in the nation, the oldest, where there are more deaths every year than births, and I went to this dying mill town called Lewiston that is being revitalized by new people — mostly African, mostly Muslim, immigrants and refugees. There, I met a woman named Cecile, whose parents had been part of the last wave of new people to come to Lewiston. These are French-Canadian millworkers at the turn of the century. Cecile is retired, but she had found a new purpose in life, by organizing Congolese refugees to join with the white retirees at the Franco Heritage Center. (Laughter) These men and women from the Congo were helping these retirees remember the French that they hadn't spoken since their childhoods. And together, these two communities helped each other feel at home. You know, for all the political talk about the newcomers being a drain on the town, a bipartisan think tank found that the local refugee community there created 40 million dollars in tax revenue, and 130 million in income. And I talked to the town administrator, who was boasting about the fact that Lewiston was building a new school, when all the rest of towns like theirs in Maine was closing them. You know, it costs us so much to remain divided. This zero-sum thinking, that's what's good for one group has to come at the expense of another, it's what's gotten us into this mess. I believe it's time to reject that old paradigm and realize that our fates are linked. An injury to one is an injury to all. You know, we have a choice. Our nation was founded on a belief in a hierarchy of human value. But we are about to be a country with no racial majority. So we can keep pretending like we're not all on the same team. We can keep sabotaging our success and hamstringing our own players. Or we can let the proximity of so much difference reveal our common humanity. And we can finally invest in our greatest asset. Our people. All of our people. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to co-parent as allies, not adversaries | {0: 'Ebony Roberts works to lift the veil of shame for those who have an incarcerated loved one.', 1: 'Using literature as a lifeline, Shaka Senghor escaped a cycle of prison and desperation. Now his story kindles hope in those who have little.'} | TEDxDetroit | Ebony Roberts: I remember watching my father raise the pistol to my mother's head. She pleaded with him to put the gun down, but he ignored her. When she bolted toward the door, he followed close behind and once outside, he fired one single shot. I was 12. I remember this moment frame by frame. I remember feeling numb. I remember feeling alone. Thank God, the bullet missed her, but my family would never be the same. I would never be the same. I didn't know then all the ways that my parents' on-again, off-again relationship would impact me, but I knew I didn't want a love like theirs. My story would be different. Years later, when I met you, I fell madly in love. Our connection was undeniable. It was as if you had been hand-picked just for me. I thought we'd be together forever. But we struggled with some of the same issues my parents had, and after nearly nine years together, we called it quits. We had Sekou then. He was only three. Though he was too young to really understand what was going on, he was old enough to know that mommy and daddy were not going to be living in the same house anymore. Our breakup hit me really hard. But I decided I wouldn't let my broken heart get in the way of what was best for Sekou. We struggled initially, trying to navigate this new space as co-parents. I asked myself, how do we raise this beautiful boy full of wonder and promise and so much power, in spite of our failures as a couple? The answer for me was simple. I could either choose fear, fear of being alone, fear of the unknown, or choose love. And I chose love. That means seeing the good in you as a father. It means seeing the good in you as a father and not your missteps as a partner. It means putting Sekou first every time, even if it means I don't get my way. I know my parents went back and forth trying to work things out for my brother and I's sake. Though I appreciate their effort, I wish they hadn't. I saw too much, I heard too much. I knew I didn't want that to be Sekou's story. I wanted Sekou to know what it was like to see two parents who got along, two parents who worked together as a team. I wanted him to know what love looks like in its truest form. Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not anger easily, it keeps no wrongs. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Shaka Senghor: It was 1983. I was 11 years old. I remember being in a basement with my father, in our home on the east side of Detroit. I watched him stuff albums into the blue and orange milk crates, as tears streamed from his eyes. Just before that, him and my mother had just sat me and my siblings down and told us that they were calling it quits. Thirty years later, I found myself with tears in my eyes, as I packed my belongings in our home. Ebony and I met while I was serving a 19-year prison sentence. For four years, we used letters, phone calls and visits to build what we had imagined to be an unshakeable bond. We fought the system together, and we thought that we would be able to right the wrongs of our parents. She was a poet, I was a writer. She was gorgeous, with a PhD. I was handsome, with a GED. (Laughter) We built something magical. We built something that we thought would endure. But unfortunately, our relationship became unhinged when I was released from prison. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, trauma from prior to going to prison, baggage from her relationship, my inexperience in a relationship undid the magic of what we built behind the walls. Centered in all of that was our beautiful boy. I remember when we first brought Sekou home. It was so exciting, it was amazing, we worked together, we collaborated, we supported each other. You took the night shift, I took the morning shift. And it was going amazing. And then it all changed. It changed the morning that you came in really excited, you was like, "Hey, I'm going back to work! Aren't you excited?" And I was like, "Yes. I am ecstatic right now. (Laughter) I cannot be more delighted." But inside, I was really afraid. But I couldn't tell you that. So instead, I said, "Hey, go off and have a wonderful day." And you left, and I was left with Sekou. What I understand now about that moment is that we were fostering a trust that's necessary for parents to coexist. And that you were trusting me with our most precious gift. And that you were building the foundation and the blocks for what's important for this portal we call parenthood. ER: Knowing how our parents' breakups impacted us, you know, we were really sensitive about how our breakup would impact Sekou. We struggled, but we found our way. And let Sekou tell it, we're the best parents in the world. I love that he sees us that way. We made a choice in the beginning to co-parent as allies and not adversaries. To break the toxic pattern that we see play out over and over again when parents lose focus on what's most important, the children. They allow their relationship pain to get in the way. But at the end of the day, we're on the same team, and that's Sekou's team. You know, I have to admit, we have an unconventional relationship a lot of people don't understand. We're not perfect as parents or people. But we honor each other's role in Sekou's life. We allow him to do things that our parents would never allow us to do. We don't allow our fears to put limits on him. We nurture his natural curiosity about the universe and his relationship to the world. Remember that time when we were coming in from a long day at work, and Sekou found a puddle outside, a puddle of mud, mind you. Had a brand new fresh outfit on, Levi's from head to toe. And he found this puddle of mud, and he reached for it. And he wanted to touch the muddy earth, and we allowed him to do that. We resisted the urge to say no, and in fact, went and got him a shovel, and allowed him to feel the earth's properties and explore as much as he wanted to, and he played, and was as happy as a pig in mud. (Laughter) We realized that the outfit could be washed, that a bath would clean up all the dirt, but the thrill of being in the moment, of being able to touch and be amazed at this thing that he had never discovered before was more valuable than the clothes or the dirt that could be washed away. We continue to rethink what is right and wrong when it comes to parenting. Sekou challenges us every day. You know, we allow him to climb on couches and draw on his clothes and his shoes, let him run around the store — well, I do, anyway. And I get the death stares from other mamas who look at me and who think that children should be quiet and well-behaved in public. I also get those questions that are really judgments, but I don't pay them any mind. Because at the end of the day, our job is to guide Sekou on this journey of life, not to control him. We're here to help him figure out his place in the world, to uncover his greatest gifts, to discover why he was born. We are raising a free black boy in a world that despises black joy, and we refuse to put limits on him that the world already has. SS: Our parenting can be seen as an allegory for this two-sided coin of possibilities. On one side, the reality of raising a black boy in a society that says that black boys, black bodies and black lives only seen as profitable or disposable. And then there's the other side. Possibility of two parents who are no longer together coexisting, supporting each other, loving each other, showing affection publicly in a way that honors the relationship with our son. And even more importantly is the power to support each other in all those vulnerable moments. There was this one time that it was my day to go pick up Sekou, you remember that time? I go pick Sekou up, he's in first grade, and as I'm walking up, another parent walks up and says, "Hey, Shaka. I seen Oprah Winfrey give a shout-out to you on CNN last night." She was super excited, exuberant even. I was mortified. Because I thought, what's going to happen when she tells another parent, and they tell another parent, and then they go and look me up and then they discover that I was in prison for second-degree murder. And then their child hears about it. And they come to school, and they say to Sekou, "Your dad was convicted of murdering someone." And I remember, as watching Sekou race out, and I knew that I had to call Ebony. When I called her, I explained to her what happened, Ebony said, "You have to have the talk." So I took Sekou home, got him ready for bed, and we talked for half an hour. I talked to him about why I went to prison. And I listened to his feedback. And then we called his mom so we can do our nightly ritual of her offering prayer and then me doing affirmations. And I remember holding him tightly. And I realized the importance of the affirmations that we do at night. And I see them as a road map, as a guide, as a touchstone for other parents to protect and to empower their children, especially in a world where it's very difficult. For us, co-parenting is so much more than scheduling pick-up and drop-off, playdates, deciding what he's going to wear, what he's going to eat. For us, it's about helping each other carry the weight, unpack the load, and to show up in the world in a way that honors the beauty of our son. And it's for these reasons that we do affirmations. ER: We never though we'd be here. But here we are. And we hope that the way that we show up for Sekou and for each other is a model of what successful co-parenting can look like. We'd like to bring you all in to this nightly ritual of affirmations that Shaka does with Sekou every night at bedtime. SS: Hey. (Applause) SS: I am great. Sekou: I am great. SS: I am awesome. Sekou: I am awesome. SS: I'm amazing. Sekou: I'm amazing. SS: I am thoughtful. Sekou: I am thoughtful. SS: I am kind. Sekou: I am kind. SS: I am loving. Sekou: I am loving. SS: I am caring. Sekou: I am caring. SS: I am funny. Sekou: I am funny. SS: I'm smart. Sekou: I'm smart. SS: I'm a big boy. Sekou: I'm a big boy. SS: I'm a soldier. Sekou: I'm a soldier. SS: I'm a warrior. Sekou: I'm a warrior. SS: I am Sekou. Sekou: I am Sekou. (Cheers and applause) ER: Good job, baby. |
An evolutionary perspective on human health and disease | {0: 'Lara Durgavich brings historical context to human biology, sharing the importance of evolutionary medicine in personal life and beyond.'} | TEDxTufts | When I was approximately nine weeks pregnant with my first child, I found out I'm a carrier for a fatal genetic disorder called Tay-Sachs disease. What this means is that one of the two copies of chromosome number 15 that I have in each of my cells has a genetic mutation. Because I still have one normal copy of this gene, the mutation doesn't affect me. But if a baby inherits this mutation from both parents, if both copies of this particular gene don't function properly, it results in Tay-Sachs, an incurable disease that progressively shuts down the central nervous system and causes death by age five. For many pregnant women, this news might produce a full-on panic. But I knew something that helped keep me calm when I heard this bombshell about my own biology. I knew that my husband, whose ancestry isn't Eastern European Jewish like mine, had a very low likelihood of also being a carrier for the Tay-Sachs mutation. While the frequency of heterozygotes, individuals who have one normal copy of the gene and one mutated copy, is about one out of 27 people among Jews of Ashkenazi descent, like me, in most populations, only one in about 300 people carry the Tay-Sachs mutation. Thankfully, it turned out I was right not to worry too much. My husband isn't a carrier, and we now have two beautiful and healthy children. As I said, because of my Jewish background, I was aware of the unusually high rate of Tay-Sachs in the Ashkenazi population. But it wasn't until a few years after my daughter was born when I created and taught a seminar in evolutionary medicine at Harvard, that I thought to ask, and discovered a possible answer to, the question "why?" The process of evolution by natural selection typically eliminates harmful mutations. So how did this defective gene persist at all? And why is it found at such a high frequency within this particular population? The perspective of evolutionary medicine offers valuable insight, because it examines how and why humans' evolutionary past has left our bodies vulnerable to diseases and other problems today. In doing so, it demonstrates that natural selection doesn't always make our bodies better. It can't necessarily. But as I hope to illustrate with my own story, understanding the implications of your evolutionary past can help enrich your personal health. When I started investigating Tay-Sachs using an evolutionary perspective, I came across an intriguing hypothesis. The unusually high rate of the Tay-Sachs mutation in Ashkenazi Jews today may relate to advantages the mutation gave this population in the past. Now I'm sure some of you are thinking, "I'm sorry, did you just suggest that this disease-causing mutation had beneficial effects?" Yeah, I did. Certainly not for individuals who inherited two copies of the mutation and had Tay-Sachs. But under certain circumstances, people like me, who had only one faulty gene copy, may have been more likely to survive, reproduce and pass on their genetic material, including that mutated gene. This idea that there can be circumstances in which heterozygotes are better off might sound familiar to some of you. Evolutionary biologists call this phenomenon heterozygote advantage. And it explains, for example, why carriers of sickle cell anemia are more common among some African and Asian populations or those with ancestry from these tropical regions. In these geographic regions, malaria poses significant risks to health. The parasite that causes malaria, though, can only complete its life cycle in normal, round red blood cells. By changing the shape of a person's red blood cells, the sickle cell mutation confers protection against malaria. People with the mutation aren't less likely to get bitten by the mosquitoes that transmit the disease, but they are less likely to get sick or die as a result. Being a carrier for sickle cell anemia is therefore the best possible genetic option in a malarial environment. Carriers are less susceptible to malaria, because they make some sickled red blood cells, but they make enough normal red blood cells that they aren't negatively affected by sickle cell anemia. Now in my case, the defective gene I carry won't protect me against malaria. But the unusual prevalence of the Tay-Sachs mutation in Ashkenazi populations may be another example of heterozygote advantage. In this case, increasing resistance to tuberculosis. The first hint of a possible relationship between Tay-Sachs and tuberculosis came in the 1970s, when researchers published data showing that among the Eastern European-born grandparents of a sample of American Ashkenazi children born with Tay-Sachs, tuberculosis was an exceedingly rare cause of death. In fact, only one out of these 306 grandparents had died of TB, despite the fact that in the early 20th century, TB caused up to 20 percent of deaths in large Eastern European cities. Now on the one hand, these results weren't surprising. People had already recognized that while Jews and non-Jews in Europe had been equally likely to contract TB during this time, the death rate among non-Jews was twice as high. But the hypothesis that these Ashkenazi grandparents had been less likely to die of TB specifically because at least some of them were Tay-Sachs carriers was novel and compelling. The data hinted that the persistence of the Tay-Sachs mutation among Ashkenazi Jews might be explained by the benefits of being a carrier in an environment where tuberculosis was prevalent. You'll notice, though, that this explanation only fills in part of the puzzle. Even if the Tay-Sachs mutation persisted because carriers were more likely to survive, reproduce and pass on their genetic material, why did this resistance mechanism proliferate among the Ashkenazi population in particular? One possibility is that the genes and health of Eastern European Jews were affected not simply by geography but also by historical and cultural factors. At various points in history this population was forced to live in crowded urban ghettos with poor sanitation. Ideal conditions for the tuberculosis bacterium to thrive. In these environments, where TB posed an especially high threat, those individuals who were not carriers of any genetic protection would have been more likely to die. This winnowing effect together with a strong cultural predilection for marrying and reproducing only within the Ashkenazi community, would have amplified the relative frequency of carriers, boosting TB resistance but increasing the incidence of Tay-Sachs as an unfortunate side effect. Studies from the 1980s support this idea. The segment of the American Jewish population that had the highest frequency of Tay-Sachs carriers traced their descent to those European countries where the incidence of TB was highest. The benefits of being a Tay-Sachs carrier were highest in those places where the risk of death due to TB was greatest. And while it was unclear in the 1970s or '80s how exactly the Tay-Sachs mutation offered protection against TB, recent work has identified how the mutation increases cellular defenses against the bacterium. So heterozygote advantage can help explain why problematic versions of genes persist at high frequencies in certain populations. But this is only one of the contributions evolutionary medicine can make in helping us understand human health. As I mentioned earlier, this field challenges the notion that our bodies should have gotten better over time. An idea that often stems from a misconception of how evolution works. In a nutshell, there are three basic reasons why human bodies, including yours and mine, remain vulnerable to diseases and other health problems today. Natural selection acts slowly, there are limitations to the changes it can make and it optimizes for reproductive success, not health. The way the pace of natural selection affects human health is probably most obvious in people's relationship with infectious pathogens. We're in a constant arms race with bacteria and viruses. Our immune system is continuously evolving to limit their ability to infect, and they are continuously developing ways to outmaneuver our defenses. And our species is at a distinct disadvantage due to our long lives and slow reproduction. In the time it takes us to evolve one mechanism of resistance, a pathogenic species will go through millions of generations, giving it ample time to evolve, so it can continue using our bodies as a host. Now what does it mean that there are limitations to the changes natural selection can make? Again, my examples of heterozygote advantage offer a useful illustration. In terms of resisting TB and malaria, the physiological effects of the Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia mutations are good. Taken to their extremes, though, they cause significant problems. This delicate balance highlights the constraints inherent in the human body, and the fact that the evolutionary process must work with the materials already available. In many instances, a change that improves survival or reproduction in one sense may have cascading effects that carry their own risk. Evolution isn't an engineer that starts from scratch to create optimal solutions to individual problems. Evolution is all about compromise. It's also important to remember, when considering our bodies' vulnerabilities, that from an evolutionary perspective, health isn't the most important currency. Reproduction is. Success is measured not by how healthy an individual is, or by how long she lives, but by how many copies of her genes she passes to the next generation. This explains why a mutation like the one that causes Huntington's disease, another degenerative neurological disorder, hasn't been eliminated by natural selection. The mutation's detrimental effects usually don't appear until after the typical age of reproduction, when affected individuals have already passed on their genes. As a whole, the biomedical community focuses on proximate explanations and uses them to shape treatment approaches. Proximate explanations for health conditions consider the immediate factors: What's going on inside someone's body right now that caused a particular problem. Nearsightedness, for example, is usually the result of changes to the shape of the eye and can be easily corrected with glasses. But as with the genetic conditions I've discussed, a proximate explanation only provides part of the bigger picture. Adopting an evolutionary perspective to consider the broader question of why do we have this problem to begin with — what evolutionary medicine calls the ultimate perspective — can give us insight into nonimmediate factors that affect our health. This is crucial, because it can suggest ways by which you can mitigate your own risk or that of friends and family. In the case of nearsightedness, some research suggests that one reason it's becoming more common in some populations is that many people today, including most of us in this room, spend far more time reading, writing and engaging with various types of screen than we do outside, interacting with the world on a bigger scale. In evolutionary terms, this is a recent change. For most of human evolutionary history, people used their vision across a broader landscape, spending more time in activities like hunting and gathering. The increase in recent years in what's termed "near work," focusing intensely on objects directly in front of us for long periods of time, strains our eyes differently and affects the physical shape of the eye. When we put all these pieces together, this ultimate explanation for nearsightedness — that environmental and behavioral change impact the way we use our eyes — helps us better understand the proximate cause. And an inescapable conclusion emerges — my mother was right, I probably should have spent a little less time with my nose in a book. This is just one of many possible examples. So the next time you or a loved one are faced with a health challenge, whether it's obesity or diabetes, an autoimmune disorder, or a knee or back injury, I encourage you to think about what an ultimate perspective can contribute. Understanding that your health is affected not just by what's going on in your body right now, but also by your genetic inheritance, culture and history, can help you make more informed decisions about predispositions, risks and treatments. As for me, I won't claim that an evolutionary medicine perspective has always directly influenced my decisions, such as my choice of spouse. It turned out, though, that not following the traditional practice of marrying within the Jewish community ultimately worked in my favor genetically, reducing the odds of me having a baby with Tay-Sachs. It's a great example of why not every set of Ashkenazi parents should hope that their daughter marries "a nice Jewish boy." (Laughter) (Audience) Woo-hoo! More importantly, though, the experience of learning about my own genes taught me to think differently about health in the long run, and I hope sharing my story inspires you to do the same. Thank you. (Applause) |
What's the point(e) of ballet? | null | TED-Ed | A baby cursed at birth. A fierce battle of good and evil. A true love awoken with a kiss. Sleeping Beauty is one of the world’s favorite folktales. But one of its most famous renditions tells the story without a single word. Since premiering in 1890, "The Sleeping Beauty" has become one of the most frequently staged ballets in history. So what makes this piece so beloved? And what exactly does ballet bring to this— or any other story? At the heart of ballet are dozens of gestures that dancers painstakingly perfect over thousands of hours of practice. This unique set of gestures has been used for centuries, each movement rich with meaning and history. But you don’t need to study them to understand ballet, any more than you need to study music to be moved by a song. And just as composers combine notes and phrases to form pieces of music, choreographers string these gestures together with new movements to form expressive combinations. Working alongside the orchestra’s live score, ballerinas precisely perform these combinations to convey narrative, emotion, and character. In "The Sleeping Beauty’s" opening scene, a flurry of techniques depicts the fairy court bestowing gifts on baby Princess Aurora. The Fairy of Generosity delicately walks “en pointe”— meaning on the tips of her toes— in step with the light plucking of violins. The ballerina moves in perfect harmony with the music, even mimicing the violins’ trill with an elegant bourrée. The Fairy of Temperance, bestowing the gift of strong will on Aurora, is choreographed as if shooting bolts of electricity from her fingers. She bounds across the stage, spinning with quick chaînés before decisively jetéing. Some movements are even more literal than this. The evil fairy Carabosse curses the princess with a lethal “X,” and the benevolent Lilac Fairy counters that curse. Of course, the relationship between music and movement isn’t always this straightforward. While classical ballet gestures often respond to musical elements, the degree to which the dancers and orchestra align is another choreographic tool. Some characters and scenes move in sync to create rhythmic clarity, while others deliberately diverge from the orchestra. Dancers and musicians maintain this delicate balance throughout each performance, engaging in a live negotiation of speed and rhythm. But prior to the performance, a ballet’s most important relationship is between the choreographer and the music. Choreographer Marius Petipa and composer Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky worked together on every second of "The Sleeping Beauty." This is particularly noticeable in Princess Aurora’s exuberant entrance on her 16th birthday. Tchaikovsky’s enthusiastic music tumbles forward in fits and starts, even cutting short some musical phrases to capture her impatience. Petipa choreographs Aurora bouncing back and forth with “pas de chat”— French for "cat steps"— as she waits for her party to begin. Once the celebration starts, it’s up to the dancers to deliver on the physical spectacle of performing these gestures with grace. Aurora has the hardest part of all: her famous Rose Adagio. As four suitors vie for her hand, the Princess performs a dizzying array of balances, all en pointe. She briefly takes each suitor’s hand, but then balances unassisted— a breath-taking display of physical strength and skill. However, it’s not just technique that carries meaning, but also style and personality. Like an actor delivering their lines, ballerinas can execute their movements to convey a wide range of emotion. Aurora can be elegant and restrained, throwing her arms in independence from her suitors. Or she can be coy and flirtatious, descending from en pointe with grace and knowing confidence. "The Sleeping Beauty" offers a showcase for so much of what ballet can do. Its graceful spectacle, dramatic physical vocabulary, and enchanting coordination of music and movement perfectly reflect the themes of this fantastical romance. But ballet isn’t just for epic fairytales. Ballets can be non-narrative emotional journeys, experimental deconstructions of form, or pure demonstrations of skill. The artform is always experimenting with a centuries old set of rules, making it the perfect medium for stories old and new. |
What's missing from the American immigrant narrative | {0: 'Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez is a corporate and investment banking analyst at Wells Fargo.'} | TED@WellsFargo | Hi, everyone, my name is Elizabeth, and I work on the trading floor. But I'm still pretty new to it. I graduated from college about a year and a half ago, and to be quite honest, I'm still recovering from the recruiting process I had to go through to get here. (Laughter) Now, I don't know about you, but this is the most ridiculous thing that I still remember about the whole process, was asking insecure college students what their biggest passion was. Like, do you expect me to have an answer for that? (Laughter) Of course I did. And to be quite honest, I really showed those recruiters just how passionate I was by telling them all about my early interest in the global economy, which, conveniently, stemmed from the conversations that I would overhear my immigrant parents having about money and the fluctuating value of the Mexican peso. They love a good personal story. But you know what? I lied. (Laughter) And not because the things I said weren't true — I mean, my parents were talking about this stuff. But that's not really why I decided to jump into finance. I just really wanted to pay my rent. (Laughter) And here's the thing. The reality of having to pay my rent and do real adult things is something that we're rarely willing to admit to employers, to others and even to ourselves. I know I wasn't about to tell my recruiters that I was there for the money. And that's because for the most part, we want to see ourselves as idealists and as people who do what they believe in and pursue the things that they find the most exciting. But the reality is very few of us actually have the privilege to do that. Now, I can't speak for everyone, but this is especially true for young immigrant professionals like me. And the reason this is true has something to do with the narratives that society has kept hitting us with in the news, in the workplace and even by those annoyingly self-critical voices in our heads. So what narratives am I referring to? Well, there's two that come to mind when it comes to immigrants. The first is the idea of the immigrant worker. You know, people that come to the US in search of jobs as laborers, or field workers, dish washers. You know, things that we might consider low-wage jobs but the immigrants? That's a good opportunity. The news nowadays has convoluted that whole thing quite a bit. You could say that it's made America's relationship with immigrants complicated. And as immigrant expert George Borjas would have put it, it's kind of like America wanted workers, but then, they got confused when we got people instead. (Laughter) I mean, it's natural that people want to strive to put a roof over their heads and live a normal life, right? So for obvious reasons, this narrative has been driving me a little bit crazy. But it's not the only one. The other narrative that I'm going to talk about is the idea of the superimmigrant. In America, we love to idolize superimmigrants as the ideal symbols of American success. I grew up admiring superimmigrants, because their existence fueled my dreams and it gave me hope. The problem with this narrative is that it also seems to cast a shadow on those that don't succeed or that don't make it in that way, as less than. And for years, I got caught up in the ways in which it seemed to celebrate one type of immigrant while villainizing the other. I mean, were my parents' sacrifices not enough? Was the fact that my dad came home from the metal factory covered in corrosive dust, was that not super? Don't get me wrong, I've internalized both of these narratives to some degree, and in many ways, seeing my heroes succeed, it has pushed me to do the same. But both of these narratives are flawed in the ways in which they dehumanize people if they don't fit within a certain mold or succeed in a certain way. And this really affected my self-image, because I started to question these ideas for who my parents were and who I was, and I started to wonder, "Am I doing enough to protect my family and my community from the injustices that we felt every day?" So why did I choose to "sell out" while watching tragedies unfold right in front of me? Now, it took me a long time to come to terms with my decisions. And I really have to thank the people running the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, or HSF, for validating this process early on. And the way that HSF — an organization that strives to help students achieve higher education through mentorship and scholarships — the way that they helped calm my anxiety, it was by telling me something super familiar. Something that you all probably have heard before in the first few minutes after boarding a flight. In case of an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first before helping those around you. Now I understand that this means different things to different people. But for me, it meant that immigrants couldn't and would never be able to fit into any one narrative, because most of us are actually just traveling along a spectrum, trying to survive. And although there may be people that are further along in life with their oxygen mask on and secured in place, there are undoubtedly going to be others that are still struggling to put theirs on before they can even think about helping those around them. Now, this lesson really hit home for me, because my parents, while they wanted us to be able to take advantage of opportunities in a way that we wouldn't have been able to do so anywhere else — I mean, we were in America, and so as a child, this made me have these crazy, ambitious and elaborate dreams for what my future could look like. But the ways in which the world sees immigrants, it affects more than just the narratives in which they live. It also impacts the ways laws and systems can affect communities, families and individuals. I know this firsthand, because these laws and systems, well, they broke up my family, and they led my parents to return to Mexico. And at 15, my eight-year-old brother and I, we found ourselves alone and without the guidance that our parents had always provided us with. Despite being American citizens, we both felt defeated by what we had always known to be the land of opportunity. Now, in the weeks that followed my parents' return to Mexico, when it became clear that they wouldn't be able to come back, I had to watch as my eight-year-old brother was pulled out of school to be with his family. And during this same time, I wondered if going back would be validating my parents' sacrifices. And so I somehow convinced my parents to let me stay, without being able to guarantee them that I'd find somewhere to live or that I'd be OK. But to this day, I will never forget how hard it was having to say goodbye. And I will never forget how hard it was watching my little brother crumble in their arms as I waved goodbye from the other side of steel grates. Now, it would be naive to credit grit as the sole reason for why I've been able to take advantage of so many opportunities since that day. I mean, I was really lucky, and I want you to know that. Because statistically speaking, students that are homeless or that have unstable living conditions, well, they rarely complete high school. But I do think that it was because my parents had the trust in letting me go that I somehow found the courage and strength to take on opportunities even when I felt unsure or unqualified. Now, there's no denying that there is a cost to living the American dream. You do not have to be an immigrant or the child of immigrants to know that. But I do know that now, today, I am living something close to what my parents saw as their American dream. Because as soon as I graduated from college, I flew my younger brother to the United States to live with me, so that he, too, could pursue his education. Still, I knew that it would be hard flying my little brother back. I knew that it would be hard having to balance the demands and professionalism required of an entry-level job while being responsible for a child with dreams and ambitions of his own. But you can imagine how fun it is to be 24 years old, at the peak of my youth, living in New York, with an angsty teenage roommate who hates doing the dishes. (Laughter) The worst. (Laughter) But when I see my brother learning how to advocate for himself, and when I see him get excited about his classes and school, I do not doubt anything. Because I know that this bizarre, beautiful and privileged life that I now live is the true reason for why I decided to pursue a career that would help me and my family find financial stability. I did not know it back then, but during those eight years that I lived without my family, I had my oxygen mask on and I focused on survival. And during those same eight years, I had to watch helplessly the pain and hurt that it caused my family to be apart. What airlines don't tell you is that putting your oxygen mask on first while seeing those around you struggle — it takes a lot of courage. But being able to have that self-control is sometimes the only way that we are able to help those around us. Now I'm super lucky to be in a place where I can be there for my little brother so that he feels confident and prepared to take on whatever he chooses to do next. But I also know that because I am in this position of privilege, I also have the responsibility to make sure that my community finds spaces where they can find guidance, access and support. I can't claim to know where each and every one of you are on your journey through life, but I do know that our world is one that flourishes when different voices come together. My hope is that you will find the courage to put your oxygen mask on when you need to, and that you will find the strength to help those around you when you can. Thank you. (Applause) |
How to shift your mindset and choose your future | {0: 'A political strategist focused on creating a better future, Tom Rivett-Carnac works at the highest levels of business and government to find creative ways to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.'} | TED2020: The Prequel | I never thought that I would be giving my TED Talk somewhere like this. But, like half of humanity, I've spent the last four weeks under lockdown due to the global pandemic created by COVID-19. I am extremely fortunate that during this time I've been able to come here to these woods near my home in southern England. These woods have always inspired me, and as humanity now tries to think about how we can find the inspiration to retake control of our actions so that terrible things don't come down the road without us taking action to avert them, I thought this is a good place for us to talk. And I'd like to begin that story six years ago, when I had first joined the United Nations. Now, I firmly believe that the UN is of unparalleled importance in the world right now to promote collaboration and cooperation. But what they don't tell you when you join is that this essential work is delivered mainly in the form of extremely boring meetings — extremely long, boring meetings. Now, you may feel that you have attended some long, boring meetings in your life, and I'm sure you have. But these UN meetings are next-level, and everyone who works there approaches them with a level of calm normally only achieved by Zen masters. But myself, I wasn't ready for that. I joined expecting drama and tension and breakthrough. What I wasn't ready for was a process that seemed to move at the speed of a glacier, at the speed that a glacier used to move at. Now, in the middle of one of these long meetings, I was handed a note. And it was handed to me by my friend and colleague and coauthor, Christiana Figueres. Christiana was the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and as such, had overall responsibility for the UN reaching what would become the Paris Agreement. I was running political strategy for her. So when she handed me this note, I assumed that it would contain detailed political instructions about how we were going to get out of this nightmare quagmire that we seemed to be trapped in. I took the note and looked at it. It said, "Painful. But let's approach with love!" Now, I love this note for lots of reasons. I love the way the little tendrils are coming out from the word "painful." It was a really good visual depiction of how I felt at that moment. But I particularly love it because as I looked at it, I realized that it was a political instruction, and that if we were going to be successful, this was how we were going to do it. So let me explain that. What I'd been feeling in those meetings was actually about control. I had moved my life from Brooklyn in New York to Bonn in Germany with the extremely reluctant support of my wife. My children were now in a school where they couldn't speak the language, and I thought the deal for all this disruption to my world was that I would have some degree of control over what was going to happen. I felt for years that the climate crisis is the defining challenge of our generation, and here I was, ready to play my part and do something for humanity. But I put my hands on the levers of control that I'd been given and pulled them, and nothing happened. I realized the things I could control were menial day-to-day things. "Do I ride my bike to work?" and "Where do I have lunch?", whereas the things that were going to determine whether we were going to be successful were issues like, "Will Russia wreck the negotiations?" "Will China take responsibility for their emissions?" "Will the US help poorer countries deal with their burden of climate change?" The differential felt so huge, I could see no way I could bridge the two. It felt futile. I began to feel that I'd made a mistake. I began to get depressed. But even in that moment, I realized that what I was feeling had a lot of similarities to what I'd felt when I first found out about the climate crisis years before. I'd spent many of my most formative years as a Buddhist monk in my early 20s, but I left the monastic life, because even then, 20 years ago, I felt that the climate crisis was already a quickly unfolding emergency and I wanted to do my part. But once I'd left and I rejoined the world, I looked at what I could control. It was the few tons of my own emissions and that of my immediate family, which political party I voted for every few years, whether I went on a march or two. And then I looked at the issues that would determine the outcome, and they were big geopolitical negotiations, massive infrastructure spending plans, what everybody else did. The differential again felt so huge that I couldn't see any way that I could bridge it. I kept trying to take action, but it didn't really stick. It felt futile. Now, we know that this can be a common experience for many people, and maybe you have had this experience. When faced with an enormous challenge that we don't feel we have any agency or control over, our mind can do a little trick to protect us. We don't like to feel like we're out of control facing big forces, so our mind will tell us, "Maybe it's not that important. Maybe it's not happening in the way that people say, anyway." Or, it plays down our own role. "There's nothing that you individually can do, so why try?" But there's something odd going on here. Is it really true that humans will only take sustained and dedicated action on an issue of paramount importance when they feel they have a high degree of control? Look at these pictures. These people are caregivers and nurses who have been helping humanity face the coronavirus COVID-19 as it has swept around the world as a pandemic in the last few months. Are these people able to prevent the spread of the disease? No. Are they able to prevent their patients from dying? Some, they will have been able to prevent, but others, it will have been beyond their control. Does that make their contribution futile and meaningless? Actually, it's offensive even to suggest that. What they are doing is caring for their fellow human beings at their moment of greatest vulnerability. And that work has huge meaning, to the point where I only have to show you those pictures for it to become evident that the courage and humanity those people are demonstrating makes their work some of the most meaningful things that can be done as human beings, even though they can't control the outcome. Now, that's interesting, because it shows us that humans are capable of taking dedicated and sustained action, even when they can't control the outcome. But it leaves us with another challenge. With the climate crisis, the action that we take is separated from the impact of it, whereas what is happening with these images is these nurses are being sustained not by the lofty goal of changing the world but by the day-to-day satisfaction of caring for another human being through their moments of weakness. With the climate crisis, we have this huge separation. It used to be that we were separated by time. The impacts of the climate crisis were supposed to be way off in the future. But right now, the future has come to meet us. Continents are on fire. Cities are going underwater. Countries are going underwater. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move as a result of climate change. But even if those impacts are no longer separated from us by time, they're still separated from us in a way that makes it difficult to feel that direct connection. They happen somewhere else to somebody else or to us in a different way than we're used to experiencing it. So even though that story of the nurse demonstrates something to us about human nature, we're going to have find a different way of dealing with the climate crisis in a sustained manner. There is a way that we can do this, a powerful combination of a deep and supporting attitude that when combined with consistent action can enable whole societies to take dedicated action in a sustained way towards a shared goal. It's been used to great effect throughout history. So let me give you a historical story to explain it. Right now, I am standing in the woods near my home in southern England. And these particular woods are not far from London. Eighty years ago, that city was under attack. In the late 1930s, the people of Britain would do anything to avoid facing the reality that Hitler would stop at nothing to conquer Europe. Fresh with memories from the First World War, they were terrified of Nazi aggression and would do anything to avoid facing that reality. In the end, the reality broke through. Churchill is remembered for many things, and not all of them positive, but what he did in those early days of the war was he changed the story the people of Britain told themselves about what they were doing and what was to come. Where previously there had been trepidation and nervousness and fear, there came a calm resolve, an island alone, a greatest hour, a greatest generation, a country that would fight them on the beaches and in the hills and in the streets, a country that would never surrender. That change from fear and trepidation to facing the reality, whatever it was and however dark it was, had nothing to do with the likelihood of winning the war. There was no news from the front that battles were going better or even at that point that a powerful new ally had joined the fight and changed the odds in their favor. It was simply a choice. A deep, determined, stubborn form of optimism emerged, not avoiding or denying the darkness that was pressing in but refusing to be cowed by it. That stubborn optimism is powerful. It is not dependent on assuming that the outcome is going to be good or having a form of wishful thinking about the future. However, what it does is it animates action and infuses it with meaning. We know that from that time, despite the risk and despite the challenge, it was a meaningful time full of purpose, and multiple accounts have confirmed that actions that ranged from pilots in the Battle of Britain to the simple act of pulling potatoes from the soil became infused with meaning. They were animated towards a shared purpose and a shared outcome. We have seen that throughout history. This coupling of a deep and determined stubborn optimism with action, when the optimism leads to a determined action, then they can become self-sustaining: without the stubborn optimism, the action doesn't sustain itself; without the action, the stubborn optimism is just an attitude. The two together can transform an entire issue and change the world. We saw this at multiple other times. We saw it when Rosa Parks refused to get up from the bus. We saw it in Gandhi's long salt marches to the beach. We saw it when the suffragettes said that "Courage calls to courage everywhere." And we saw it when Kennedy said that within 10 years, he would put a man on the moon. That electrified a generation and focused them on a shared goal against a dark and frightening adversary, even though they didn't know how they would achieve it. In each of these cases, a realistic and gritty but determined, stubborn optimism was not the result of success. It was the cause of it. That is also how the transformation happened on the road to the Paris Agreement. Those challenging, difficult, pessimistic meetings transformed as more and more people decided that this was our moment to dig in and determine that we would not drop the ball on our watch, and we would deliver the outcome that we knew was possible. More and more people transformed themselves to that perspective and began to work, and in the end, that worked its way up into a wave of momentum that crashed over us and delivered many of those challenging issues with a better outcome than we could possibly have imagined. And even now, years later and with a climate denier in the White House, much that was put in motion in those days is still unfolding, and we have everything to play for in the coming months and years on dealing with the climate crisis. So right now, we are coming through one of the most challenging periods in the lives of most of us. The global pandemic has been frightening, whether personal tragedy has been involved or not. But it has also shaken our belief that we are powerless in the face of great change. In the space of a few weeks, we mobilized to the point where half of humanity took drastic action to protect the most vulnerable. If we're capable of that, maybe we have not yet tested the limits of what humanity can do when it rises to meet a shared challenge. We now need to move beyond this narrative of powerlessness, because make no mistake — the climate crisis will be orders of magnitude worse than the pandemic if we do not take the action that we can still take to avert the tragedy that we see coming towards us. We can no longer afford the luxury of feeling powerless. The truth is that future generations will look back at this precise moment with awe as we stand at the crossroads between a regenerative future and one where we have thrown it all away. And the truth is that a lot is going pretty well for us in this transition. Costs for clean energy are coming down. Cities are transforming. Land is being regenerated. People are on the streets calling for change with a verve and tenacity we have not seen for a generation. Genuine success is possible in this transition, and genuine failure is possible, too, which makes this the most exciting time to be alive. We can take a decision right now that we will approach this challenge with a stubborn form of gritty, realistic and determined optimism and do everything within our power to ensure that we shape the path as we come out of this pandemic towards a regenerative future. We can all decide that we will be hopeful beacons for humanity even if there are dark days ahead, and we can decide that we will be responsible, we will reduce our own emissions by at least 50 percent in the next 10 years, and we will take action to engage with governments and corporations to ensure they do what is necessary coming out of the pandemic to rebuild the world that we want them to. Right now, all of these things are possible. So let's go back to that boring meeting room where I'm looking at that note from Christiana. And looking at it took me back to some of the most transformative experiences of my life. One of the many things I learned as a monk is that a bright mind and a joyful heart is both the path and the goal in life. This stubborn optimism is a form of applied love. It is both the world we want to create and the way in which we can create that world. And it is a choice for all of us. Choosing to face this moment with stubborn optimism can fill our lives with meaning and purpose, and in doing so, we can put a hand on the arc of history and bend it towards the future that we choose. Yes, living now feels out of control. It feels frightening and scary and new. But let's not falter at this most crucial of transitions that is coming at us right now. Let's face it with stubborn and determined optimism. Yes, seeing the changes in the world right now can be painful. But let's approach it with love. Thank you. |
An ode to living on Earth | {0: 'With a style that crackles with wry wit, writer and artist Oliver Jeffers captivates audiences of all ages.'} | TED2020: The Prequel | [Oliver Jeffers] [An ode to living on Earth] Hello. I'm sure by the time I get to end of this sentence, given how I talk, you'll all have figured out that I'm from a place called planet Earth. Earth is pretty great. It's home to us. And germs. Those [blip] take a back seat for the time being, because believe it or not, they're not the only thing going on. This planet is also home to cars, brussels sprouts; those weird fish things that have their own headlights; art, fire, fire extinguishers, laws, pigeons, bottles of beer, lemons and light bulbs; Pinot noir and paracetamol; ghosts, mosquitoes, flamingos, flowers, the ukulele, elevators and cats, cat videos, the internet; iron beams, buildings and batteries, all ingenuity and bright ideas, all known life ... and a whole bunch of other stuff. Pretty much everything we know and ever heard of. It's my favorite place, actually. This small orb, floating in a cold and lonely part of the cosmos. Oh, the accent is from Belfast, by the way, which is ... here. Roughly. You may think you know this planet Earth, as you're from here. But chances are, you probably haven't thought about the basics in a while. I thought I knew it. Thought I was an expert, even. Until, that is, I had to explain the entire place, and how it's supposed to work, to someone who had never been here before. Not what you might think, although my dad always did say the sure sign of intelligent life out there is that they haven't bothered trying to contact us. It was actually my newborn son I was trying to explain things to. We'd never been parents before, my wife and I, and so treated him like most guests when he arrived home for the first time, by giving him the tour. This is where you live, son. This room is where we make food at. This is the room we keep our collection of chairs, and so on. It's refreshing, explaining how our planet works to a zero-year-old. But after the laughs, and once the magnitude that new humans know absolutely nothing settles on you and how little you know either, explaining the whole planet becomes quite intimidating. But I tried anyway. As I walked around those first few weeks, narrating the world as I saw it, I began to take notes of the ridiculous things I was saying. The notes slowly morphed into a letter intended for my son once he learned to read. And that letter became a book about the basic principles of what it is to be a human living on Earth in the 21st century. Some things are really obvious. Like, the planet is made of two parts: land and sea. Some less obvious until you think about them. Like, time. Things can sometimes move slowly here on Earth. But more often, they move quickly. So use your time well, it will be gone before you know it. Or people. People come in all different shapes, sizes and colors. We may all look different, act different and sound different, but don't be fooled. We are all people. It doesn't skip me that of all the places in the universe, people only live on Earth, can only live on Earth. And even then, only on some of the dry bits. There's only a very small part of the surface of our planet that is actually habitable to human life, and squeezed in here is where all of us live. It's easy to forget when you're up close to the dirt, the rocks, the foliage, the concrete of our lands, just how limited the room for maneuvering is. From a set of eyes close to the ground, the horizon feels like it goes forever. After all, it's not an every-day ritual to consider where we are on the ball of our planet and where that ball is in space. I didn't want to tell my son the same story of countries that we were told where I was growing up in Northern Ireland. That we were from just a small parish, which ignores life outside its immediate concerns. I wanted to try to feel what it was like to see our planet as one system, as a single object, hanging in space. To do this, I would need to switch from flat drawings for books to 3D sculpture for the street, and I'd need almost 200 feet, a New York City block, to build a large-scale model of the moon, the Earth and us. This project managed to take place on New York City's High Line park last winter, on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's mission around the Moon. After its installation, I was able to put on a space helmet with my son and launch, like Apollo 11 did half a century ago, towards the Moon. We circled around and looked back at us. What I felt was how lonely it was there in the dark. And I was just pretending. The Moon is the only object even remotely close to us. And at the scale of this project, where our planet was 10 feet in diameter, Mars, the next planet, will be the size of a yoga ball and a couple of miles away. Although borders are not visible from space, on my sculpture, every single border was drawn in. But rather than writing the country names on the carved-up land, I wrote over and over again, "people live here, people live here." "People live here." And off on the Moon, it was written, "No one lives here." Often, the obvious things aren't all that obvious until you think about them. Seeing anything from a vast enough distance changes everything, as many astronauts have experienced. And human eyes have only ever seen our Earth from as far as the Moon, really. It's quite a ways further before we get to the edges of our own Solar System. And even out to other stars, to the constellations. There is actually only one point in the entire cosmos that is present in all constellations of stars, and that presence is here, planet Earth. Those pictures we have made up for the clusters of stars only make sense from this point of view down here. Their stories only make sense here on Earth. And only something to us. To people. We are creatures of stories. We are the stories we tell, we're the stories we're told. Consider briefly the story of human civilization on Earth. It tells of the ingenuity, elegance, generous and nurturing nature of a species that is also self-focused, vulnerable and defiantly protective. We, the people, shield the flame of our existence from the raw, vast elements outside our control, the great beyond. Yet it is always to the flame we look. "For all we know," when said as a statement, it means the sum total of all knowledge. But when said another way, "for all we know," it means that we do not know at all. This is the beautiful, fragile drama of civilization. We are the actors and spectators of a cosmic play that means the world to us here, but means nothing anywhere else. Possibly not even that much down here, either. If we truly thought about our relationship with our boat, with our Earth, it might be more of a story of ignorance and greed. As is the case with Fausto, a man who believed he owned everything and set out to survey what was his. He easily claims ownership of a flower, a sheep, a tree and a field. The lake and the mountain prove harder to conquer, but they, too, surrender. It is in trying to own the open sea where his greed proves his undoing, when, in a fit of arrogance, he climbs overboard to show that sea who is boss. But he does not understand, slips beneath the waves, sinks to the bottom. The sea was sad for him but carried on being the sea. As do all the other objects of his ownership, for the fate of Fausto does not matter to them. For all the importance in the cosmos we believe we hold, we'd have nothing if not for this Earth. While it would keep happily spinning, obliviously without us. On this planet, there are people. We have gone about our days, sometimes we look up and out, mostly we look down and in. Looking up and by drawing lines between the lights in the sky, we've attempted to make sense out of chaos. Looking down, we've drawn lines across the land to know where we belong and where we don't. We do mostly forget that these lines that connect the stars and those lines that divide the land live only in our heads. They, too, are stories. We carry out our everyday routines and rituals according to the stories we most believe in, and these days, the story is changing as we write it. There is a lot of fear in this current story, and until recently, the stories that seemed to have the most power are those of bitterness, of how it had all gone wrong for us individually and collectively. It has been inspiring to watch how the best comes from the worst. How people are waking up in this time of global reckoning to the realization that our connections with each other are some of the most important things we have. But stepping back. For all we've had to lament, we spend very little time relishing the single biggest thing that has ever gone right for us. That we are here in the first place, that we are alive at all. That we are still alive. A million and a half years after finding a box of matches, we haven't totally burned the house down. Yet. The chances of being here are infinitesimal. Yet here we are. Perils and all. There have never been more people living on Earth. Using more stuff. And it's become obvious that many of the old systems we invented for ourselves are obsolete. And we have to build new ones. If it wasn't germs, our collective fire might suffocate us before long. As we watch the wheels of industry grind to a halt, the machinery of progress become silent, we have the wildest of opportunities to hit the reset button. To take a different path. Here we are on Earth. And life on Earth is a wonderful thing. It looks big, this Earth, but there are lots of us on here. Seven and a half billion at last count, with more showing up every day. Even so, there is still enough for everyone, if we all share a little. So please, be kind. When you think of it another way, if Earth is the only place where people live, it's actually the least lonely place in the universe. There are plenty of people to be loved by and plenty of people to love. We need each other. We know that now, more than ever. Good night. |
The wildly complex anatomy of a sneaker | {0: 'Angel Chang is a womenswear designer working with artisans in rural China. '} | TED-Ed | Australians call them “runners." The British know them as “trainers." Americans refer to them as “tennis shoes” or “sneakers." Whatever you call them, these rubber-soled, casual shoes are worn by billions of people around the world. Originally invented in the late 19th century, these simple canvas and rubber creations have changed a lot since they first hit the pavement. Today, sneaker consumption is at an all-time high. No country buys more sneakers than the United States, where people purchase 3 pairs a year on average. To meet this demand, roughly 23 billion shoes are produced each year, mostly in factories across China and Southeast Asia. But making shoes has become more complicated, more labor-intensive, and in some ways, more dangerous, for the workers involved and for our planet. Shoe manufacturing accounts for roughly one-fifth of the fashion industry’s carbon emissions. Sneakers alone generate 313 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of 66 million cars. To better understand your shoe’s carbon footprint, let’s dive into the anatomy of a sneaker. For starters, the heel, insole, midsole, and upper layer are usually made from synthetic textiles like polyester, nylon, latex, and polyurethane. Mining the fossil fuels that make up these materials emits tons of greenhouse gases. And processing those raw ingredients into synthetic textiles also uses a lot of energy, further compounding that pollution. Some sneaker tops are made from natural sources like leather, but tanning this material relies on chromium; a carcinogenic chemical that can damage freshwater ecosystems. The outer soles of most shoes are made of rubber that’s gone through a process called vulcanization. This technique adds sulfur to superheated raw rubber to create a material that’s both elastic and sturdy. Until recently, sneakers used natural rubber for this process. But today, most outer soles are made with a synthetic blend of natural rubber and byproducts from coal and oil. Producing these materials accounts for 20% of a sneaker’s carbon footprint. But more than two-thirds of the shoe’s carbon impact comes from the next step: manufacturing. A typical sneaker is comprised of 65 discrete parts, each of which is produced by specialized machinery. This means it’s cheaper for factories to mass-produce each piece separately rather than manufacturing every part under one roof. But the transportation required to ship these pieces to one assembly plant emits even more CO2. Once the components arrive at the assembly line, they undergo cutting, pouring, melting, baking, cooling, and gluing, before the final products can be stitched together. The assembly of a typical sneaker requires more than 360 steps, and accounts for the remaining 20% of a sneaker’s environmental impact. The dispersion of factories fuels another problem as well: labor abuse. Most brands don’t own or operate their factories, so the plants they work with are in countries with little to no worker protection laws. As a result, many laborers earn below the living wage, and are exposed to harmful chemicals, like toxic glue fumes. When manufacturing is complete, the shoes are packaged and transported to stores around the globe. For many, these shoes could last years. But for someone running 20 miles a week, a pair of running shoes will start wearing out after roughly 6 months. Since the shoes are made of so many different materials, they’re almost impossible to break down into recyclable components. 20% of these shoes are incinerated, while the rest are tossed into landfills where they can take up to 1,000 years to degrade. So, how can we balance our love of sneakers with the need for sustainability? First, designers should streamline design elements and focus on eco-friendly materials. Factories need to develop energy efficient manufacturing processes that consolidate steps and sneaker parts. And consumers should support companies using clean energy and ethical manufacturing processes. We can also buy fewer shoes, wear them for longer, and donate those we no longer need. So no matter what your style, we can all take steps towards a sustainable future. |
The benefits of expressing your emotions (constructively) | {0: 'Arturs is a certified doctor and works at the Rigas Stradins University, Clinic of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy department. With a specialization in psychotherapy and psychosomatics, he works mainly with children and family matters.\nApart from practicing as a doctor, Arturs both develops his existing professional knowledge, as well as proactively broadens his experiences further. He lectures students in different study courses, including medical psychology, mental health, psychosomatic medicine, psychosomatics and many others, and has been recognized by students as one of the most interesting lecturers at RSU. In addition to lecturing, Arturs has published various research articles, participated in numerous seminars and conferences, both locally and outside the borders of Latvia.'} | TEDxRiga | It's a Friday afternoon, I have finally finished my workday, and there is just one thing on my mind: I can finally go to the supermarket and get those cookies I've been dreaming about my whole day. I get to the local store which is near my flat, I get near the aisle where there's bunch of cookies, and I'm standing there with a gaze, and I notice there's a little girl next to me. She's about four or five, let's call her Lucy. And Lucy has that same smile on her face like, "All of these are going to be mine!" At that moment, I just take one or two packs for myself, she sees how I do this, she's like, "Aha, this is how it works." She takes ten of them, puts them in her armpits and victoriously goes to the cashier's office. And you have that sensation there's like ponies and rainbows and the sun is shining and she's going to have a blastly Friday. I gather my stuff, get to the cashier's, and I notice we are in the same queue. Lucy is there with her mom, she's thrown all the cookies there in the basket and unfortunately, as life is, mom takes all the cookies out, just leaves one pack. And when she takes them out, you notice that the sunshine and rainbows slowly start to fade. And that's when Lucy starts to become a bit grim, she becomes a bit angry and starts to say, "Wait, wait, hold on there Sparky, what's going on?" And then she realizes this is not going to end well, and those rainbows and sunshine turn into rainy clouds and a thunderstorm, and that small sweet Lucy isn't sweet Lucy anymore. She becomes angry and shouts, and yells, "Why? Why are you doing this to me? Why? I want those cookies!" and so on and starts to cry suddenly. And then there's kind of a fuss around the situation - everybody looks at how the mom is going to react - and at this magical moment, all of you probably know, a magical thing happens. Somewhere from the store, the granny appears. (Laughter) She appears and starts to have an opinion, of course, on the matter. "Oh, in my time, things were different." Yada yada yada. Let's pause for a brief moment here. What you've just heard is basically a part of my daily life. Being a medical doctor and a psychotherapist, I hear a lot of stories which people go through. And there is this myth that you have to, as a doctor, distance yourself a bit from patients in order to not get too involved, too attached and so on, which is not quite true. When you are a psychotherapist, you need to actually let yourself feel to some degree, to some extent what the patient feels. How that works is not magic, it's simple biology. You have a part of your brain that is called the limbic system, which is responsible for how you feel, where your emotions, yours and mine, reside. And when you have an emotional reaction, it's never logical, it's neurophysiological, it's biology, it could be completely illogical. And when somebody feels something, you can start to feel in a similar manner. To give you an example, few years ago, me and my girlfriend were asked to babysit our friend's infant. Let's call him David. David is about eight, yeah, eight months old. We arrive at their place, we go in, and you have like a déjà vu feeling, like sunshine and rainbows and ponies. Everything is great, you go in, it's going to be a blasty evening. The parents leave; we have a very nice time with David. But the infant who is eight month old is at a very special age. Everything's kind of nice up until one point David notices something. "You're not my real parents, now, are you?" (Laughter) At which point, David starts to cry, as babies do. For five minutes. "Oh, David, it's going to be fine." "We just have to caress him, maybe put him to bed." Fifteen. OK, then. "Let's change the diaper." "Yeah, sure, let's change the diaper." We change the diaper. Twenty five, for Christ's sake. "Let's feed him?" "Yes, let's feed him!" We feed him. Forty. At this point, you start to have various ideas in your head, like, for example, "David! Shut up, David! Please shut up!" or that you would just leave him somewhere, or you could just ignore him for the rest of the evening. But you realize you can't do that. An hour. An hour and ten. And I remember so vividly, my girlfriend was holding David in her hands, and he's still crying, We're standing in the doorway, we look at each other, and we realize we're screwed! At that moment, what basically happens on a neurobiological level, you can't act out in this instance when you want to shake David, you want to put him away, you want to do something else. But it's interesting to notice in yourself how you actually feel. And how I actually felt at that moment was completely helpless, angry, in despair, scared at the same time, I don't know what to do. If you think about it, it's the same way how David feels. He's been abandoned by his parents - bastards left him all alone with these two strangers at home. God knows what they're doing. So he's abandoned, all alone, helpless, hopeless and scared. And the only thing you can do in this instance is to just be there with him and to feel him and to help him in his feelings what he's feeling. It's interesting, when we start to feel something, how our minds change, kind of to some degree tell us what we actually feel. Every single one of us has been born with a completely different set of a brain, how we experience feelings, how intensively that happens - but we experience all the same feelings. The odd thing is while we are growing up we are taught, mostly by our parents, what feelings to feel and not to feel. Stereotypes exist because to some degree, they are true. If we are very open about things, then if I ask the ladies of the audience you'll probably want your men to be emotional, right? I can just - "No." Someone said no. No? See? Proves my point! So, to some degree you want him to be emotional, but if you're very open to yourself, you don't want the whole emotional spectrum. You want him to be firm and stable, a man on a high horse - or Mercedes, whatever you prefer. But you don't want that embarrassment, the shame, the fear, the excessive jealousy. You don't want that, do you? The same question would be for the men. You do want your lady next to you to be emotional, right? Of course not. You want her to be on the shy side, maybe be afraid sometimes. You're going again ride on your high horse and your Mercedes, and save them from despair, but ... good girls don't get angry, do they? You don't like the hysteria, you don't like the anger. These are the stereotypes that are taught to kids already from day one, to basically eradicate some of the feelings that they have. And the more the years go by, you start to actually think you don't feel something, and then you put your feelings somewhere else. You start to think you're angry at somebody else, you start to think you're afraid or ashamed of something else, which is not quite true. To maybe not talk so much broadly and saying everything about you, I'd like to share the story about me, how my feelings get in the way of my work. Four months ago, I received one of the worst phone calls you can get. In the evening, when I finished my work, my mom called me and told me those words I was always afraid to hear from her: that my father had passed away. And I remember when I came home, how filled with rage I was. I screamed and I yelled, I broke some furniture in my apartment. And my girlfriend was there to see that thing happening to me. Of course, the funeral goes by and life goes on. Then you start to notice something interesting, that some weeks have passed, and walking on the streets to work, I don't even think about my dad in any way, any shape or form, but I'm looking at the people around me, and I notice a feeling in myself: I hate every single one of them. I hate their smile, even hate babies that I see. You start to notice, What the hell is happening to me? You get to work, you're angry at your colleagues. You want to tell them how important it is to cherish relationships, how important it is to do stuff, to do things on time, not to let things go, and so on and so on and so on. Months have passed, and I was asked to do this TED Talk. I was preparing the speech for my TED Talk, and every single time I did it, I realized it is not good enough. This isn't good enough, that isn't good enough. At some point, I even had the idea I'm going to cancel this whole TED thing. I called up my mom and said, "You know, I think I'm going to give up all this TED thing. I don't want to do it." And she said, "Why?" "Well, because, I don't know, because I am going to stand there and don't know what I'm going to say and so on." And then it hit me, why I didn't want to be here. It's not because I don't know what to say. I give lectures all the time. I know what I am going to talk about. The reason why I didn't want to be here because I know I would feel something standing right here. What I am actually feeling right now. I notice my heart racing. I notice that I'm sad that he is not here. He's not going to call me after this lecture. I notice that I'm angry that that's an inevitable thing of life. At the same time, I'm to some degree maybe scared or ashamed: What if I drop a tear while I'm talking to you? How awful is that going to look? But I didn't finish the story about Lucy, did I? If we go back to Lucy, Lucy's mom could've done anything. She could've told her, "That's not how a girl behaves. Look at that granny who's shouting at you. Look at the man, that tall man behind you, he is looking weirdly at you." I'm looking what was actually happening. And she didn't just keep silent and not say anything. She didn't devalue her, she didn't condemn her, she didn't do anything of the sort. All she did was to get the groceries that she had, took Lucy on her arms, and I heard her just so vaguely that Lucy continued to tell mom, "I want those cookies so badly," and "I wanted them." And the only thing Lucy's mom said to Lucy was, "I know, honey. I know you did. But it's OK to be angry, it's OK to be sad." And I remember I'm walking home from this very simple scene any one of you has maybe already seen. I go in my apartment. My girlfriend meets me. She asks me, "Well, how was your day?" I said, "I started off with a smile on my face," said, "I just saw a girl not get any cookies." She's like, "What? Are you OK?" I'm probably in a psychotic state right now. I said no. I told her the whole story about the store. And at some point I notice that my smile turns into a single tear that I have. She asked me, "Why are you crying? Is everything OK?" I said "No. I miss him, like a lot." And the hardest thing about feelings, actually, is that it's easy, to some degree, to think about them in your head. But it's much harder to actually express them out loud. And all of my patients every single time ask me one of the same questions: "What's the difference that I tell you that I'm angry, I'm scared, I'm helpless, I'm hopeless, I'm happy? What's the difference?" And I tell them, "This is the difference, that somebody's here - this time it's me - who actually doesn't just understand what you are going through, but I feel what you're feeling to a certain amount." Question always is, The experiences we have in life, how will that impact your and my ability to, let's say, be there with somebody and feel these feelings? The same way as David needed somebody to be there, the same way Lucy needed somebody to be there, even I need somebody there to be there for me. And I hope every single one of you has the experience that not somebody understands you, but somebody feels you. Thank you. (Applause) |
What happens if you cut down all of a city's trees? | {0: 'Architect and urban designer Stefan Al believes that architecture is more than just buildings.'} | TED-Ed | This is the tale of two ancient cities and the trees that determined their destinies. In 3,000 BC Uruk was more densely populated than modern day New York City. This crowded capital had to continually expand their irrigation system to feed its growing population. 2,500 years later in Sri Lanka, the city of Anuradhapura had a similar problem. They were also growing constantly, and like Uruk, their city relied heavily on an elaborate irrigation system. As Uruk grew, its farmers began chopping down trees to make space for more crops. In Anuradhapura, however, trees were sacred. Their city housed an offshoot of the Bodhi tree under which Buddha himself was said to have attained enlightenment. Religious reverence slowed farmer’s axes and even led the city to plant additional trees in urban parks. Initially, Uruk’s expansion worked well. But without trees to filter their water supply, Uruk’s irrigation system became contaminated. Evaporating water left mineral deposits, which rendered the soil too salty for agriculture. Conversely, Anuradhapura’s irrigation system was designed to work in concert with the surrounding forest. Their city eventually grew to more than twice Uruk’s population, and today, Anuradhapura still cares for a tree planted over 2,000 years ago. We may think of nature as being unconnected to our urban spaces, but trees have always been an essential part of successful cities. Trees act like a natural sponge, absorbing storm water runoff before releasing it back into the atmosphere. The webs of their roots protect against mudslides while allowing soil to retain water and filter out toxins. Roots help prevent floods, while reducing the need for storm drains and water treatment plants. Their porous leaves purify the air by trapping carbon and other pollutants, making them essential in the fight against climate change. Humanity has been uncovering these arboreal benefits for centuries. But trees aren’t just crucial to the health of a city’s infrastructure; they play a vital role in the health of its citizens as well. In the 1870’s, Manhattan had few trees outside the island’s parks. Without trees to provide shade, buildings absorbed up to nine times more solar radiation during deadly summer heat waves. Combined with the period’s poor sanitation standards, the oppressive heat made the city a breeding ground for bacteria like cholera. In modern day Hong Kong, tall skyscrapers and underground infrastructure make it difficult for trees to grow. This contributes to the city’s dangerously poor air quality, which can cause bronchitis and diminished lung function. Trees affect our mental health as well. Research indicates that the presence of green foliage increases attention spans and decreases stress levels. It’s even been shown that hospital patients with views of brick walls recover more slowly than those with views of trees. Fortunately, many cities are full of views like this— and that’s no accident. As early as the 18th century, city planners began to embrace the importance of urban trees. In 1733, Colonel James Oglethorpe planned the city of Savannah, Georgia to ensure that no neighborhood was more than a 2-minute walk from a park. After World War II, Copenhagen directed all new development along five arteries— each sandwiched between a park. This layout increased the city’s resilience to pollution and natural disasters. And urban trees don’t just benefit people. Portland’s Forest Park preserves the region’s natural biodiversity, making the city home to various local plants, 112 bird species, and 62 species of mammals. No city is more committed to trees than Singapore. Since 1967, Singapore’s government has planted over 1.2 million trees, including those within 50-meter tall vertical gardens called supertrees. These structures sustain themselves and nearby conservatories with solar energy and collected rainwater. Trees and vegetation currently cover over 50% of Singapore’s landmass, reducing the need for air conditioning and encouraging low-pollution transportation. By 2050, it’s estimated that over 65% of the world will be living in cities. City planners can lay an eco-friendly foundation, but it’s up to the people who live in these urban forests to make them homes for more than humans. |
A global pandemic calls for global solutions | {0: "TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant has spent his career solving the world's biggest problems, from overseeing the last smallpox cases to saving millions from blindness.", 1: 'After a long career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2002 and has developed it as a platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading.'} | TED2020: The Prequel | Helen Walters: So, Chris, who's up first? Chris Anderson: Well, we have a man who's worried about pandemics pretty much his whole life. He played an absolutely key role, more than 40 years ago, in helping the world get rid of the scourge of smallpox. And in 2006, he came to TED to warn the world of the dire risk of a global pandemic, and what we might do about it. So please welcome here Dr. Larry Brilliant. Larry, so good to see you. Larry Brilliant: Thank you, nice to see you. CA: Larry, in that talk, you showed a video clip that was a simulation of what a pandemic might look like. I would like to play it — this gave me chills. Larry Brilliant (TED2006): Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like, so we know what we're talking about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly, you get two or three discrete locations. Then there will be secondary outbreaks. And the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks, it will be everywhere in the world. Now if we had an undo button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started, if we could find it early and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail, that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. CA: Larry, that phrase you mentioned there, "early detection," "early response," that was a key theme of that talk, you made us all repeat it several times. Is that still the key to preventing a pandemic? LB: Oh, surely. You know, when you have a pandemic, something moving at exponential speed, if you miss the first two weeks, if you're late the first two weeks, it's not the deaths and the illness from the first two weeks you lose, it's the two weeks at the peak. Those are prevented if you act early. Early response is critical, early detection is a condition precedent. CA: And how would you grade the world on its early detection, early response to COVID-19? LB: Of course, you gave me this question earlier, so I've been thinking a lot about it. I think I would go through the countries, and I've actually made a list. I think the island republics of Taiwan, Iceland and certainly New Zealand would get an A. The island republic of the UK and the United States — which is not an island, no matter how much we may think we are — would get a failing grade. I'd give a B to South Korea and to Germany. And in between ... So it's a very heterogeneous response, I think. The world as a whole is faltering. We shouldn't be proud of what's happening right now. CA: I mean, we got the detection pretty early, or at least some doctors in China got the detection pretty early. LB: Earlier than the 2002 SARS, which took six months. This took about six weeks. And detection means not only finding it, but knowing what it is. So I would give us a pretty good score on that. The transparency, the communication — those are other issues. CA: So what was the key mistake that you think the countries you gave an F to made? LB: I think fear, political incompetence, interference, not taking it seriously soon enough — it's pretty human. I think throughout history, pretty much every pandemic is first viewed with denial and doubt. But those countries that acted quickly, and even those who started slow, like South Korea, they could still make up for it, and they did really well. We've had two months that we've lost. We've given a virus that moves exponentially a two-month head start. That's not a good idea, Chris. CA: No, indeed. I mean, there's so much puzzling information still out there about this virus. What do you think the scientific consensus is going to likely end up being on, like, the two key numbers of its infectiousness and its fatality rate? LB: So I think the kind of equation to keep in mind is that the virus moves dependent on three major issues. One is the R0, the first number of secondary cases that there are when the virus emerges. In this case, people talk about it being 2.2, 2.4. But a really important paper three weeks ago, in the "Emerging Infectious Diseases" journal came out, suggesting that looking back on the Wuhan data, it's really 5.7. So for argument's sake, let's say that the virus is moving at exponential speed and the exponent is somewhere between 2.2 and 5.7. The other two factors that matter are the incubation period or the generation time. The longer that is, the slower the pandemic appears to us. When it's really short, like six days, it moves like lightning. And then the last, and the most important — and it's often overlooked — is the density of susceptibles. This is a novel virus, so we want to know how many customers could it potentially have. And as it's novel, that's eight billion of us. The world is facing a virus that looks at all of us like equally susceptible. Doesn't matter our color, our race, or how wealthy we are. CA: I mean, none of the numbers that you've mentioned so far are in themselves different from any other infections in recent years. What is the combination that has made this so deadly? LB: Well, it is exactly the combination of the short incubation period and the high transmissibility. But you know, everybody on this call has known somebody who has the disease. Sadly, many have lost a loved one. This is a terrible disease when it is serious. And I get calls from doctors in emergency rooms and treating people in ICUs all over the world, and they all say the same thing: "How do I choose who is going to live and who is going to die? I have so few tools to deal with." It's a terrifying disease, to die alone with a ventilator in your lungs, and it's a disease that affects all of our organs. It's a respiratory disease — perhaps misleading. Makes you think of a flu. But so many of the patients have blood in their urine from kidney disease, they have gastroenteritis, they certainly have heart failure very often, we know that it affects taste and smell, the olfactory nerves, we know, of course, about the lung. The question I have: is there any organ that it does not affect? And in that sense, it reminds me all too much of smallpox. CA: So we're in a mess. What's the way forward from here? LB: Well, the way forward is still the same. Rapid detection, rapid response. Finding every case, and then figuring out all the contacts. We've got great new technology for contact tracing, we've got amazing scientists working at the speed of light to give us test kits and antivirals and vaccines. We need to slow down, the Buddhists say slow down time so that you can put your heart, your soul, into that space. We need to slow down the speed of this virus, which is why we do social distancing. Just to be clear — flattening the curve, social distancing, it doesn't change the absolute number of cases, but it changes what could be a Mount Fuji-like peak into a pulse, and then we won't also lose people because of competition for hospital beds, people who have heart attacks, need chemotherapy, difficult births, can get into the hospital, and we can use the scarce resources we have, especially in the developing world, to treat people. So slow down, slow down the speed of the epidemic, and then in the troughs, in between waves, jump on, double down, step on it, and find every case, trace every contact, test every case, and then only quarantine the ones who need to be quarantined, and do that until we have a vaccine. CA: So it sounds like we have to get past the stage of just mitigation, where we're just trying to take a general shutdown, to the point where we can start identifying individual cases again and contact-trace for them and treat them separately. I mean, to do that, that seems like it's going to take a step up of coordination, ambition, organization, investment, that we're not really seeing the signs of yet in some countries. Can we do this, how can we do this? LB: Oh, of course we can do this. I mean, Taiwan did it so beautifully, Iceland did it so beautifully, Germany, all with different strategies, South Korea. It really requires competent governance, a sense of seriousness, and listening to the scientists, not the politicians following the virus. Of course we can do this. Let me remind everybody — this is not the zombie apocalypse, it's not a mass extinction event. You know, 98, 99 percent of us are going to get out of this alive. We need to deal with it the way we know we can, and we need to be the best version of ourselves. Both sitting at home as well as in science, and certainly in leadership. CA: And might there be even worse pathogens out there in the future? Like, can you picture or describe an even worse combination of those numbers that we should start to get ready for? LB: Well, smallpox had an R0 of 3.5 to 4.5, so that's probably about what I think this COVID will be. But it killed a third of the people. But we had a vaccine. So those are the different sets that you have. But what I'm mostly worried about, and the reason that we made "Contagion" and that was a fictional virus — I repeat, for those of you watching, that's fiction. We created a virus that killed a lot more than this one did. CA: You're talking about the movie "Contagion" that's been trending on Netflix. And you were an advisor for. LB: Absolutely, that's right. But we made that movie deliberately to show what a real pandemic looked like, but we did choose a pretty awful virus. And the reason we showed it like that, going from a bat to an apple, to a pig, to a cook, to Gwyneth Paltrow, was because that is in nature what we call spillover, as zoonotic diseases, diseases of animals, spill over to human beings. And if I look backwards three decades or forward three decades — looking backward three decades, Ebola, SARS, Zika, swine flu, bird flu, West Nile, we can begin almost a catechism and listen to all the cacophony of these names. But there were 30 to 50 novel viruses that jumped into human beings. And I'm afraid, looking forward, we are in the age of pandemics, we have to behave like that, we need to practice One Health, we need to understand that we're living in the same world as animals, the environment, and us, and we get rid of this fiction that we are some kind of special species. To the virus, we're not. CA: Mmm. You mentioned vaccines, though. Do you see any accelerated path to a vaccine? LB: I do. I'm actually excited to see that we're doing something that we only get to think of in computer science, which is we're changing what should have always been, or has always been, rather, multiple sequential processes. Do safety testing, then you test for effectiveness, then for efficiency. And then you manufacture. We're doing all three or four of those steps, instead of doing it in sequence, we're doing in parallel. Bill Gates has said he's going to build seven vaccine production lines in the United States, and start preparing for production, not knowing what the end vaccine is going to be. We're simultaneously doing safety tests and efficacy tests. I think the NIH has jumped up. I'm very thrilled to see that. CA: And how does that translate into a likely time line, do you think? A year, 18 months, is that possible? LB: You know, Tony Fauci is our guru in this, and he said 12 to 18 months. I think that we will do faster than that in the initial vaccine. But you may have heard that this virus may not give us the long-term immunity — that something like smallpox would do. So we're trying to make vaccines where we add adjuvants that actually make the vaccine create better immunity than the disease, so that we can confer immunity for many years. That's going to take a little longer. CA: Last question, Larry. Back in 2006, as a winner of the TED Prize, we granted you a wish, and you wished the world would create this pandemic preparedness system that would prevent something like this happening. I feel like we, the world, let you down. If you were to make another wish now, what would it be? LB: Well, I don't think we're let down in terms of speed of detection. I'm actually pretty pleased. When we met in 2006, the average one of these viruses leaping from an animal to a human, it took us six months to find that — like the first Ebola, for example. We're now finding the first cases in two weeks. I'm not unhappy about that, I'd like to push it down to a single incubation period. It's a bigger issue for me. What I found is that in the Smallpox Eradication Programme people of all colors, all religions, all races, so many countries, came together. And it took working as a global community to conquer a global pandemic. Now, I feel that we have become victims of centrifugal forces. We're in our nationalistic kind of barricades. We will not be able to conquer a pandemic unless we believe we're all in it together. This is not some Age of Aquarius, or Kumbaya statement, this is what a pandemic forces us to realize. We are all in it together, we need a global solution to a global problem. Anything less than that is unthinkable. CA: Larry Brilliant, thank you so very much. LB: Thank you, Chris. |
Subsets and Splits