diff --git "a/data/en-de/tst2013/IWSLT.TED.tst2013.en-de.en.xml" "b/data/en-de/tst2013/IWSLT.TED.tst2013.en-de.en.xml" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data/en-de/tst2013/IWSLT.TED.tst2013.en-de.en.xml" @@ -0,0 +1,1110 @@ + + + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/shabana_basij_rasikh_dare_to_educate_afghan_girls.html +Imagine a country where girls must sneak out to go to school, with deadly consequences if they get caught learning. This was Afghanistan under the Taliban, and traces of that danger remain today. 22-year-old Shabana Basij-Rasikh runs a school for girls in Afghanistan. She celebrates the power of a family's decision to believe in their daughters -- and tells the story of one brave father who stood up to local threats. <i></i> +education,global issues,women +1666 +Shabana Basij-Rasikh: Dare to educate Afghan girls + When I was 11, I remember waking up one morning to the sound of joy in my house. + My father was listening to BBC News on his small, gray radio. + There was a big smile on his face which was unusual then, because the news mostly depressed him. + "The Taliban are gone!" my father shouted. + I didn't know what it meant, but I could see that my father was very, very happy. + "You can go to a real school now," he said. + A morning that I will never forget. + A real school. + You see, I was six when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school. + So for the next five years, I dressed as a boy to escort my older sister, who was no longer allowed to be outside alone, to a secret school. + It was the only way we both could be educated. + Each day, we took a different route so that no one would suspect where we were going. + We would cover our books in grocery bags so it would seem we were just out shopping. + The school was in a house, more than 100 of us packed in one small living room. + It was cozy in winter but extremely hot in summer. + We all knew we were risking our lives -- the teacher, the students and our parents. + From time to time, the school would suddenly be canceled for a week because Taliban were suspicious. + We always wondered what they knew about us. + Were we being followed? + Do they know where we live? + We were scared, but still, school was where we wanted to be. + I was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured. + My grandfather was an extraordinary man for his time. + A total maverick from a remote province of Afghanistan, he insisted that his daughter, my mom, go to school, and for that he was disowned by his father. + But my educated mother became a teacher. + There she is. + She retired two years ago, only to turn our house into a school for girls and women in our neighborhood. + And my father -- that's him -- he was the first ever in his family to receive an education. + There was no question that his children would receive an education, including his daughters, despite the Taliban, despite the risks. + To him, there was greater risk in not educating his children. + During Taliban years, I remember there were times I would get so frustrated by our life and always being scared and not seeing a future. + I would want to quit, but my father, he would say, "Listen, my daughter, you can lose everything you own in your life. + Your money can be stolen. You can be forced to leave your home during a war. + But the one thing that will always remain with you is what is here, and if we have to sell our blood to pay your school fees, we will. + So do you still not want to continue?" + Today I am 22. + I was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war. + Fewer than six percent of women my age have made it beyond high school, and had my family not been so committed to my education, I would be one of them. + Instead, I stand here a proud graduate of Middlebury College. + When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me. + He not only brags about my college degree, but also that I was the first woman, and that I am the first woman to drive him through the streets of Kabul. + My family believes in me. + I dream big, but my family dreams even bigger for me. + That's why I am a global ambassador for 10x10, a global campaign to educate women. + That's why I cofounded SOLA, the first and perhaps only boarding school for girls in Afghanistan, a country where it's still risky for girls to go to school. + The exciting thing is that I see students at my school with ambition grabbing at opportunity. + And I see their parents and their fathers who, like my own, advocate for them, despite and even in the face of daunting opposition. + Like Ahmed. That's not his real name, and I cannot show you his face, but Ahmed is the father of one of my students. + Less than a month ago, he and his daughter were on their way from SOLA to their village, and they literally missed being killed by a roadside bomb by minutes. + As he arrived home, the phone rang, a voice warning him that if he sent his daughter back to school, they would try again. + "Kill me now, if you wish," he said, "but I will not ruin my daughter's future because of your old and backward ideas." + What I've come to realize about Afghanistan, and this is something that is often dismissed in the West, that behind most of us who succeed is a father who recognizes the value in his daughter and who sees that her success is his success. + It's not to say that our mothers aren't key in our success. + In fact, they're often the initial and convincing negotiators of a bright future for their daughters, but in the context of a society like in Afghanistan, we must have the support of men. + Under the Taliban, girls who went to school numbered in the hundreds -- remember, it was illegal. + But today, more than three million girls are in school in Afghanistan. + Afghanistan looks so different from here in America. + I find that Americans see the fragility in changes. + I fear that these changes will not last much beyond the U.S. troops' withdrawal. + But when I am back in Afghanistan, when I see the students in my school and their parents who advocate for them, who encourage them, I see a promising future and lasting change. + To me, Afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities, and every single day the girls of SOLA remind me of that. + Like me, they are dreaming big. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someone_shut_up_and_listen.html +When most well-intentioned aid workers hear of a problem they think they can fix, they go to work. This, Ernesto Sirolli suggests, is naïve. In this funny and impassioned talk, he proposes that the first step is to listen to the people you're trying to help, and tap into their own entrepreneurial spirit. His advice on what works will help any entrepreneur. +business,development,global issues +1617 +Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen! + Everything I do, and everything I do professionally -- my life -- has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. + From 1971 to 1977 -- I look young, but I'm not — -- I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries. + I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. + And I was distraught. + I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. + Instead, everything we touched we killed. + Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. + So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ... + And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. + And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. + But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." + "Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation." + And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. + We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. + And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is." + When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. + And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!" + And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." + "Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked." + I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. + Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos. + You should see the rubbish — -- You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. + You want to read the book, read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. + The book was published in 2009. + We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. + I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. + Just go and read her book. + Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done. + We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. + The two words come from the Latin root "pater," which means "father." + But they mean two different things. + Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "I love you so much." + Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. + That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss. + I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. + This should be the first principle of aid. + The first principle of aid is respect. + This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "Can we -- can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial?" + I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. + So what you do -- you shut up. + You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. + We don't work from offices. + We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. + We have zero infrastructure. + And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do. + The most important thing is passion. + You can give somebody an idea. + If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? + The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. + The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. + And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. + The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. + So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. + Let me tell you a secret. + There is a problem with community meetings. + Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. + So planning has this blind spot. + The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings. + What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. + You have to create a new profession. + The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living. + I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. + I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. + And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?" + And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?" + In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "How can you do that? + How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult. + I shut up, and listen to them." + So — — So the government says, "Do it again." + We've done it in 300 communities around the world. + We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. + There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude. + Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. + Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy." + Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. + So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. + You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. + You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. + In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. + Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? + Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? + Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded. + So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. + We are at the end of the first industrial revolution -- nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing -- and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. + The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. + Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. + What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. + The technologies do not exist to do that. + Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! + Government? Forget about it! + It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now. + There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. + There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. + And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. + Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. + They were already drowning in manure. + So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York. + So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies -- 1,001. + The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. + Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford. + However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. + First, you have to offer them confidentiality. + Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. + Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. + And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. + The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. + Guess what? + We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. + It doesn't exist. + This person has never been born. + We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world -- Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. + There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. + Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word "I" and how many times he uses the word "we." + Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times. + He wasn't alone when he started. + Nobody started a company alone. No one. + So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, "What do you need? + What can you do? Can you make it? + Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?" + "Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?" + We activate communities. + We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me.html +Melissa Marshall brings a message to all scientists : We're fascinated by what you're doing. So tell us about it -- in a way we can understand. In just 4 minutes, she shares powerful tips on presenting complex scientific ideas to a general audience. +communication,engineering,science +1592 +Melissa Marshall: Talk nerdy to me + Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland. + Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students. + And I was scared. + Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words. + But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world. + That's just how I felt as I had those conversations with the students. I was amazed at the ideas that they had, and I wanted others to experience this wonderland as well. + And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication. + We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world. + Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, from energy to environment to health care, among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions. + But these great conversations can't occur if our scientists and engineers don't invite us in to see their wonderland. + So scientists and engineers, please, talk nerdy to us. + I want to share a few keys on how you can do that to make sure that we can see that your science is sexy and that your engineering is engaging. + First question to answer for us: so what? + Tell us why your science is relevant to us. + Don't just tell me that you study trabeculae, but tell me that you study trabeculae, which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis. + And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon. + Jargon is a barrier to our understanding of your ideas. + Sure, you can say "spatial and temporal," but why not just say "space and time," which is so much more accessible to us? + And making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down. + Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. + You can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas. + A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content. + And when presenting your work, drop the bullet points. + Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? + What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation. + A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too much on the language area of our brain, and causes us to become overwhelmed. + Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower. + And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described. + So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering. + And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. + Take your science, subtract your bullet points and your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you're doing, and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding. + And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/malte_spitz_your_phone_company_is_watching.html +What kind of data is your cell phone company collecting? Malte Spitz wasn't too worried when he asked his operator in Germany to share information stored about him. Multiple unanswered requests and a lawsuit later, Spitz received 35,830 lines of code -- a detailed, nearly minute-by-minute account of half a year of his life. +data,technology,telecom +1518 +Malte Spitz: Your phone company is watching + Hi. This is my mobile phone. + A mobile phone can change your life, and gives you individual freedom. + With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. + With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. + And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. + All this is possible with your mobile phone. + I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. + Let's go back to that time, to this city. + Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. + This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket. + Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? + Hold it up. + Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! + Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. + That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone. + But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. + And I will talk about this. + These are 35,830 lines of information. + Raw data. + And why are these informations there? + Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive. + This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. + This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. + Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? + Who sends whom a text message? + And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. + All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider. + And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this." + They said, we don't want this data retention. + We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. + They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "We don't want this." + And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear." + And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. + Stasi was the secret police in East Germany. + And I also ask myself, does it really work? + Can they really store all this information about us? + Every time I use my mobile phone? + So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. + And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers. + But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. + So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. + But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. + So at the end, I had a settlement with them. + I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. + Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional. + So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. + And on the C.D., this was on. + Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. + At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. + But then after a while I realized, this is my life. + This is six months of my life, into this file. + So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? + Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. + But then I said, I want to go out with this information. + I want to make them public. + Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean. + So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. + This is a visualization of six months of my life. + You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. + You can see every step I take. + And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between. + All this is possible with this information. + That's a little bit scary. + But it is not only about me. + It's about all of us. + First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. + And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. + And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network. + But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. + You can see all of this. + You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. + If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. + If you have access to this information, you can control your society. + This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. + This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. + And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years. + Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. + And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. + The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. + And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. + Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. + They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time. + But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. + But you have to fight for your self-determination today. + You have to fight for it every day. + So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. + When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. + And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you. + So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la.html +Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA -- in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where "the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys." +agriculture,culture,food,health,social change +1685 +Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA + I live in South Central. + This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. + So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city. + This is South Los Angeles. + Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. + Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. + Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. + People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. + For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away. + I got tired of seeing this happening. + And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood? + I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars. + I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks. + And I figured, this has to stop. + So I figured that the problem is the solution. + Food is the problem and food is the solution. + Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides. + So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house. + It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway. + It's 150 feet by 10 feet. + Thing is, it's owned by the city. + But you have to maintain it. + So I'm like, "Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it." + And this is how I decided to maintain it. + So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables. + What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free. + And the garden, it was beautiful. + And then somebody complained. + The city came down on me, and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turning into a warrant. + And I'm like, "Come on, really? + A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?" + And I was like, "Cool. Bring it." + Because this time it wasn't coming up. + So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success. + We had a victory on our hands. + My councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we're doing. + I mean, come on, why wouldn't they? + L.A. leads the United States in vacant lots that the city actually owns. + They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. + That's 20 Central Parks. + That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants. + Why in the hell would they not okay this? + Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds. + When one dollar's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars' worth of produce. + It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food. + Growing your own food is like printing your own money. + See, I have a legacy in South Central. + I grew up there. I raised my sons there. + And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality. + See, I'm an artist. + Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. + Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautiful lawns, parkways. + I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. + You'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. + You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people. + So what happened? + I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. + To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. + We are the soil. + You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this. + Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. + Plus you get strawberries. + I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10:30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed. + So I'm like, man, it made me feel bad that they were there, and I told them, you know, you don't have to do this like this. + This is on the street for a reason. + It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, "Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food?" + And I'm like, "Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it. + That's why it's on the street. + That's the whole idea. + I want them to take it, but at the same time, I want them to take back their health." + There's another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. + These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck. + It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment. + So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens. + We've had, like, 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate, and it's all volunteers. + If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. + If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. + But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them. + I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up -- I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. + So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life. + And when we do this, who knows? + We might produce the next George Washington Carver. + but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this. + Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do. + I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block. + I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes. + Now don't get me wrong. + I'm not talking about no free shit, because free is not sustainable. + The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it. + What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets. + So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy. + So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners. + We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. + If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta. + Get gangsta with your shovel, okay? + And let that be your weapon of choice. + So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit -- where you talk about doing some shit. + If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. + Peace. Thank you. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_forsyth_what_s_a_snollygoster_a_short_lesson_in_political_speak.html +Most politicians choose their words carefully, to shape the reality they hope to create. But does it work? Etymologist Mark Forsyth shares a few entertaining word-origin stories from British and American history and draws a surprising conclusion. <i></i> +culture,language,politics +1548 +Mark Forsyth: What's a snollygoster? A short lesson in political speak + One of my favorite words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary is "snollygoster." + Just because it sounds so good. + And what snollygoster means is "a dishonest politician." + Although there was a 19th-century newspaper editor who defined it rather better when he said, "A snollygoster is a fellow who seeks office regardless of party, platform or principle, and who, when he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy." + Now I have no idea what "talknophical" is. + Something to do with words, I assume. + But it's very important that words are at the center of politics, and all politicians know they have to try and control language. + It wasn't until, for example, 1771 that the British Parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber. + And this was actually all down to the bravery of a guy with the extraordinary name of Brass Crosby, who took on Parliament. + And he was thrown into the Tower of London and imprisoned, but he was brave enough, he was brave enough to take them on, and in the end he had such popular support in London that he won. + And it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase "as bold as brass." + Most people think that's down to the metal. + It's not. It's down to a campaigner for the freedom of the press. + But to really show you how words and politics interact, I want to take you back to the United States of America, just after they'd achieved independence. + And they had to face the question of what to call George Washington, their leader. + They didn't know. + What do you call the leader of a republican country? + And this was debated in Congress for ages and ages. + And there were all sorts of suggestions on the table, which might have made it. + I mean, some people wanted him to be called Chief Magistrate Washington, and other people, His Highness George Washington, and other people, Protector of the Liberties of the People of the United States of America Washington. + Not that catchy. + Some people just wanted to call him King. + They thought it was tried and tested. + And they weren't even being monarchical there, they had the idea that you could be elected King for a fixed term. + And, you know, it could have worked. + And everybody got insanely bored, actually, because this debate went on for three weeks. + I read a diary of this poor senator, who just keeps coming back, "Still on this subject." + And the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate. + The House of Representatives didn't want Washington to get drunk on power. + They didn't want to call him King in case that gave him ideas, or his successor ideas. + So they wanted to give him the humblest, meagerest, most pathetic title that they could think of. + And that title was "President." + President. They didn't invent the title. I mean, it existed before, but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting. + It was like the foreman of the jury. + And it didn't have much more grandeur than the term "foreman" or "overseer." + There were occasional presidents of little colonial councils and bits of government, but it was really a nothing title. + And that's why the Senate objected to it. + They said, that's ridiculous, you can't call him President. + This guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries. + And who's going to take him seriously if he's got a silly little title like President of the United States of America? + And after three weeks of debate, in the end the Senate did not cave in. + Instead, they agreed to use the title "President" for now, but they also wanted it absolutely set down that they didn't agree with it from a decent respect for the opinions and practice of civilized nations, whether under republican or monarchical forms of government, whose custom it is to annex, through the office of the Chief Magistrate, titles of respectability -- not bloody President -- and that in the intercourse with foreign nations, the majesty of the people of the United States may not be hazarded by an appearance of singularity, i.e., we don't want to look like bloody weirdos. + Now you can learn three interesting things from this. + First of all -- and this is my favorite -- is that so far as I've ever been able to find out, the Senate has never formally endorsed the title of President. + Barack Obama, President Obama, is there on borrowed time, just waiting for the Senate to spring into action. + Second thing you can learn is that when a government says that this is a temporary measure -- -- you can still be waiting 223 years later. + But the third thing you can learn, and this is the really important one, this is the point I want to leave you on, is that the title, President of the United States of America, doesn't sound that humble at all these days, does it? + Something to do with the slightly over 5,000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff. + Reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur. + And so the Senate won in the end. + They got their title of respectability. + And also, the Senate's other worry, the appearance of singularity -- well, it was a singularity back then. + But now, do you know how many nations have a president? + A hundred and forty-seven. + All because they want to sound like the guy who's got the 5,000 nuclear warheads, etc. + And so, in the end, the Senate won and the House of Representatives lost, because nobody's going to feel that humble when they're told that they are now the President of the United States of America. + And that's the important lesson I think you can take away, and the one I want to leave you with. + Politicians try to pick words and use words to shape reality and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality. + Thank you very much. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/a_sense_of_humor_about_afghanistan_an_artist_shows_how.html +Afghan-American artist Aman Mojadidi calls himself "Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of god." Playing off his two identities, the TED Fellow's bold, funny, thought-provoking artwork explores jihad, gangsterism, consumers and corruption in modern Afghanistan. +art,arts,culture,politics +1539 +A sense of humor about Afghanistan? Artist Aman Mojadidi shows how + So I arrived by truck with about 50 rebels to the battle for Jalalabad as a 19-year-old vegetarian surfer from Jacksonville, Florida. + I traded my Converse black low-tops for a pair of brown leather sandals and launched a rocket towards government tanks that I couldn't even see. + And this was my first time in Afghanistan. + Long before that I had grown up with the war, but alongside weekend sleepovers and Saturday soccer games and fistfights with racist children of the Confederacy and religio-nationalist demonstrations chanting, "Down with communism and long live Afghanistan," and burning effigies of Brezhnev before I even knew what it meant. + But this is the geography of self. + And so I stand here today, Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God, an atheist and a radically politicized artist who's been living, working and creating in Afghanistan for the last nine years. + Now there are a lot of wonderful things that you could make art about in Afghanistan, but personally I don't want to paint rainbows; I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority and exposes hypocrisy and reinterprets reality and even uses kind of an imaginative ethnography to try and understand the world that we live in. + I want to spend a day in the life of a jihadi gangster who wears his jihad against the communists like popstar bling and uses armed religious intimidation and political corruption to make himself rich. + And where else can the jihadi gangster go, but run for parliament and do a public installation campaign with the slogan: "Vote for me! I've done jihad, and I'm rich." + And try and use this campaign to expose these mafiosos who are masquerading as national heroes. + I want to look into corruption in Afghanistan through a work called "Payback" and impersonate a police officer, set up a fake checkpoint on the street of Kabul and stop cars, but instead of asking them for a bribe, offering them money and apologizing on behalf of the Kabul Police Department -- and hoping that they'll accept this 100 Afghanis on our behalf. + I want to look at how, in my opinion, the conflict in Afghanistan has become conflict chic. + The war and the expatriate life that comes with it have created this environment of style and fashion that can only be described through creating a fashion line for soldiers and suicide bombers where I take local Afghan fox fur and add it to a flack jacket or make multiple interior pockets on fashionable neo-traditional vests. + And I'd like to look at how taking a simple Kabul wheelbarrow and putting it on the wall amidst Kipling's call of 1899 to generate dialogue about how I see contemporary development initiatives being rooted in yesterday's colonial rhetoric about a "white man's burden" to save the brown man from himself and maybe even civilize him a bit. + But doing these things, they can get you in jail, they can be misunderstood, misinterpreted. + But I do them because I have to, because the geography of self mandates it. + That is my burden. What's yours? + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_russell_looks_aren_t_everything_believe_me_i_m_a_model.html +Cameron Russell admits she won "a genetic lottery": she's tall, pretty and an underwear model. But don't judge her by her looks. In this fearless talk, she takes a wry look at the industry that had her looking highly seductive at barely 16-years-old. +culture,fashion,photography +1647 +Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model. + Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while I've been a model. + Actually, for 10 years. + And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. + So luckily I brought an outfit change. + This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. + If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter. + I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. + Not everybody gets to do that. + These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. + The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. + All right. + So why did I do that? + That was awkward. + Well, hopefully not as awkward as that picture. + Image is powerful, but also image is superficial. + I just totally transformed what you thought of me in six seconds. + And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. + I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. + And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. + So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. + And I am on this stage because I am a model. + I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry we call that a sexy girl. + And I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist. + So the first question is, how do you become a model? + And I always just say, "Oh, I was scouted," but that means nothing. + The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. + Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. + And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. + And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are, like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen." + And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive. + But unfortunately I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white. + The next question people always ask me is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?" + And the first answer is, "I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that." + But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, "Why? + You know? You can be anything. + You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardio-thoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one." + If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well then I say, "Be my boss." + Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel. + Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. + It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path. + I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardio-thoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right into -- right now. + So if the photographer is right there and the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "Cameron, we want a walking shot," well then this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times. + It will look something like this. + Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. + That was, I don't know what happened there. + Unfortunately after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "Underwear Model: 10 years," people give you a funny look. + The next question people always ask me is, "Do they retouch all the photos?" + And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. + This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. + I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. + This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. + Here's me on the same day as this shoot. + My friend got to come with me. + Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. + Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. + And here's me today. + And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. + They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. That's not me. + Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, "Do you get free stuff?" + I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about. + I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. + When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a "Sorry, officer," and we were on our way. + And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. + I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86 percent of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. + And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "Will I get stopped?" + but "How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped?" + When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53 percent don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78 percent by the time that they're 17. + So the last question people ask me is, "What is it like to be a model?" + And I think the answer that they're looking for is, "If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous." + And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. + We say, "It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people." + And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure." + And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. + And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?" + you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet. + So when I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, "Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor," and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, "and it doesn't always make me happy." + But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries. + But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now. + If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/zahra_langhi_why_libya_s_revolution_didn_t_work_and_what_might.html +In Libya, Zahra' Langhi was part of the "days of rage" movement that helped topple the dictator Qaddafi. But -- then what? In their first elections, Libyans tried an innovative slate of candidates, the "zipper ballot," that ensured equal representation from men and women of both sides. Yet the same gridlocked politics of dominance and exclusion won out. What Libya needs now, Langhi suggests, is collaboration, not competition; compassion, not rage. +compassion,global issues,politics,women +1659 +Zahra' Langhi: Why Libya's revolution didn't work -- and what might + I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: "Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him. + But don't you ever turn into a Gaddafi-like revolutionary." + Almost two years have passed since the Libyan Revolution broke out, inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions. + I joined forces with many other Libyans inside and outside Libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi. + And there it was, a great revolution. + Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice. + They have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi. + They have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south. + Eventually, after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead, we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant. + However, Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden, a legacy of tyranny, corruption and seeds of diversions. + For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society. + Aware of the devastation and the challenges, I was keen among many other women to rebuild the Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation. + Almost 200 organizations were established in Benghazi during and immediately after the fall of Gaddafi -- almost 300 in Tripoli. + After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills. + With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace. + I met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections, an environment which was increasingly polarized, an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion. + I led an initiative by the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law, a law that would give every citizen, no matter what your background, the right to vote and run, and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists, creating the zipper list. + Eventually, our initiative was adopted and successful. + Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years. + However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections, and of the revolution as a whole, was fading out -- for every day we were waking up to the news of violence. + One day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and Sufi tombs. + On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate. + On another day we wake up to the news of the assassination of army officers. + And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law. + Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles -- freedom, dignity, social justice -- that we first held. + Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the icons of the [aftermath] of the revolution. + I am here today not at all to inspire you with our success story of the zipper list and the elections. + I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision. + We did not prioritize right. + For elections did not bring peace and stability and security in Libya. + Did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation? + No, it didn't. + What is it, then? + Why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion, by both men and women? + Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion. + Our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections, which only reinforced polarization and division. + Our society needs the qualitative representation of the feminine more than it needs the numerical, quantitative representation of the feminine. + We need to stop acting as agents of rage and calling for days of rage. + We need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy. + We need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion. + These are the ideals that a war-torn Libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace. + For peace has an alchemy, and this alchemy is about the intertwining, the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives. + That's the real zipper. + And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically. + According to a Quranic verse "Salam" -- peace -- "is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem." + In turn, the word "raheem," which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word "rahem" -- womb -- symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from. + And so just as the womb entirely envelopes the embryo, which grows within it, the divine matrix of compassion nourishes the entire existence. + Thus we are told that "My mercy encompasses all things." + Thus we are told that "My mercy takes precedence over my anger." + May we all be granted a grace of mercy. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/hyeonseo_lee_my_escape_from_north_korea.html +As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country was "the best on the planet." It wasn't until the famine of the 90s that she began to wonder. She escaped the country at 14, to begin a life in hiding, as a refugee in China. Hers is a harrowing, personal tale of survival and hope -- and a powerful reminder of those who face constant danger, even when the border is far behind. +culture,global issues,politics +1694 +Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea + When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet, and I grew up singing a song called "Nothing To Envy." + And I was very proud. + In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies. + Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed. + When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution, but I thought my life in North Korea was normal. + My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger. + But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister. + It read, "When you read this, all five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past two weeks. + We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak we are ready to die." + I was so shocked. + This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. + Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that I can't erase from my memory. + A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. + But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families. + A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. + Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. + Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home. + I always wondered why they had lights but we didn't. + This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night compared to neighbors. + This is the Amrok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. + As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. + But many die. + Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river. + I can't reveal many details [about] how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine I was sent to China to live with distant relatives. + But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time. + I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together. + In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. + I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee, but I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants. + So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate back in North Korea. + One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police and brought to the police station for interrogation. + Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities and asked me tons of questions. + I was so scared, I thought my heart was going to explode. + If anything seemed unnatural, I could be imprisoned and repatriated. + I thought my life was over, but I managed to control all the emotions inside me and answer the questions. + After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, "This was a false report. + She's not North Korean." + And they let me go. It was a miracle. + Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies, but many can be caught by the Chinese police and repatriated. + These girls were so lucky. + Even though they were caught, they were eventually released after heavy international pressure. + These North Koreans were not so lucky. + Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned or publicly executed. + Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky. + It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive. + Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant. + That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea, and I started a new life yet again. + Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected. + English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language. + Also, I realized there was a wide gap between North and South. + We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different due to 67 years of division. + I even went through an identity crisis. + Am I South Korean or North Korean? + Where am I from? Who am I? + Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own. + Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan. + I started studying for the university entrance exam. + Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call. + The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. + They had to get out quickly, so I started planning how to help them escape. + North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom. + It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea, so, ironically, I took a flight back to China and I headed toward the North Korean border. + Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them, somehow, through more than 2,000 miles in China and then into Southeast Asia. + The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. + One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. + He took everyone's I.D. cards, and he started asking them questions. + Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. + As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. + He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily he believed me. + We made it all the way to the border of Laos, but I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos. + But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing. + After I paid the fine and bribe, my family was released in one month, but soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again in the capital of Laos. + This was one of the lowest points in my life. + I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail just a short distance from the South Korean embassy. + I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out, but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore. + I lost all hope. + At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, "What's wrong?" + I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. + In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM and he paid the rest of the money for my family and two other North Koreans to get out of jail. + I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, "Why are you helping me?" + "I'm not helping you," he said. + "I'm helping the North Korean people." + I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. + The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people when we needed it most, and he showed me the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need. + Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea, but getting to freedom is only half the battle. + Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money. + So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more. + We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world, because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside. + I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support. + I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/faith_jegede_what_i_ve_learned_from_my_autistic_brothers.html +Faith Jegede tells the moving and funny story of growing up with her two brothers, both autistic -- and both extraordinary. In this talk from the TED Talent Search, she reminds us to pursue a life beyond what is normal. +brain,culture,mental health,storytelling +1600 +Faith Jegede: What I've learned from my autistic brothers + Today I have just one request. + Please don't tell me I'm normal. + Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers. + Remi is 22, tall and very handsome. + He's speechless, but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot. + Remi knows what love is. + He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless. + He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color. + He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie. + When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be. + Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome. + He has the most impeccable memory. + He has a selective one, though. + He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday. + Don't they sound incredible? + But most people don't agree. + And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood. + But what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case, although they were not seen as ordinary, this could only mean one thing: that they were extraordinary -- autistic and extraordinary. + Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism," it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills. + It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam. + And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure. + And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it. + I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life. + And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different. + He screamed a lot. + He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever. + Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between. + And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious. + Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied. + Extraordinary. + Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me. + But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality. + Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong. + It just means that there's a different kind of right. + And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal. + You can be extraordinary. + Because autistic or not, the differences that we have -- We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. + The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else. + Please -- don't tell me I'm normal. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second.html +Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look "around" corners or see inside the body without X-rays. +innovation,invention,photography,technology +1520 +Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second + Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second. + But now, 50 years later, we can go a million times faster and see the world not at a million, or a billion, but one trillion frames per second. + I present you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion. + And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight or see inside our body without an X-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera. + Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second -- which is several femtoseconds -- I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide, and that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and, again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet. + Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle? + How does light look in slow motion? + Now, the whole event + Now, remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond — that's how much time it takes for light to travel — but I'm slowing down in this video by a factor of 10 billion so you can see the light in motion. + But, Coca-Cola did not sponsor this research. + Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on. + So, the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside. + Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves. + Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions. + As you can see, there's a bubble of air, and it's bouncing around inside. + Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused. + Now, if you take an ordinary bullet and let it go the same distance and slow down the video again by a factor of 10 billion, do you know how long you'll have to sit here to watch that movie? + A day, a week? Actually, a whole year. + It'll be a very boring movie — — of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion. + And what about some still-life photography? + You can watch the ripples again washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back. + It's like throwing a stone in a pond of water. + I thought, this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite. + But if you look at this tomato one more time, you will notice, as the light washes over the tomato, it continues to glow. It doesn't become dark. + Why is that? Because the tomato is actually ripe, and the light is bouncing around inside the tomato, and it comes out after several trillionths of a second. + So, in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it. + So how did my team at MIT create this camera? + Now, as photographers, you know, if you take a short exposure photo, you get very little light, but we're going to go a billion times faster than your shortest exposure, so you're going to get hardly any light. + So, what we do is we send that bullet, those packet of photons, millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you. + And we can take all that raw data and treat it in very interesting ways. + So, Superman can fly. + Some other heroes can become invisible, but what about a new power for a future superhero: to see around corners? + The idea is that we could shine some light on the door. + It's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera, and we could exploit these multiple bounces of light. + And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it. + On the left, you see our femto-camera. + There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door. + So after our paper was published in Nature Communications, it was highlighted by Nature.com, and they created this animation. + We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn the door will reflect some of that scattered light, and a tiny fraction of the photons will actually come back to the camera, but most interestingly, they will all arrive at a slightly different time slot. + And because we have a camera that can run so fast, our femto-camera, it has some unique abilities. + It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light. + And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance. + By shining one laser, we can record one raw photo, which, you look on the screen, doesn't really make any sense, but then we will take a lot of such pictures, dozens of such pictures, put them together, and try to analyze the multiple bounces of light, and from that, can we see the hidden object? + Can we see it in full 3D? + So this is our reconstruction. + Now we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend, or we can look for survivors in hazardous conditions by looking at light reflected through open windows, or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes. + But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health imaging problems. + Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art, an art of ultra-fast photography, and I realized that all the gigabytes of data that we're collecting every time is not just for scientific imaging, but we can also do a new form of computational photography with time-lapse and color-coding, and we look at those ripples. Remember, the time between each of those ripples is only a few trillionths of a second. + But there's also something funny going on here. + When you look at the ripples under the cap, the ripples are moving away from us. + The ripples should be moving towards us. + What's going on here? + It turns out, because we're recording nearly at the speed of light, we have strange effects, and Einstein would have loved to see this picture. + The order at which events take place in the world appear in the camera with sometimes reversed order, so by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion. + So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research community will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras — — and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging. + It's about time. Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/candy_chang_before_i_die_i_want_to.html +In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: "Before I die I want to ___." Her neighbors' answers -- surprising, poignant, funny -- became an unexpected mirror for the community. +TED Fellows,arts,cities,community +1553 +Candy Chang: Before I die I want to... + There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. + We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. + So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. + And these projects came from questions I had, like, how much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? + How can we lend and borrow more things without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? + How can we share more of our memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? + And how can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? + Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. + My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. + I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. + The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. + I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. + In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. + Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me, and her death was sudden and unexpected. + And I thought about death a lot, and this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had, and brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. + But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. + I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. + So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ... " So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space. + I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. + And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. + "Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." + "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Date Line." + "Before I die, I want to sing for millions." + "Before I die, I want to plant a tree." + "Before I die, I want to live off the grid." + "Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." + "Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." + "Before I die, I want to be completely myself." + So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. + It's about knowing you're not alone. + It's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways. + It's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. + I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community, so my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and beyond. + Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice and share more with one another. + Two of the most valuable things we have are time and our relationships with other people. + In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective and remember that life is brief and tender. + Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. + Thinking about death clarifies your life. + Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. + Thank you. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/max_little_a_test_for_parkinson_s_with_a_phone_call.html +Parkinson's disease affects 6.3 million people worldwide, causing weakness and tremors, but there's no objective way to detect it early on. Yet. Applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little is testing a simple, cheap tool that in trials is able to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy -- in a 30-second phone call. +disease,global issues,innovation,math,medicine,science,technology +1534 + A test for Parkinson's with a phone call + So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants. + No one knows what the hell we do. + So I am going to give you some -- attempt today to try and explain to you what I do. + So, dancing is one of the most human of activities. + We delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on. + Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it. + Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time. + So great progress and treatment has been made over the years. + However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late. + We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure. + But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test. + You have to go to the clinic to do it. It's very, very costly, and that means that, outside the clinical trials, it's just never done. It's never done. + But what if patients could do this test at home? + Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right? + No expensive staff time required. + Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it. + So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling. + So here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds. + Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example. + And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training. + I mean, just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak. + From the sound, we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates, and just as the limbs are affected in Parkinson's, so too are the vocal organs. + So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor. + We see all the same symptoms. + We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity. + The speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while, and that's one of the example symptoms of it. + So these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle, in some cases, but with any digital microphone, and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning, which is very advanced by now, we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone. + So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive. + The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure. + You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it. + And they're both accurate. Okay, but in addition, voice-based tests are non-expert. + That means they can be self-administered. + They're high-speed, take about 30 seconds at most. + They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens. + When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable. + So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now. + We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients. + No need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup. + We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data. + We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time. + We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late. + So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative. + With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals. + We have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet. + Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours. + Thank you. + So Max, by taking all these samples of, let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not? + What are you going to get out of those samples? + Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. Right. + You see, some people may not do it. They may not get through it. + But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease. + So you're 86 percent accurate right now? + It's much better than that. + Actually, my student Thanasis, I have to plug him, because he's done some fantastic work, and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well, which enables this project, and we're getting 99 percent accuracy. + Ninety-nine. Well, that's an improvement. + So what that means is that people will be able to — People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease. + Absolutely. + Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody. + Thanks, Tom. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_turere_a_peace_treaty_with_the_lions.html +In the Masai community where 13-year-old Richard Turere lives, cattle are all-important. But lion attacks were growing more frequent. In this short, inspiring talk, the young inventor shares the solar-powered solution he designed to safely scare the lions away. +agriculture,biodiversity,technology +1699 + My invention that made peace with lions + This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park. + Those are my dad's cows at the back, and behind the cows, that's the Nairobi National Park. + Nairobi National Park is not fenced in the south widely, which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely. + So predators like lions follow them, and this is what they do. + They kill our livestock. + This is one of the cows which was killed at night, and I just woke up in the morning and I found it dead, and I felt so bad, because it was the only bull we had. + My community, the Maasai, we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them, and that's why we value them so much. + So I grew up hating lions so much. + The morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock, and they're also upset about this problem. + So they kill the lions. + It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi. + And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few. + So a boy, from six to nine years old, in my community is responsible for his dad's cows, and that's the same thing which happened to me. + So I had to find a way of solving this problem. + And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire. + But I came to realize that that didn't really help, because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed. + So I didn't give up. I continued. + And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow. + I was trying to trick the lions [into thinking] that I was standing near the cowshed. + But lions are very clever. + They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back, but the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it's always here. + So he jumps in and kills the animals. + So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch, and that day, the lions didn't come. + And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light. + So I had an idea. + Since I was a small boy, I used to work in my room for the whole day, and I even took apart my mom's new radio, and that day she almost killed me, but I learned a lot about electronics. + So I got an old car battery, an indicator box. It's a small device found in a motorcycle, and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left. It blinks. + And I got a switch where I can switch on the lights, on and off. + And that's a small torch from a broken flashlight. + So I set up everything. + As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer. + And the indicator box makes the lights flash. + As you can see, the bulbs face outside, because that's where the lions come from. + And that's how it looks to lions when they come at night. + The lights flash and trick the lions into thinking I was walking around the cowshed, but I was sleeping in my bed. + Thanks. + So I set it up in my home two years ago, and since then, we have never experienced any problem with lions. + And my neighboring homes heard about this idea. + One of them was this grandmother. + She had a lot of her animals being killed by lions, and she asked me if I could put the lights for her. + And I said, "Yes." + So I put the lights. You can see at the back, those are the lion lights. + Since now, I've set up seven homes around my community, and they're really working. + And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms. + Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this. + My new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness. + I even took my friends back to my community, and we're installing the lights to the homes which don't have [any], and I'm teaching them how to put them. + So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside. + And here I am today. + I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED. + So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up. + I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict. + Ashê olên. It means in my language, thank you very much. + You have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours. + So you got this scholarship. Yep. + You're working on other electrical inventions. + What's the next one on your list? + My next invention is, I want to make an electric fence. Electric fence? + But I know electric fences are already invented, but I want to make mine. + You already tried it once, right, and you -- I tried it before, but I stopped because it gave me a shock. + In the trenches. Richard Turere, you are something else. + We're going to cheer you on every step of the way, my friend. + Thank you so much. Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_addis_a_father_daughter_bond_one_photo_at_a_time.html +A long time ago in New York City, Steve Addis stood on a corner holding his 1-year-old daughter in his arms; his wife snapped a photo. The image has inspired an annual father-daughter ritual, where Addis and his daughter pose for the same picture, on the same corner, each year. Addis shares 15 treasured photographs from the series, and explores why this small, repeated ritual means so much. +children,parenting,photography +1634 +Steven Addis: A father-daughter bond, one photo at a time + Photography has been my passion ever since I was old enough to pick up a camera, but today I want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine, and I didn't take any of them. + There were no art directors, no stylists, no chance for reshoots, not even any regard for lighting. + In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists. + My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th. + We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture. + Well you can see where this is going. + Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual?" + This is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture. + You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger. + No one's ever refused, and luckily no one's ever run off with our camera. + Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives. + It's really become sacred to us. + This one was taken just weeks after 9/11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand. + So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip. + They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way. + Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change, and she reaches new milestones, and I get to see life through her eyes, and how she interacts with and sees everything. + This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year. + Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips. + And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot. + She said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier. + And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York. + And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories. + So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories. + I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos. + I'm always the one taking the picture. + So I want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot, and don't hesitate to go up to someone and ask, "Will you take our picture?" + Thank you. + + +