diff --git "a/data/en-de/tst2020/IWSLT.TED.tst2020.en-de.en.xml" "b/data/en-de/tst2020/IWSLT.TED.tst2020.en-de.en.xml" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data/en-de/tst2020/IWSLT.TED.tst2020.en-de.en.xml" @@ -0,0 +1,1963 @@ + + + + +talks, hearing, TEDx, sound, human body, humanity, science, self, speech, vocals +Rébecca Kleinberger +5990 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Your voice is indistinguishable from how other people see you, but your relationship with it is far from obvious. Rébecca Kleinberger studies how we use and understand our voices and the voices of others. She explains why you may not like the sound of your own voice on recordings, the differences between your outward, inward and inner voices -- and the extraordinary things you communicate without being aware of it. +Rébecca Kleinberger: Why you don't like the sound of your own voice +If you ask evolutionary biologists when did humans become humans, some of them will say that, well, at some point we started standing on our feet, became biped and became the masters of our environment. +Others will say that because our brain started growing much bigger, that we were able to have much more complex cognitive processes. +And others might argue that it's because we developed language that allowed us to evolve as a species. +Interestingly, those three phenomena are all connected. +We are not sure how or in which order, but they are all linked with the change of shape of a little bone in the back of your neck that changed the angle between our head and our body. +That means we were able to stand upright but also for our brain to evolve in the back and for our voice box to grow from seven centimeters for primates to 11 and up to 17 centimetres for humans. +And this is called the descent of the larynx. +And the larynx is the site of your voice. +When baby humans are born today, their larynx is not descended yet. +That only happens at about three months old. +So, metaphorically, each of us here has relived the evolution of our whole species. +And talking about babies, when you were starting to develop in your mother's womb, the first sensation that you had coming from the outside world, at only three weeks old, when you were about the size of a shrimp, were through the tactile sensation coming from the vibrations of your mother's voice. +So, as we can see, the human voice is quite meaningful and important at the level of the species, at the level of the society — this is how we communicate and create bonds, and at the personal and interpersonal levels — with our voice, we share much more than words and data, we share basically who we are. +And our voice is indistinguishable from how other people see us. +It is a mask that we wear in society. +But our relationship with our own voice is far from obvious. +We rarely use our voice for ourselves; we use it as a gift to give to others. +It is how we touch each other. +It's a dialectical grooming. +But what do we think about our own voice? +So please raise your hand if you don't like the sound of your voice when you hear it on a recording machine. +Yeah, thank you, indeed, most people report not liking the sound of their voice recording. So what does that mean? Let's try to understand that in the next 10 minutes. +I'm a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, part of the Opera of the Future group, and my research focuses on the relationship people have with their own voice and with the voices of others. +I study what we can learn from listening to voices, from the various fields, from neurology to biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics. +In our group we create tools and experiences to help people gain a better applied understanding of their voice in order to reduce the biases, to become better listeners, to create more healthy relationships or just to understand themselves better. +And this really has to come with a holistic approach on the voice. +Because, think about all the applications and implications that the voice may have, as we discover more about it. +Your voice is a very complex phenomenon. +It requires a synchronization of more than 100 muscles in your body. +And by listening to the voice, we can understand possible failures of what happens inside. +For example: listening to very specific types of turbulences and nonlinearity of the voice can help predict very early stages of Parkinson's, just through a phone call. +Listening to the breathlessness of the voice can help detect heart disease. +And we also know that the changes of tempo inside individual words is a very good marker of depression. +Your voice is also very linked with your hormone levels. +Third parties listening to female voices were able to very accurately place the speaker on their menstrual cycle. +Just with acoustic information. +And now with technology listening to us all the time, Alexa from Amazon Echo might be able to predict if you're pregnant even before you know it. So think about — +Think about the ethical implications of that. +Your voice is also very linked to how you create relationships. +You have a different voice for every person you talk to. +If I take a little snippet of your voice and I analyze it, I can know whether you're talking to your mother, to your brother, your friend or your boss. +We can also use, as a predictor, the vocal posture. +Meaning, how you decide to place your voice when you talk to someone. +And you vocal posture, when you talk to your spouse, can help predict not only if, but also when you will divorce. +So there is a lot to learn from listening to voices. +And I believe this has to start with understanding that we have more than one voice. +So, I'm going to talk about three voices that most of us posses, in a model of what I call the mask. +So when you look at the mask, what you see is a projection of a character. +Let's call that your outward voice. +This is also the most classic way to think about the voice, it's a way of projecting yourself in the world. +The mechanism for this projection is well understood. +Your lungs contract your diaphragm and that creates a self-sustained vibration of your vocal fold, that creates a sound. +And then the way you open and close the cavities in you mouth, your vocal tract is going to transform the sound. +So everyone has the same mechanism. +But voices are quite unique. +It's because very subtle differences in size, physiology, in hormone levels are going to make very subtle differences in your outward voice. +And your brain is very good at picking up those subtle differences from other people's outward voices. +In our lab, we are working on teaching machines to understand those subtle differences. +And we use deep learning to create a real-time speaker identification system to help raise awareness on the use of the shared vocal space — so who talks and who never talks during meetings — to increase group intelligence. +And one of the difficulties with that is that your voice is also not static. +We already said that it changes with every person you talk to but it also changes generally throughout your life. +At the beginning and at the end of the journey, male and female voices are very similar. +It's very hard to distinguish the voice of a very young girl from the voice of a very young boy. +But in between, your voice becomes a marker of your fluid identity. +Generally, for male voices there's a big change at puberty. +And then for female voices, there is a change at each pregnancy and a big change at menopause. +So all of that is the voice other people hear when you talk. +So why is it that we're so unfamiliar with it? +Why is it that it's not the voice that we hear? +So, let's think about it. When you wear a mask, you actually don't see the mask. +And when you try to observe it, what you will see is inside of the mask. +And that's your inward voice. +So to understand why it's different, let's try to understand the mechanism of perception of this inward voice. +Because your body has many ways of filtering it differently from the outward voice. +So to perceive this voice, it first has to travel to your ears. +And your outward voice travels through the air while your inward voice travels through your bones. +This is called bone conduction. +Because of this, your inward voice is going to sound in a lower register and also more musically harmonical than your outward voice. +Once it travels there, it has to access your inner ear. +And there's this other mechanism taking place here. It's a mechanical filter, it's a little partition that comes and protects your inner ear each time you produce a sound. +So it also reduces what you hear. +And then there is a third filter, it's a biological filter. +Your cochlea — it's a part of your inner ear that processes the sound — is made out of living cells. +And those living cells are going to trigger differently according to how often they hear the sound. +It's a habituation effect. +So because of this, as your voice is the sound you hear the most in your life, you actually hear it less than other sounds. +Finally, we have a fourth filter. +It's a neurological filter. +Neurologists found out recently that when you open your mouth to create a sound, your own auditory cortex shuts down. +So you hear your voice but your brain actually never listens to the sound of your voice. +Well, evolutionarily that might make sense, because we know cognitively what we are going to sound like so maybe we don't need to spend energy analyzing the signal. +And this is called a corollary discharge and it happens for every motion that your body does. +The exact definition of a corollary discharge is a copy of a motor command that is sent by the brain. +This copy doesn't create any motion itself but instead is sent to other regions of the brain to inform them of the impending motion. +And for the voice, this corollary discharge also has a different name. It is your inner voice. +So let's recapitulate. We have the mask, the outward voice, the inside of the mask, your inward voice, and then you have your inner voice. +And I like to see this one as the puppeteer that holds the strings of the whole system. +Your inner voice is the one you hear when you read a text silently, when you rehearse for an important conversation. +Sometimes is hard to turn it off, it's really hard to look at the text written in your native language, without having this inner voice read it. +It's also the voice that refuse to stop singing the stupid song you have in your head. +And for some people it's actually impossible to control it. +And that's the case of schizophrenic patients, who have auditory hallucinations. Who can't distinguish at all between voices coming from inside and outside their head. +So in our lab, we are also working on small devices to help those people make those distinctions and know if a voice is internal or external. +You can also think about the inner voice as the voice that speaks in your dream. +This inner voice can take many forms. +And in your dreams, you actually unleash the potential of this inner voice. +That's another work we are doing in our lab: trying to access this inner voice in dreams. +So even if you can't always control it, the inner voice — you can always engage with it through dialogue, through inner dialogues. +And you can even see this inner voice as the missing link between thought and actions. +So I hope I've left you with a better appreciation, a new appreciation of all of your voices and the role it plays inside and outside of you — as your voice is a very critical determinant of what makes you humans and of how you interact with the world. +Thank you. + + +talks, pollution, oceans, farming, food, life, biosphere, science, marine biology +Nancy Rabalais +13029 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Ocean expert Nancy Rabalais tracks the ominously named "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico -- where there isn't enough oxygen in the water to support life. The Gulf has the second largest dead zone in the world; on top of killing fish and crustaceans, it's also killing fisheries in these waters. Rabalais tells us about what's causing it -- and how we can reverse its harmful effects and restore one of America's natural treasures. +Nancy Rabalais: The "dead zone" of the Gulf of Mexico +Good evening, welcome to New Orleans. +I don't know if you knew this, but you are sitting within 15 minutes of one of the largest rivers in the world: the Mississippi river. Old Man River, Big Muddy. +And it goes as far north as the state of Minnesota, as far east as the state of New York, as far west as Montana. +And 100 miles from here, river miles, it empties its fresh water and sediments into the Gulf of Mexico. +That's the end of Geography 101. +Now we're going to go to what is in that water. +Besides the sediment, there are dissolved molecules, nitrogen and phosphorus. +And those, through a biological process, lead to the formation of areas called dead zones. Now, dead zone is a quite ominous word if you're a fish or a crab. +Even a little worm in the sediments. +Which means that there's not enough oxygen for those animals to survive. +So, how does this happen? +The nitrogen and the phosphorus stimulate the growth of microscopic plants called phytoplankton. +And small animals called zooplankton eat the phytoplankton, small fish eat the zooplankton, large fish eat the small fish and it goes on up into the food web. +The problem is that there's just too much nitrogen and phosphorus right now, too much phytoplankton falling to the bottom and decomposed by bacteria that use up the oxygen. +Now, you can't see it from the surface of the water, you can't see it in satellite images, so how do we know it's there? +Well, a trawler can tell you, when she puts her net over the side and drags for 20 minutes and comes up empty, that she knows she's in the dead zone. +And she has to go somewhere else. +But where else do you go if this area is 8,000 square miles big? +About the size of the state of New Jersey. +Well, you either make a decision to go further, without much economic return, or go back to the dock. +As a scientist, I have access to high-tech equipment that we can put over the side of the research vessel, and it measures oxygen and many more things. +We start at the Mississippi River, we crisscross the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Texas, and even I sneak into Texas every now and then and test their waters. +And you can tell by the bottom oxygen — you can draw a map of everything that's less than two, which is the magic number for when the fish start to leave the area. +I also dive in this dead zone. +We have oxygen meters that we have to deploy offshore that tell us continuous measurements of low oxygen or high oxygen. +And when you get into the water, there's a lot of fish. Tons of fish, all kinds of fish, including my buddy here, the barracuda that I saw one day. +Everybody else swam this way and I went this way with my camera. +And then, down at 30 feet you start to see fewer fish. +And then you get to the bottom. +And you don't see any fish. +There's no life on the platform, there's no life swimming around. +And you know you're in the dead zone. +So, what's the connection between the middle of the United States and the Gulf of Mexico? +Well, most of the watershed is farmland. And in particular, corn-soybean rotation. +The nitrogen that is put in fertilizers and the phosphorus goes on the land and drains off into the Mississippi River and ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. +There's three times more nitrogen in the water in the Mississippi now, than there was in the 1950s. Three times. And phosphorus has doubled. +And what that means is more phytoplankton and more sinking sails and lower oxygen. +This is not a natural feature of the Gulf; it's been caused by human activities. +The landscape is not what it used to be. +It used to be prairies and forests and prairie potholes and duck areas and all kinds of stuff. +But not anymore — it's row crops. +And there are ways that we can address this type of agriculture by using less fertilizer, maybe precision fertilizing. And trying some sustainable agriculture such as perennial wheatgrass, which has much longer roots than the six inches of a corn plant, that can keep the nitrogen on the soil and keep the soil from running off. +And how do we convince our neighbors to the north, maybe 1,000 miles away or more, that their activities are causing problems with water quality in the Gulf of Mexico? +First of all, we can take them to their own backyard. +If you want to go swimming in Wisconsin in the summer in your favorite watering hole, you might find something like this which looks like spilled green paint and smells like it, growing on the surface of the water. +This is a toxic blue-green algal bloom and it is not good for you. +Similarly, in Lake Erie, couple of summers ago there was hundreds of miles of this blue-green algae and the city of Toledo, Ohio, couldn't use it for their drinking water for several days on end. +And if you watch the news, you know that lots of communities are having trouble with drinking water. +I'm a scientist. I don't know if you could tell that. +And I do solid science, I publish my results, my colleagues read them, I get citations of my work. +But I truly believe that, as a scientist, using mostly federal funds to do the research, I owe it to the public, to agency heads and congressional people to share my knowledge with them so they can use it, hopefully to make better decisions about our environmental policy. +Thank you. +One of the ways that I was able to do this is I brought in the media. +And Joby Warrick from the "Washington Post" put this picture in an article on the front page, Sunday morning, two inches above the fold. +That's a big deal. +And Senator John Breaux, from Louisiana, said, "Oh my gosh, that's what they think the Gulf of Mexico looks like?" And I said, "Well, you know, there's the proof." And we've go to do something about it. +At the same time, Senator Olympia Snowe from Maine was having trouble with harmful algal blooms in the Gulf of Maine. +They joined forces — it was bipartisan — +And invited me to give congressional testimony, and I said, "Oh, all I've done is chase crabs around south Texas, I don't know how to do that." +But I did it. +And eventually, the bill passed. +And it was called — yeah, yay! It was called The Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act of 1998. +Thank you. Which is why we call it the Snowe-Breaux Bill. +The other thing is that we had a conference in 2001 that was put on by the National Academy of Sciences that looked at fertilizers, nitrogen and poor water quality. +Our plenary speaker was the former governor of the state of New Jersey. +And she... There was no thinking she wasn't serious when she peered at the audience, and I thought, "Surely she's looking at me." "You know, I'm really tired of this thing being called New Jersey. +Pick another state, any state, I just don't want to hear it anymore. "But she was able to move the action plan across President George H.W. Bush's desk so that we had environmental goals and that we were working to solve them. +The Midwest does not feed the world. +It feeds a lot of chickens, hogs, cattle and it generates ethanol to put into our gasoline, which is regulated by federal policy. +We can do better than this. +We need to make decisions that make us less consumptive and reduce our reliance on nitrogen. +It's like a carbon footprint. +But you can reduce your nitrogen footprint. +I do it by not eating much meat — I still like a little every now and then — not using corn oil, driving a car that I can put nonethanol gas in and get better gas mileage. +Just things like that that can make a difference. +So I'm challenging, not just you, but I challenge a lot of people, especially in the Midwest — think about how you're treating your land and how you can make a difference. +So my steps are very small steps. To change the type of agriculture in the US is going to be many big steps. +And it's going to take political and social will for that to happen. +But we can do it. +I strongly believe we can translate the science, bridge it to policy and make a difference in our environment. +We all want a clean environment. +And we can work together to do this so that we no longer have these dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. +Thank you. + + +talks, activism, United States, guns, communication, community, culture, education, history, society, leadership, social change, violence +Diane Wolk-Rogers +14608 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Diane Wolk-Rogers teaches history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, site of a horrific school shooting on Valentine's Day 2018. How can we end this senseless violence? In a stirring talk, Wolk-Rogers offers three ways Americans can move forward to create more safety and responsibility around guns -- and invites people to come up with their own answers, too. Above all, she asks us to take a cue from the student activists at her school, survivors whose work for change has moved millions to action. "They shouldn't have to do this on their own," Wolk-Rogers says. "They're asking you to get involved." +Diane Wolk-Rogers: A Parkland teacher's homework for us all +I teach history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. +On February 14, 2018, my school experienced one of the worst mass school shootings in American history. +People want to know what we saw, what I felt. +I don't remember everything, but I do remember I went into crisis mode, mother mode. +There was no emotion. +I lined up the kids, I held up a sign so they could follow me through the hall, just like a fire drill. +I heard shots from one direction. +Luckily, we were already moving in the opposite direction. +We made it outside. We made it to safety. +I called my mother. "I'm OK." I called my husband. "I'm OK." Then my daughter called, my voice cracked, and I knew I had to pull myself together. +I sat alone in my thoughts, worried about my colleagues and students. +We sat there, only understanding that somehow, Valentine's Day — We sat there, only understanding that somehow, Valentine's Day had ended up with our babies dead, and we didn't know what to do next. +It's been two months, and every day I still hear the echoes of the "pop, pop" sound of the gunfire. +I remember the fearful faces of my students when we knew it wasn't a drill. +Still, there's no constant emotion, except for flashes of pain, grief and anger triggered by the news, or an insensitive comment, or just silence. +Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School lost 17 precious lives on that horrible day. +After, students asked us, the adults the hardest question: How can we stop the senseless violence? +This was the most difficult question I've been asked. +But it was not the first time I've been humbled by a student's question. +I've been teaching in the public schools for 33 years, so I know you have to admit what you don't know before you can share what you do know. +In fact, there's a method to being an engaged student, teacher, citizen. +First, listen closely to the person asking you a question. +Second, admit your vulnerability. Admit what you don't know. +Third, do your homework. +Fourth, humbly share your knowledge. +I know all about this process. +My students ask really thoughtful questions all the time. +They're eager to learn, and sometimes they're eager to prove their smarts. +And believe me, they know when I have no idea of the answer, so in those instances, I say to them, "That's a great question. +Let me research that and get back to you. " +So when my students asked, "How do we stop this senseless violence?" I listened, and then I admitted, "I don't know." And like I always do when I don't know the answer to one of my questions, I began doing my homework. +And as a history teacher, I knew I needed to start with the Second Amendment and the NRA. +In case it's been a while since you've been sitting in a history class, here is what the Second Amendment actually says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Meaning, the federal government could not infringe on the rights of citizens to participate in well-regulated militias. +The Second Amendment was ratified 226 years ago. +It was written in a time before the federal government's armed forces were among the most powerful in the world and when state militias were viewed as necessary to protect the states. +Fast-forward 80 years, to 1871. +The American Civil War had ended a few years prior, but a couple of Union officers had witnessed some pretty shoddy marksmanship on the battlefield. +So in an attempt to prepare their men for any future conflicts, they founded the National Rifle Association to promote rifle practice. +In short, the Second Amendment was written to ensure that our newly formed and fragile country had access to organized state militias. +And the NRA's original mission was to ensure future soldiers had good aim. +Someone could teach an entire course on how the next 150 years influenced the gun regulation conversations we're having in the United States and our interpretation of the Second Amendment. +Almost every pivotal moment in our nation's history in one way or another influenced how we as a people manufacture, debate, regulate and feel about guns. +A lot of change has occurred. +As a matter of fact, it wasn't until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled for the first time the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Within the home. +This change over time is striking to me, because it reminds us that the interpretation of the Second Amendment and cultural attitudes about guns have changed over time. +Which gives me hope they could change again. +It's an incredibly complex and dynamic history lesson, but it's not the lesson I'm here to teach today, because we don't have time. +I'm not talking about time, the time that I have here to stand and speak. +I'm talking about the fact we don't have time to lose. +According to the CDC, over the last five years, on average, each day 96 people are killed by guns in the United States, and if we don't figure out how to answer my students' question soon, one of us could be next. +So, if the question is, how do we stop this senseless violence, the best way I can think to answer is to look at multiple choice. +You remember multiple-choice questions in high school, don't you? Let's start. +Choice A: this will end when we hold gun manufacturers responsible for the deadliness of their products. +It might surprise you to learn that we've actually thought about this before. +Between 1998 and 2000, 30 counties and cities sued gun manufacturers, saying they should make their products safer and do a better job of tracking where their products are sold. +In response, manufacturers argued that they had no direct liability for how their products were used. +They said the stores who sold the guns and the owners who bought them were responsible should anything bad happen. +In response to this and many other lawsuits, the NRA lobbied for the passage of the PLCAA, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. +The PLCAA passed with bipartisan support in 2005 and entrusts gun manufacturers to design guns safely, stores to sell those guns responsibly and someone to own and use the gun responsibly. +And so when 17 students and faculty die at my school, no one in this chain will assume responsibility. +Let's take a look at another option, Choice B: this will end when we hold ourselves accountable and regulate the estimated 300 million guns available in America. +Yes, voting is one of the best ways to take personal responsibility for gun violence. +Making sure that our lawmakers are willing to pass commonsense gun reform is one of the most effective ways to get those 300 million guns under control. +And also, gun owners can take personal initiative. +If you own a gun, ask yourself: Do I have an extra gun I don't need? +Could it fall into the wrong hands? +Have I attended the latest training? +Perhaps as a gun owner, you should also ask whether you have been taking care of your mental health? +When it comes to gun violence, the mental health argument falls flat if we don't acknowledge our own personal vulnerabilities to mental illness. +One in six Americans will struggle with mental illness. +If we own a gun, we should be rigorously engaged in the upkeep of our emotional well-being so we don't pull a trigger in times of illness. +Otherwise, we should seriously ask ourselves whether we really have the time and attention to own a gun. +Perhaps for some of us it's time to lay down our arms. +Then we have Choice C: this will end when we do a better job of taking care of each other. +Many social issues affect why people buy and use guns. +Sixty-two percent of US gun fatalities between 2012 and 2016 were suicides, yet we call people maniacs and psychos, shaming them. +We are creating barriers for people that need help. +Why are we embarrassing each other? +Let's make it easier, not harder, for people to access better mental health care. What else? Sexism, racism and poverty affect gun ownership and gun-related fatalities. +On average, it's estimated that 50 women were fatally shot each month between 2010 and 2014 due to domestic violence, and women are still dying in their homes. +Let's empower women and give our young boys a chance to learn how to work out their conflicts and emotions with words, not weapons. +And the "Washington Post" reported that last year, nearly 1,000 people were fatally wounded by on-duty police officers. +Talk to Black Lives Matter and the police union about that. +We need to tackle this. +At the end of the day, perhaps people won't feel the need to buy and use a gun when they all equally feel safe, healthy, respected and cared for. +All right, discussion time is over. +It's now time to answer the question. +How do we stop this senseless violence? +Is it Choice A, Choice B, Choice C? Now, I know what you're all thinking. +You remember that multiple-choice questions almost never end with just three possibilities. +There's always that fourth, Choice D: all of the above. +Maybe that's the answer here. +Or maybe "all of the above" is too easy, and this is not an easy problem. +It requires deep analytical thinking by all of us. +So instead, I'm asking you to do your homework, write your own Choice D using supporting detail. +And if you're not sure where to start, look to my students as role models. +They are armed with incredible communication skills and a sense of citizenship that I find so inspiring. +These are public school kids engaged in the issue of gun regulation, and their endeavor has moved our hearts. +And they shouldn't have to do this on their own. +They're asking you, they're asking all of us, to get involved. +This isn't a spectator sport. +So what's the right answer? +I don't know. +Listen, I'm no gun control expert. I teach the humanities. To be human is to learn, and to be part of a civilization is to share your knowledge. +This kind of honest, brave and sincere engagement is what I ask of my students, what I expect of myself as a teacher and what I demand of you now. +Every one of you needs to do your homework. And then what? Humbly share your knowledge with each other. +Please teach your family, teach your community, your city council, your state legislature. +Teach Congress a lesson. +Thank you. Thank you. + + +talks, animals, biology, body language, primates, apes, communication, community, nature, science, politics, empathy, peace, biodiversity +Frans de Waal +15290 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the power struggles of human politicians. "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says. +Frans de Waal: The surprising science of alpha males +Well, I have known many alpha males in my life, chimpanzee alpha males, and I'm going to talk about what an alpha male is, because I think we can all learn a lot from our close relatives where we have alpha males. +And as an example, I want to give you Amos, a male that I knew who was a young male and he was alpha male, he was very popular, but he got sick and he lost his position because, you know, chimpanzee males they can spot from a mile away if you are weak and they went for him, and he lost his position, and then he got sicker and sicker until at some point we had to isolate him. +The group lived on a grassy island, and we had to isolate him in a cage, but we cracked open the cage so that the rest of the chimps still had access to him. +And what happened was most touching. +Other chimps would bring food to him, they would bring wood wool to him, which is this thing that they use to sleep in and build nests out of, and females would put the wood wool behind his back. +He was leaning heavily against the wall, and the way we do with pillows to patients in a hospital, they were putting that stuff behind his back. +And I thought, this is the way to go for an alpha male. +He was loved and respected, and everyone was taking care of him, and this is not always how it goes, because some males don't end so well when they lose their position. +So Amos was an example of a male who was liked as a leader, and I think the term alpha male, if you look it up on the internet, you will find all these business books that tell you how to be an alpha male, and what they mean is how to beat up others and beat them over the head and let them know that you are boss and don't mess with me and so on. +And basically an alpha male for them is a bully. +And I really don't like that kind of description, because I am actually partly responsible for the term "alpha male" because I wrote this book "Chimpanzee Politics," which was recommended by Newt Gingrich to freshmen congressmen. +I don't know what good it did, but he recommended that book to them, and after that the term "alpha male" became very popular. +But I think it is used in a mischaracterization. +It's used in a very superficial way that doesn't relate to what a real alpha male is. +And so I'm here to explain what that is. +The term itself goes back actually much further. +It goes back to the '40s and' 50s, research on wolves, and basically the definition is very simple. +The highest ranking male is the alpha male. +The highest ranking female is the alpha female. +Every primate group has one alpha male, one alpha female, not more than that, there's only one. +And I will explain how that goes. +So first, the body language. What you see here is two male chimpanzees who are the same size, but one is walking upright, has his hair up, has a big rock in his hand, and he's the alpha male. +The other male is pant-grunting to him, is being submissive to him and bowing for him, and that is the sort of ritual they need to go through many times a day in order to have a stable relationship. +I'll show you a video from the field. +What you will see here is a female pant-grunting to an alpha male and you will see how that goes. +The male is approaching, she grunts at him. +(Chimpanzee grunts) +He has all his hair up and he displays. +I'm actually standing far too close. +A chimpanzee is far stronger than I am, and I just was not very prudent, this particular video. +So what you saw him do is he was lifting himself up and standing on two legs, and putting his arms out. That's called the bipedal swagger. +It's a very common posture in high-ranking males, and it's very recognizable because humans do this kind of stuff. +Humans do this all the time. +And what I really like about this particular picture is the two old guys to the side. +This is very chimpanzee. In chimpanzees, we have usually old males who are over the hill, who cannot be alpha male themselves anymore, but they start playing games and forming coalitions, and behind the backs of others. +And they become extremely influential, and you may actually have old males who are more influential than the alpha male himself. +Just as an example, the three males that I used to work with most at the Dutch zoo long ago, where I worked, and the middle male here is a 17-year-old alpha male. +The male whom he is grooming on the side is twice as old, and this old male has made him the leader. +So you can imagine that that old male has an enormous amount of power, because he has made the alpha male alpha male. +The male on the right is individually the strongest male. +In captivity, you can test it out, and you can know that this male has no trouble with either one. +He has only trouble with the combination of the two. +And so the coalition formation that goes on in chimpanzee society makes it much more complex than you think. +It means, for example, that the smallest male in a group can be the alpha male. +You don't need to be the biggest and strongest male. +The smallest male, if he has the right friends and keeps them happy, or he has female support, he can be the alpha male. +So the coalition system makes everything complex, and I'm always waiting here in the US for the primaries, the end of the primaries, because that's a moment where you need to demonstrate unity. +Now let me first show you how the unity is shown in chimpanzees. +What you see here is two males on the left who are standing together. +You also see the big canine teeth that they have. +And they're standing together and they demonstrate to the rest of the group, "We are together. +We are a unit. "The males on the right are walking together in synchrony. +That's another way of demonstrating that you are together. +And so demonstrating unity is extremely important in a coalition system, and as I said, in the primaries always I'm waiting for that moment because then you have two members of the same party who have been fighting with each other, and they need to come together at some moment. +And it leads to very awkward situations. +People who don't like each other need to embrace each other and stand together, and that's absolutely essential for the unity of the party, and if you don't do that, the party may fall apart. +And so if it doesn't go well, like in this particular case — +then the party is in deep doo-doo because they have not demonstrated unity. +So that's a very important part of the coalition system, and that's something that we share between humans and chimpanzees. +Now, how do you become an alpha male? +First of all, you need to be impressive and intimidating and demonstrate your vigor on occasion and show that you are very strong, and there's all sorts of ways of doing that. +But other things that you need to do is you need to be generous. +So, for example, males who go on a campaign to dethrone the leader, which may take two or three months where they're testing all the coalitions in the group, they also become extremely generous. +They share food very easily with everyone. +Or they start to tickle the babies of the females. +They're normally, male chimpanzees, not particularly interested in infants, but when they are campaigning like that, they get very interested in infants and they tickle them, and they try to curry favor with the females. +So in humans, of course, I am always intrigued by these men who are candidates and hold babies up like this. +This is not particularly something that babies like — +but since it is a signal to the rest of the world, they need to hold them in the air. +And I was really intrigued by, when we had a female candidate in the last election, the way she held babies was more like this, which is what babies really like. +But she of course didn't need to send the message that she could hold a baby without dropping it, which was what the man was doing. +So this is a very common tactic, and male chimpanzees, they spend a lot of time currying favor with all sorts of parties when they are campaigning. +Now, what are the privileges and the costs of being an alpha male? +The biggest privilege is females. +Food is really irrelevant. +Male chimpanzees can go a week without food if there's a female in estrus and they're sexually interested in her. +Food is secondary to sex. +And so the male chimpanzees — and we evolutionary biologists, of course, we have an explanation for this, is that sex leads to reproduction, and reproductive success is the measure of evolution. +That's how everything evolves. +And so if males can enhance their reproductive success by being high ranking, you get automatically the ambition to be high ranking in the males. +So that's the privilege. +The costs, one cost is of course that you need to keep your partners happy. +So if you come to power with the support of an old male, you need to let that old male mate with females. +If you don't do that, that old male is going to get mad at you, and you're going to lose him as a partner. +So there's a transaction going on. +If you become alpha male this way, you need to keep your partners happy. +And so that's one of the costs. +The second cost is that everyone wants your position. +Alpha male position is a very important position, and everyone wants to take it from you, and so you constantly have to watch your back. +You have to be extremely vigilant. +For example, you have to disrupt the coalitions of others and that's what male chimpanzees do quite a bit. +Divide and rule strategies, they have. +And so that's a very stressful situation, and we actually have data on this. +The data comes from the field, from baboons not chimpanzees in this case, where they did fecal samples on the baboons and they analyzed them for glucocorticoids. +And what you see here is a graph where you see that the lower ranking the male baboon is, the higher is his cortisol level in the feces, but the alpha male, as you see, has just as high a level as the lowest-ranking males, and so you may think that being alpha male is nice and dandy and is wonderful, but it's actually a very stressful position, and we can demonstrate that physiologically. +Now, what are the obligations? And here, for me, it gets really interesting, and it deviates very much from your typical image of the alpha male. +The alpha male has two sorts of obligations. +One is to keep the peace in the group. +We call that the control role, to control fights in the group, and the second is to be the most empathic, the consoler in chief, basically, of the nation, so to speak. +So first of all, keeping the peace. +This is a male who stops a fight between two females. +Two females on the left and the right have been screaming and yelling at each other over food, because food is very important for the females, and so he stops the fight between them and stands between them like this. +And it's very interesting to me that alpha males, when they do this, they become impartial. +They don't support their mom or their best buddy. +No, no, they stop fights, and they come up for the underdog in general. +And this makes them extremely popular in the group, because they provide security for the lowest-ranking members of the group. +And so they become impartial, which is an unusual condition for a chimpanzee to be in, because they're usually very fond of their friends and so on, and these alpha males who are good at this, they can be very effective at keeping the peace in the group. +And the second thing they do is they show empathy for others. +Now, I do an enormous amount of research on empathy, and I don't have time to go into it, but empathy is nowadays a topic that we study in rodents and dogs and elephants and primates, all sorts of animals. +And what you see here is two bonobos. +The one in front has been beaten up in a fight. +The one in the back puts her arms around her and consoles her. +This is also actually how we measure empathy in young children, by looking at how they respond to distressed individuals. +And high-ranking males, they do a lot of this. +High-ranking males provide an enormous amount of comfort in the group, and they go to places where there are earthquakes or hurricanes and they provide comfort. +The pope does this. The presidents do this. All the leaders in the world have to do this job. +The queen does it and so on. +They all have to do this job, so providing consolation, and that's a very important task. +And males who are good at these two, keeping the peace and providing comfort, they become extremely popular leaders, and there's actually some self-interest involved in it. +They don't do it just for the group, because it also stabilizes their position. +The more popular a male becomes as alpha male and the more the rest of them respects them and looks up to them, the better their position is defended in case it's going to be challenged by somebody else, because then, of course, the whole group is going to support that male because they want to keep a leader who is good for them. +So the group is usually very supportive of males who are good leaders, and it's not supportive at all of bullies. +And when bullies lose their position, they may end up in a very bad situation there. +This is data actually on the consolation behavior. +This is data on consolation in chimpanzees, and you see for the medium- and low-ranking individuals, the females do more of it than the males. +This is basically the whole community. +And this is true for all the mammal studies on empathy is that females have more of it than males. +But look at the alpha male. +The alpha male does far more than anybody else. +And so that's the data on alpha males being the consoler in chief, basically. +The last thing I want to say is something about alpha females. +This is a picture of Mama, the alpha female in the Arnhem zoo where I used to work, who is now all over the internet, I think a hundred million clicks at the moment, for a video of her dying at the age of 59, which happened last year. +And Mama was an absolute centrum of the group. +So she was not physically capable of dominating the males. +She ranked below the males, but she was the center of the community, and if there was big trouble in the community, everyone would end up in the arms of Mama. +And so she was a very important figure. +And so I don't want to minimize the position of alpha females in the chimpanzee group. +And then we have a species that is equally close to us as the chimpanzee, the bonobo. +We often forget about the bonobo, but the bonobos have a matriarchal society and the alpha individual is a female, generally. +Generally, it's a female who is at the top of the community, and we know much less about how this is done and how they get to that position, and what they do with it, because we know much less about bonobos in general. +But I do want to emphasize that the alpha in a group doesn't need to be a male, and that actually in one of our close relatives, it is a female. +So the message I want to leave you with is that if you are looking at men in our society who are the boss of, let's say, a family or a business or Washington or whatever, you call them alpha male, you should not insult chimpanzees by using the wrong label. +You should not call a bully an alpha male. +Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male. +An alpha male has all sorts of qualities, and I have seen bully alpha males in chimpanzees, they do occur, but most of the ones that we have have leadership capacities and are integrated in their community, and, like Amos at the end, they are loved and respected, and so it's a very different situation than you may think. +And I thank you. + + +talks, TED Residency, life, garden, art, public spaces, nature, teaching, beauty, culture, plants +tobacco brown +15398 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Gardens are mirrors of our lives, says environmental artist tobacco brown, and we must cultivate them with care to harvest their full beauty. Drawing on her experience bringing natural public art installations to cities around the world, brown reveals what gardening can teach us about creating lives of compassion, connection and grace. +tobacco brown: What gardening taught me about life +At age four, I found a garden, living underneath the kitchen floor. +It was hiding behind leftover patches of linoleum on the worn-out floor my mother was having removed. +The workman was busy when the garden caught my attention. +My eyes became glued to the patterns of embroidered roses blooming across my childhood landscape. +I saw them and felt a sense of joy and adventure. +This excitement felt like a feeling to go forward into something I knew nothing about. +My passion and connection to garden started at that exact moment. +When spring arrived, I ran so fast through the house, speeding ahead of my mother's voice. +I pulled on my red corduroy jumper and my grey plaid wool hat before my mother could get her jacket on. +I catapulted out of the front screen door and threw myself on a fresh carpet of grass. +Excited, I bounced to my feet and flipped three more cartwheels before landing by her side. +Mother dear was in the garden busy breaking up the soil, and I sat beside her, playing with mud pies in the flower bed. +When her work was done, she rewarded me with an ice-cold glass of bittersweet lemonade and then lined my shoes with sprigs of mint to cool off my feet. +My mother cooked with the colors and textures of her garden. +She baked yams and squash and heirloom tomatoes and carrots. +She fed love to a generation of people with purple hull peas and greens. +It seems that during my childhood, the blooms from my mother's gardens have healed all the way from her halo to the roots on the soles of our feet. +In our last conversation before her death, she encouraged me to go anywhere in the world that would make me happy. +Since then, I have planted her gardens through art installations throughout the world, in countries of the people that I meet. +Now they are lining parks and courtyards, painted on walls and even in blighted lots off the street. +If you were in Berlin, Germany, you would have seen my garden at Stilwerk Design Center, where rosemary and lavender, hydrangea and lemon balm trailed up the glass elevators to all six floors. +In 2009, I planted "Philosophers Garden," a garden mural, blooming at the historic Frederick Douglass High School in Memphis, Tennessee. +This school ’ s garden fed an entire community and was honored by Eleanor Roosevelt during the Great Depression. +Again, in 2011, I planted at Court Square Park — six entry gardens with 80 varieties of deliciously fragrant floribunda and hybrid tea roses. +Gardening has taught me that planting and growing a garden is the same process as creating our lives. +This process of creation begins in the spring, when you break up the soil and start anew. +Then it's time to clear out the dead leaves, debris and roots of the winter. +The gardener must then make sure that a good disposition and the proper nutrients are correctly mixed in the soil. +Then it's important to aerate the topsoil and leave it loosely packed on the surface. +You won't get those beautiful blooms in life until you first do the work just right. +When our gardens are balanced with care, we can harvest the beauty of living a life of grace. +In the forests, when trees realize through their roots that another tree is sick, they will send a portion of their nutrients to that tree to help them to heal. +They never think about what will happen to them or feel vulnerable when they do. +When a tree is dying, it releases all of its nutrients to other trees that need it the most. +Below the surface, we are all connected by our roots and sharing nutrients with each other. +It's only when we come together that we can honestly grow. +It's the same for humans in the garden of hardship. +In this garden, when the caterpillar transforms into a chrysalis, this involves some struggle. +But it's a challenge with a purpose. +Without this painful fight to break free from the confines of the cocoon, the newly formed butterfly can't strengthen its wings. +Without the battle, the butterfly dies without ever taking flight. +My life's work is to illustrate how to integrate human connectivity into the garden. +Gardens are full of magical wisdom for this transformation. +Mother Nature is creative energy waiting to be born. +Gardens are a mirror that cast their own reflection into our waking lives. +So nurture your talents and strengths while you appreciate all you've been given. +Remain humble to healing. +And maintain compassion for others. +Cultivate your garden for giving and plant those seeds for the future. +The garden is the world living deep inside of you. +Thank you. + + +talks, creativity, demo, personal growth, design, funny, robots, technology +Simone Giertz +15518 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In this joyful, heartfelt talk featuring demos of her wonderfully wacky creations, Simone Giertz shares her craft: making useless robots. Her inventions -- designed to chop vegetables, cut hair, apply lipstick and more -- rarely (if ever) succeed, and that's the point. "The true beauty of making useless things [is] this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is," Giertz says. "It turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. Maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question." +Simone Giertz: Why you should make useless things +Hello. My name is Simone. You know how people tell you if you get nervous when onstage, picture people in the audience naked? Like it's this thing that's supposed to make you feel better. +But I was thinking — picturing all of you naked in 2018 feels kind of weird and wrong. +Like, we're working really hard on moving past stuff like that, so we need a new method of dealing with if you get nervous onstage. +And I realized that what I'd really like is that I can look at you as much as you're looking at me — just to even things out a little bit. +So if I had way more eyeballs, then we'd all be really comfortable, right? +So in preparation for this talk, I made myself a shirt. +It's googly eyes. It took me 14 hours and 227 googly eyes to make this shirt. +And being able to look at you as much as you're looking at me is actually only half of the reason I made this. The other half is being able to do this. +(Googly eyes rattle) +So I do a lot of things like this. +I see a problem and I invent some sort of solution to it. +For example, brushing your teeth. +Like, it's this thing we all have to do, it's kind of boring, and nobody really likes it. +If there were any seven-year-olds in the audience, they'd be like, "Yes!" So what about if you had a machine that could do it for you? +I call it... I call it "The Toothbrush Helmet." +(Robot arm buzzing) +So my toothbrush helmet is recommended by zero out of 10 dentists, and it definitely did not revolutionize the world of dentistry, but it did completely change my life. +Because I finished making this toothbrush helmet three years ago and after I finished making it, I went into my living room and I put up a camera, and I filmed a seven-second clip of it working. +And by now, this is a pretty standard modern-day fairy tale of girl posting on the internet, the internet takes the girl by storm, thousands of men voyage into the comment sections to ask for her hand in marriage — +She ignores all of them, starts a YouTube channel and keeps on building robots. +Since then, I've carved out this little niche for myself on the internet as an inventor of useless machines, because as we all know, the easiest way to be at the top of your field is to choose a very small field. +So I run a YouTube channel about my machines, and I've done things like cutting hair with drones — +(Drone buzzes) +To a machine that helps me wake up in the morning — +Simone: Ow! +To this machine that helps me chop vegetables. +I'm not an engineer. I did not study engineering in school. +But I was a super ambitious student growing up. +In middle school and high school, I had straight A's, and I graduated at the top of my year. +On the flip side of that, I struggled with very severe performance anxiety. +Here's an email I sent to my brother around that time. "You won't understand how difficult it is for me to tell you, to confess this. +I'm so freaking embarrassed. +I don't want people to think that I'm stupid. +Now I'm starting to cry too. +Damn. "And no, I did not accidentally burn our parents' house down. +The thing I'm writing about in the email and the thing I'm so upset about is that I got a B on a math test. +So something obviously happened between here and here. +One of those things was puberty. +Beautiful time indeed. But moreover, I got interested in building robots, and I wanted to teach myself about hardware. +But building things with hardware, especially if you're teaching yourself, is something that's really difficult to do. +It has a high likelihood of failure and moreover, it has a high likelihood of making you feel stupid. +And that was my biggest fear at the time. +So I came up with a setup that would guarantee success 100 percent of the time. +With my setup, it would be nearly impossible to fail. +And that was that instead of trying to succeed, I was going to try to build things that would fail. +And even though I didn't realize it at the time, building stupid things was actually quite smart, because as I kept on learning about hardware, for the first time in my life, I did not have to deal with my performance anxiety. +And as soon as I removed all pressure and expectations from myself, that pressure quickly got replaced by enthusiasm, and it allowed me to just play. +So as an inventor, I'm interested in things that people struggle with. +It can be small things or big things or medium-sized things and something like giving a TED talk presents this whole new set of problems that I can solve. +And identifying a problem is the first step in my process of building a useless machine. +So before I came here, I sat down and I thought of some of the potential problems I might have in giving this talk. Forgetting what to say. That people won't laugh — that's you. +Or even worse, that you'll laugh at the wrong things — that was an OK part to laugh at, thank you. +Or that when I get nervous, my hands start shaking and I'm really self-conscious about it. +Or that my fly has been open this entire time and all of you noticed but I didn't, but it's closed so we're all good on that one. +But one thing I'm actually really nervous about is my hands shaking. +I remember when I was a kid, giving presentations in school, I would have my notes on a piece of paper, and I would put a notebook behind the paper so that people wouldn't be able to see the paper quivering. +And I give a lot of talks. +I know that about half of you in the audience are probably like, "Building useless machines is really fun, but how is this in any way or form a business?" And giving talks is a part of it. +And the arrangers always put out a glass of water for you onstage so you have something to drink if you get thirsty, and I always so badly want to drink that water, but I don't dare to pick the glass up because then people might be able to see that my hands are shaking. +So what about a machine that hands you a glass of water? +Sold to the nervous girl in the googly-eye shirt. +Actually, I need to take this off because I have a thing — +(Googly eyes rattle) +Oh. +I still don't know what to call this, but I think some sort of "head orbit device," because it rotates this platform around you and you can put anything on it. +You can have a camera; you can get photos of your entire head. +Like it's really — it's a very versatile machine. +OK, and I have — I mean, you can put some snacks on it, for example, if you want to. I have some popcorn here. +And you just put a little bit like that. +And then you want to — there's some sacrifices for science — just some popcorn falling on the floor. +Let's do the long way around. +(Robot buzzes) +And then you have a little hand. +You need to adjust the height of it, and you just do it by shrugging. +I just bumped my mic off, but I think we're all good. +OK, also I need to chew this popcorn, so if you guys could just clap your hands a little bit more — +OK, so it's like your own little personal solar system, because I'm a millennial, so I want everything to revolve around me. +Back to the glass of water, that's what we're here for. +So, I promise — I mean, it still has — it doesn't have any water in it, I'm sorry. But I still need to work on this machine a little bit because I still need to pick up the glass and put it on the platform, but if your hands are shaking a little bit, nobody's going to notice because you're wearing a very mesmerizing piece of equipment. +So, we're all good. OK. +(Robot buzzes) +Oh no, it got stuck. +Isn't it comforting that even robots sometimes get stage fright? It just gets stuck a little bit. It's very human of them. +Oh wait, let's go back a little bit, and then — +Isn't it a beautiful time to be alive? +So as much as my machines can seem like simple engineering slapstick, I realize that I stumbled on something bigger than that. +It's this expression of joy and humility that often gets lost in engineering, and for me it was a way to learn about hardware without having my performance anxiety get in the way. +I often get asked if I think I'm ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will. +But the way I see it, I already have because I've built myself this job and it's something that I could never have planned for, or that I could — +It's something that I could never have planned for. +Instead it happened just because I was enthusiastic about what I was doing, and I was sharing that enthusiasm with other people. +To me that's the true beauty of making useless things, because it's this acknowledgment that you don't always know what the best answer is. +And it turns off that voice in your head that tells you that you know exactly how the world works. +And maybe a toothbrush helmet isn't the answer, but at least you're asking the question. +Thank you. + + +talks, TED Fellows, health, Syria, violence, health care, medicine, humanity, war, society, social change, crowdsourcing, entrepreneur +Rola Hallam +15553 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Local humanitarians are beacons of light in the darkness of war, says humanitarian aid entrepreneur and TED Fellow Rola Hallam. She's working to help responders on the ground in devastated communities like Syria, where the destruction of health care is being used as a weapon of war. One of her campaigns achieved a global first: a crowdfunded hospital. Since it opened in 2017, the aptly named Hope Hospital has treated thousands of children. "Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and to start again, risking their lives to save others," Hallam says. "We can match their courage by not looking away or turning our backs." +Rola Hallam: The doctors, nurses and aid workers rebuilding Syria +"Five hospitals in Aleppo have been bombed." That was a text message that I received on a dark winter night in November 2016. +One of them was a children's hospital run by my Syrian colleagues at the Independent Doctors Association, IDA. +It was the sixth time it had been bombed. +I watched in horror heartbreaking footage of the head nurse, Malak, in the aftermath of the bombing, grabbing premature babies out of their incubators, desperate to get them to safety, before she broke down in tears. +And I felt devastated. +Fellow humanitarians and I have spent blood, sweat and tears rebuilding hospitals so that our patients may live, not die. +And through this work, I made a discovery. +The reason that people survive in crisis is because of the remarkable work of the people in crisis themselves. +People survive because of the local doctors, nurses and aid workers who are from the very heart of the affected community, the people who dare to work where others can't or won't. +People survive because of people like Malak, who, despite sustaining a severe burns injury in the line of duty, the first thing she did when discharged from hospital was to go back caring for small children. +From the rubble of death and devastation arise the most gallant and noble human beings. +Local humanitarians are the beacons of light in the darkness of war. +Now, the data shows that Syrian organizations carry out 75 percent of the humanitarian work in Syria. +Yet, they receive 0.3 percent of the Syria aid budget. +And what's more, the same is happening across the crises of the world. +I have witnessed this reality. +It means those with the knowledge, skill and ability to respond on the front lines have little of the necessary tools, equipment and resources they need to save lives. +It means groups like IDA don't have funds to rebuild their hospital. +The humanitarian system is failing the most vulnerable communities in their darkest hours. +Now, at the time of receiving that message, I was on sabbatical from my clinical work, setting up CanDo, a start-up determined to address this imbalance and enable local responders to provide health care to their war-devastated communities. +We had devised a simple model: source trusted and impactful local groups, support their development through an accelerator program and connect them to you via our crowdfunding platform, where they can fund-raise for their health needs. +So when IDA asked for help, I decided to launch CanDo seven months early, with very little money, and many people, including myself, thought I had finally gone mad. +I wanted to do something that transformed our collective anger into something beautiful. +And that's how the People's Convoy was born. It was a global crowdfunding campaign to enable IDA to rebuild a whole new children's hospital, and, if successful, we the people would take the medical equipment all the way from London to the Syria border. +And we did it. +Thousands of people came together from across the world to achieve a global first: we built the first-ever crowdfunded hospital. +The location was carefully chosen by the local experts, IDA, where they knew it would be safe and serve the greatest number of displaced children. +IDA was so moved by people's response, they named it "Hope Hospital." It's been open for exactly one year, and they have treated over 15,000 children. +We can provide lifesaving assistance in the most volatile places on earth. +The system needs to change, and change starts with us all sharing a new humanitarian vision, one where you, global citizens with skills, expertise and resources, stand together with the local responders; one where we are all humanitarians, putting the necessary resources in the hands of those who need them most and are best placed to use them effectively and efficiently. +We need to support the people who are not only saving lives now, but it will also be them stitching their wounded communities back together, once a conflict is over to help them heal. +Local humanitarians have the courage to persist, to dust themselves off from the wreckage and to start again, risking their lives to save others. +And we can match their courage by not looking away or turning our backs, by helping those who are helping themselves, and together, save more lives. +Thank you. +Shoham Arad: Come over here, please. +Why are hospitals being bombed? +Rola Hallam: Yeah, good question. +So, Physicians for Human Rights have documented nearly 500 attacks on hospitals and over 800 medical personnel who have been killed — over 90 percent of it by the Syrian regime — and they say this is part of a systemic targeting and destruction of health care, using it as a weapon of war. +And the thing with this is that it's not just our problem, it's yours, too, and everyone's, because A, it exacerbates the refugee situation — when you have a decimated health care system, it means the next Ebola-type epicenter of disease is going to be Syria; and unfortunately, it sets a very dangerous precedent that makes all of our hospitals anywhere in the world dangerous, and that is not how it should be. +SA: So this actually isn't just about money, either, CanDo isn't just about money. +Tell me what it means to you that 5,000 people all over the world contributed 350,000 dollars to build Hope Hospital. +RH: I think the answer is in that word, it's in hope. +I think everyone who donated, they had their faith in humanity renewed, knowing there are people like IDA and those doctors, who are exhibiting the absolute best of humanity, and it was like an absolute reciprocation. +IDA and these Syrians and many people in places of conflict feel very unheard and unseen. +And I think the fact that — and they see things through the prism of government, so when they see government's not acting, they assume everyone who lives in those places doesn't care. +So when they see that display, it really does just renew everyone's faith in humanity. +SA: Thank you, Rola. +RH: Thank you. SA: Thank you for everything. + + +talks, aging, cancer, comedy, death, creativity, funny, happiness, humanity, humor, life, illness +Emily Levine +15555 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: With her signature wit and wisdom, Emily Levine meets her ultimate challenge as a comedian/philosopher: she makes dying funny. In this personal talk, she takes us on her journey to make friends with reality -- and peace with death. Life is an enormous gift, Levine says: "You enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back." +Emily Levine: How I made friends with reality +I'm going to first tell you something that in my grandmother would've elicited a five-oy alarm: "Oy-oy-oy-oy-oy." And here it is... are you ready? OK. I have stage IV lung cancer. +Oh, I know, "poor me." I don't feel that way. +I'm so OK with it. +And granted, I have certain advantages — not everybody can take so cavalier an attitude. +I don't have young children. +I have a grown daughter who's brilliant and happy and wonderful. +I don't have huge financial stress. +My cancer isn't that aggressive. +It's kind of like the Democratic leadership — +not convinced it can win. +It's basically just sitting there, waiting for Goldman Sachs to give it some money. +Oh, and the best thing of all — I have a major accomplishment under my belt. Yes. I didn't even know it until someone tweeted me a year ago. And here's what they said: "You are responsible for the pussification of the American male." +Not that I can take all the credit, but... +But what if you don't have my advantages? +The only advice I can give you is to do what I did: make friends with reality. +You couldn't have a worse relationship with reality than I did. +From the get-go, I wasn't even attracted to reality. +If they'd had Tinder when I met reality, I would have swiped left and the whole thing would have been over. +And reality and I — we don't share the same values, the same goals — +To be honest, I don't have goals; I have fantasies. +They're exactly like goals but without the hard work. +I'm not a big fan of hard work, but you know reality — it's either push, push, push, push, push through its agent, the executive brain function — one of the "yays" of dying: my executive brain function won't have me to kick around anymore. +But something happened that made me realize that reality may not be reality. +So what happened was, because I basically wanted reality to leave me alone — but I wanted to be left alone in a nice house with a Wolf range and Sub-Zero refrigerator... private yoga lessons — I ended up with a development deal at Disney. +And one day I found myself in my new office on Two Dopey Drive — +which reality thought I should be proud of... +And I'm staring at the present they sent me to celebrate my arrival — not the Lalique vase or the grand piano I've heard of other people getting, but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse +with a catalog, in case I wanted to order some more stuff that didn't jibe with my aesthetic. +And when I looked up in the catalog to see how much this three-foot-high mouse cost, here's how it was described... "Life-sized." +And that's when I knew. Reality wasn't "reality." Reality was an imposter. +So I dived into quantum physics and chaos theory to try to find actual reality, and I've just finished a movie — yes, finally finished — about all that, so I won't go into it here, and anyway, it wasn't until after we shot the movie, when I broke my leg and then it didn't heal, so then they had to do another surgery a year later, and then that took a year — two years in a wheelchair, and that's when I came into contact with actual reality: limits. +Those very limits I'd spent my whole life denying and pushing past and ignoring were real, and I had to deal with them, and they took imagination, creativity and my entire skill set. +It turned out I was great at actual reality. +I didn't just come to terms with it, I fell in love. +And I should've known, given my equally shaky relationship with the zeitgeist... I'll just say, if anyone is in the market for a Betamax — +I should have known that the moment I fell in love with reality, the rest of the country would decide to go in the opposite direction. +But I'm not here to talk about Trump or the alt-right or climate-change deniers or even the makers of this thing, which I would have called a box, except that right here, it says, "This is not a box." +They're gaslighting me. +But what I do want to talk about is a personal challenge to reality that I take personally, and I want to preface it by saying that I absolutely love science. +I have this — not a scientist myself — but an uncanny ability to understand everything about science, except the actual science — +which is math. But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me. +The string theory; the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these teeny — I call it "The Big Twang." +Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest as two things... you know? +That a photon can manifest as a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad, ideas are right and wrong. +Freud was right about penis envy and he was wrong about who has it. +Thank you. +And then there's this slight variation on that, which is reality looks like two things, but it turns out to be the interaction of those two things, like space — time, mass — energy and life and death. +So I don't understand — I simply just don't understand the mindset of people who are out to "defeat death" and "overcome death." How do you do that? +How do you defeat death without killing off life? +It doesn't make sense to me. +I also have to say, I find it incredibly ungrateful. +I mean, you're given this extraordinary gift — life — but it's as if you had asked Santa for a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and you had gotten a salad spinner instead. +You know, it's the beef — the beef with it is that it comes with an expiration date. +Death is the deal breaker. +I don't get that. +I don't understand — to me, it's disrespectful. +It's disrespectful to nature. +The idea that we're going to dominate nature, we're going to master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect — no, I don't think so. +I think if you've actually read quantum physics as I have — well, I read an email from someone who'd read it, but — +You have to understand that we don't live in Newton's clockwork universe anymore. +We live in a banana peel universe, and we won't ever be able to know everything or control everything or predict everything. +Nature is like a self-driving car. +The best we can be is like the old woman in that joke — I don't know if you've heard it. +An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light. +And the daughter doesn't want to say anything that makes it sound like, "You're too old to drive," so she didn't say anything. +And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, "Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?" And the mother says, "Oh, am I driving?" +So... and now, I'm going to take a mental leap, which is easy for me because I'm the Evel Knievel of mental leaps; my license plate says, "Cogito, ergo zoom." I hope you're willing to come with me on this, but my real problem with the mindset that is so out to defeat death is if you're anti-death, which to me translates as anti-life, which to me translates as anti-nature, it also translates to me as anti-woman, because women have long been identified with nature. +And my source on this is Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who wrote a book called "The Human Condition." And in it, she says that classically, work is associated with men. +Work is what comes out of the head; it's what we invent, it's what we create, it's how we leave our mark upon the world. +Whereas labor is associated with the body. +It's associated with the people who perform labor or undergo labor. +So to me, the mindset that denies that, that denies that we're in sync with the biorhythms, the cyclical rhythms of the universe, does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor, which is to say, people that we associate as descendants of slaves, or people who perform manual labor. +So here's how it looks from a banana-peel-universe point of view, from my mindset, which I call "Emily's universe." First of all, I am incredibly grateful for life, but I don't want to be immortal. +I have no interest in having my name live on after me. +In fact, I don't want it to, because it's been my observation that no matter how nice and how brilliant or how talented you are, 50 years after you die, they turn on you. +And I have actual proof of that. +A headline from the Los Angeles Times: "Anne Frank: Not so nice after all." +Plus, I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe. +That's what's so extraordinary about life: it's a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. "I" am just a collection of particles that is arranged into this pattern, then will decompose and be available, all of its constituent parts, to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. +To me, that is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be part of that process. +You know, I look at death now from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at it as part of the gift economy. +You're given this enormous gift, life, you enrich it as best you can, and then you give it back. +And, you know, Auntie Mame said, "Life is a banquet" — well, I've eaten my fill. +I have had an enormous appetite for life, I've consumed life, but in death, I'm going to be consumed. +I'm going into the ground just the way I am, and there, I invite every microbe and detritus-er and decomposer to have their fill. I think they'll find me delicious. +I do. +So the best thing about my attitude, I think, is that it's real. +You can see it. +You can observe it. It actually happens. Well, maybe not my enriching the gift, I don't know about that — but my life has certainly been enriched by other people. +By TED, which introduced me to a whole network of people who have enriched my life, including Tricia McGillis, my website designer, who's working with my wonderful daughter to take my website and turn it into something where all I have to do is write a blog. +I don't have to use the executive brain function... Ha, ha, ha, I win! +And I am so grateful to you. +I don't want to say "the audience," because I don't really see it as we're two separate things. +I think of it in terms of quantum physics, again. +And, you know, quantum physicists are not exactly sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle. +There are different theories — the collapse of the wave function, decoherence — but they're all agreed on one thing: that reality comes into being through an interaction. (Voice breaking) So do you. +And every audience I've ever had, past and present. +Thank you so much for making my life real. +Thank you. + + +talks, algorithm, AI, biotech, democracy, future, government, history, humanity, leadership, politics, social change, society, technology +Yuval Noah Harari +16159 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Noah Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism -- and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy. Appearing as a hologram live from Tel Aviv, Harari warns that the greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient and capable of control. "The enemies of liberal democracy hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy," Harari says. "It is the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure they don't become weapons." (Followed by a brief conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson) +Yuval Noah Harari: Why fascism is so tempting -- and how your data could power it +Hello, everyone. It's a bit funny, because I did write that humans will become digital, but I didn't think it will happen so fast and that it will happen to me. +But here I am, as a digital avatar, and here you are, so let's start. +And let's start with a question. +How many fascists are there in the audience today? +Well, it's a bit difficult to say, because we've forgotten what fascism is. +People now use the term "fascist" as a kind of general-purpose abuse. Or they confuse fascism with nationalism. +So let's take a few minutes to clarify what fascism actually is, and how it is different from nationalism. +The milder forms of nationalism have been among the most benevolent of human creations. +Nations are communities of millions of strangers who don't really know each other. +For example, I don't know the eight million people who share my Israeli citizenship. +But thanks to nationalism, we can all care about one another and cooperate effectively. +This is very good. +Some people, like John Lennon, imagine that without nationalism, the world will be a peaceful paradise. +But far more likely, without nationalism, we would have been living in tribal chaos. +If you look today at the most prosperous and peaceful countries in the world, countries like Sweden and Switzerland and Japan, you will see that they have a very strong sense of nationalism. +In contrast, countries that lack a strong sense of nationalism, like Congo and Somalia and Afghanistan, tend to be violent and poor. +So what is fascism, and how is it different from nationalism? +Well, nationalism tells me that my nation is unique, and that I have special obligations towards my nation. +Fascism, in contrast, tells me that my nation is supreme, and that I have exclusive obligations towards it. +I don't need to care about anybody or anything other than my nation. +Usually, of course, people have many identities and loyalties to different groups. +For example, I can be a good patriot, loyal to my country, and at the same time, be loyal to my family, my neighborhood, my profession, humankind as a whole, truth and beauty. +Of course, when I have different identities and loyalties, it sometimes creates conflicts and complications. +But, well, who ever told you that life was easy? Life is complicated. Deal with it. +Fascism is what happens when people try to ignore the complications and to make life too easy for themselves. +Fascism denies all identities except the national identity and insists that I have obligations only towards my nation. +If my nation demands that I sacrifice my family, then I will sacrifice my family. +If the nation demands that I kill millions of people, then I will kill millions of people. +And if my nation demands that I betray truth and beauty, then I should betray truth and beauty. +For example, how does a fascist evaluate art? +How does a fascist decide whether a movie is a good movie or a bad movie? +Well, it's very, very, very simple. +There is really just one yardstick: if the movie serves the interests of the nation, it's a good movie; if the movie doesn't serve the interests of the nation, it's a bad movie. That's it. Similarly, how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school? +There is just one yardstick: you teach the kids whatever serves the interests of the nation. +The truth doesn't matter at all. +Now, the horrors of the Second World War and of the Holocaust remind us of the terrible consequences of this way of thinking. +But usually, when we talk about the ills of fascism, we do so in an ineffective way, because we tend to depict fascism as a hideous monster, without really explaining what was so seductive about it. +It's a bit like these Hollywood movies that depict the bad guys — Voldemort or Sauron or Darth Vader — as ugly and mean and cruel. +They're cruel even to their own supporters. +When I see these movies, I never understand — why would anybody be tempted to follow a disgusting creep like Voldemort? +The problem with evil is that in real life, evil doesn't necessarily look ugly. +It can look very beautiful. +This is something that Christianity knew very well, which is why in Christian art, as [opposed to] Hollywood, Satan is usually depicted as a gorgeous hunk. +This is why it's so difficult to resist the temptations of Satan, and why it is also difficult to resist the temptations of fascism. +Fascism makes people see themselves as belonging to the most beautiful and most important thing in the world — the nation. +And then people think, "Well, they taught us that fascism is ugly. +But when I look in the mirror, I see something very beautiful, so I can't be a fascist, right? "Wrong. +That's the problem with fascism. +When you look in the fascist mirror, you see yourself as far more beautiful than you really are. +In the 1930s, when Germans looked in the fascist mirror, they saw Germany as the most beautiful thing in the world. +If today, Russians look in the fascist mirror, they will see Russia as the most beautiful thing in the world. +And if Israelis look in the fascist mirror, they will see Israel as the most beautiful thing in the world. +This does not mean that we are now facing a rerun of the 1930s. +Fascism and dictatorships might come back, but they will come back in a new form, a form which is much more relevant to the new technological realities of the 21st century. +In ancient times, land was the most important asset in the world. +Politics, therefore, was the struggle to control land. +And dictatorship meant that all the land was owned by a single ruler or by a small oligarch. +And in the modern age, machines became more important than land. +Politics became the struggle to control the machines. +And dictatorship meant that too many of the machines became concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. +Now data is replacing both land and machines as the most important asset. +Politics becomes the struggle to control the flows of data. +And dictatorship now means that too much data is being concentrated in the hands of the government or of a small elite. +The greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is that the revolution in information technology will make dictatorships more efficient than democracies. +In the 20th century, democracy and capitalism defeated fascism and communism because democracy was better at processing data and making decisions. +Given 20th-century technology, it was simply inefficient to try and concentrate too much data and too much power in one place. +But it is not a law of nature that centralized data processing is always less efficient than distributed data processing. +With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it might become feasible to process enormous amounts of information very efficiently in one place, to take all the decisions in one place, and then centralized data processing will be more efficient than distributed data processing. +And then the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — their attempt to concentrate all the information in one place — it will become their greatest advantage. +Another technological danger that threatens the future of democracy is the merger of information technology with biotechnology, which might result in the creation of algorithms that know me better than I know myself. +And once you have such algorithms, an external system, like the government, cannot just predict my decisions, it can also manipulate my feelings, my emotions. +A dictator may not be able to provide me with good health care, but he will be able to make me love him and to make me hate the opposition. +Democracy will find it difficult to survive such a development because, in the end, democracy is not based on human rationality; it's based on human feelings. +During elections and referendums, you're not being asked, "What do you think?" You're actually being asked, "How do you feel?" And if somebody can manipulate your emotions effectively, democracy will become an emotional puppet show. +So what can we do to prevent the return of fascism and the rise of new dictatorships? +The number one question that we face is: Who controls the data? +If you are an engineer, then find ways to prevent too much data from being concentrated in too few hands. +And find ways to make sure the distributed data processing is at least as efficient as centralized data processing. +This will be the best safeguard for democracy. +As for the rest of us who are not engineers, the number one question facing us is how not to allow ourselves to be manipulated by those who control the data. +The enemies of liberal democracy, they have a method. +They hack our feelings. +Not our emails, not our bank accounts — they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within. +This is actually a method that Silicon Valley pioneered in order to sell us products. +But now, the enemies of democracy are using this very method to sell us fear and hate and vanity. +They cannot create these feelings out of nothing. +So they get to know our own preexisting weaknesses. +And then use them against us. +And it is therefore the responsibility of all of us to get to know our weaknesses and make sure that they do not become a weapon in the hands of the enemies of democracy. +Getting to know our own weaknesses will also help us to avoid the trap of the fascist mirror. +As we explained earlier, fascism exploits our vanity. +It makes us see ourselves as far more beautiful than we really are. +This is the seduction. +But if you really know yourself, you will not fall for this kind of flattery. +If somebody puts a mirror in front of your eyes that hides all your ugly bits and makes you see yourself as far more beautiful and far more important than you really are, just break that mirror. +Thank you. +Chris Anderson: Yuval, thank you. Goodness me. It's so nice to see you again. +So, if I understand you right, you're alerting us to two big dangers here. +One is the possible resurgence of a seductive form of fascism, but close to that, dictatorships that may not exactly be fascistic, but control all the data. +I wonder if there's a third concern that some people here have already expressed, which is where, not governments, but big corporations control all our data. +What do you call that, and how worried should we be about that? +Yuval Noah Harari: Well, in the end, there isn't such a big difference between the corporations and the governments, because, as I said, the questions is: Who controls the data? +This is the real government. +If you call it a corporation or a government — if it's a corporation and it really controls the data, this is our real government. +So the difference is more apparent than real. +CA: But somehow, at least with corporations, you can imagine market mechanisms where they can be taken down. +I mean, if consumers just decide that the company is no longer operating in their interest, it does open the door to another market. +It seems easier to imagine that than, say, citizens rising up and taking down a government that is in control of everything. +YNH: Well, we are not there yet, but again, if a corporation really knows you better than you know yourself — at least that it can manipulate your own deepest emotions and desires, and you won't even realize — you will think this is your authentic self. +So in theory, yes, in theory, you can rise against a corporation, just as, in theory, you can rise against a dictatorship. +But in practice, it is extremely difficult. +CA: So in "Homo Deus," you argue that this would be the century when humans kind of became gods, either through development of artificial intelligence or through genetic engineering. +Has this prospect of political system shift, collapse impacted your view on that possibility? +YNH: Well, I think it makes it even more likely, and more likely that it will happen faster, because in times of crisis, people are willing to take risks that they wouldn't otherwise take. +And people are willing to try all kinds of high-risk, high-gain technologies. +So these kinds of crises might serve the same function as the two world wars in the 20th century. +The two world wars greatly accelerated the development of new and dangerous technologies. +And the same thing might happen in the 21st century. +I mean, you need to be a little crazy to run too fast, let's say, with genetic engineering. +But now you have more and more crazy people in charge of different countries in the world, so the chances are getting higher, not lower. +CA: So, putting it all together, Yuval, you've got this unique vision. +Roll the clock forward 30 years. +What's your guess — does humanity just somehow scrape through, look back and say, "Wow, that was a close thing. +We did it! "Or not? +YNH: So far, we've managed to overcome all the previous crises. +And especially if you look at liberal democracy and you think things are bad now, just remember how much worse things looked in 1938 or in 1968. +So this is really nothing, this is just a small crisis. +But you can never know, because, as a historian, I know that you should never underestimate human stupidity. +CA: Yuval, it's been an absolute delight to have you with us. +Thank you for making the virtual trip. +Have a great evening there in Tel Aviv. Yuval Harari! +YNH: Thank you very much. + + +talks, bionics, design, future, human body, humanity, prosthetics, nature, science, technology +Hugh Herr +17238 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Humans will soon have new bodies that forever blur the line between the natural and synthetic worlds, says bionics designer Hugh Herr. In an unforgettable talk, he details "NeuroEmbodied Design," a methodology for creating cyborg function that he's developing at the MIT Media Lab, and shows us a future where we've augmented our bodies in a way that will redefine human potential -- and, maybe, turn us into superheroes. "During the twilight years of this century, I believe humans will be unrecognizable in morphology and dynamics from what we are today," Herr says. "Humanity will take flight and soar." +Hugh Herr: How we'll become cyborgs and extend human potential +I'm an MIT professor, but I do not design buildings or computer systems. +Rather, I build body parts, bionic legs that augment human walking and running. +In 1982, I was in a mountain-climbing accident, and both of my legs had to be amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite. +Here, you can see my legs: 24 sensors, six microprocessors and muscle-tendon-like actuators. +I'm basically a bunch of nuts and bolts from the knee down. +But with this advanced bionic technology, I can skip, dance and run. +Thank you. +I'm a bionic man, but I'm not yet a cyborg. +When I think about moving my legs, neural signals from my central nervous system pass through my nerves and activate muscles within my residual limbs. +Artificial electrodes sense these signals, and small computers in the bionic limb decode my nerve pulses into my intended movement patterns. +Stated simply, when I think about moving, that command is communicated to the synthetic part of my body. +However, those computers can't input information into my nervous system. +When I touch and move my synthetic limbs, I do not experience normal touch and movement sensations. +If I were a cyborg and could feel my legs via small computers inputting information into my nervous system, it would fundamentally change, I believe, my relationship to my synthetic body. +Today, I can't feel my legs, and because of that, my legs are separate tools from my mind and my body. +They're not part of me. +I believe that if I were a cyborg and could feel my legs, they would become part of me, part of self. +At MIT, we're thinking about NeuroEmbodied Design. +In this design process, the designer designs human flesh and bone, the biological body itself, along with synthetics to enhance the bidirectional communication between the nervous system and the built world. +NeuroEmbodied Design is a methodology to create cyborg function. +In this design process, designers contemplate a future in which technology no longer compromises separate, lifeless tools from our minds and our bodies, a future in which technology has been carefully integrated within our nature, a world in which what is biological and what is not, what is human and what is not, what is nature and what is not will be forever blurred. +That future will provide humanity new bodies. +NeuroEmbodied Design will extend our nervous systems into the synthetic world, and the synthetic world into us, fundamentally changing who we are. +By designing the biological body to better communicate with the built design world, humanity will end disability in this 21st century and establish the scientific and technological basis for human augmentation, extending human capability beyond innate, physiological levels, cognitively, emotionally and physically. +There are many ways in which to build new bodies across scale, from the biomolecular to the scale of tissues and organs. +Today, I want to talk about one area of NeuroEmbodied Design, in which the body's tissues are manipulated and sculpted using surgical and regenerative processes. +The current amputation paradigm hasn't changed fundamentally since the US Civil War and has grown obsolete in light of dramatic advancements in actuators, control systems and neural interfacing technologies. +A major deficiency is the lack of dynamic muscle interactions for control and proprioception. +What is proprioception? When you flex your ankle, muscles in the front of your leg contract, simultaneously stretching muscles in the back of your leg. +The opposite happens when you extend your ankle. +Here, muscles in the back of your leg contract, stretching muscles in the front. +When these muscles flex and extend, biological sensors within the muscle tendons send information through nerves to the brain. +This is how we're able to feel where our feet are without seeing them with our eyes. +The current amputation paradigm breaks these dynamic muscle relationships, and in so doing eliminates normal proprioceptive sensations. +Consequently, a standard artificial limb cannot feed back information into the nervous system about where the prosthesis is in space. +The patient therefore cannot sense and feel the positions and movements of the prosthetic joint without seeing it with their eyes. +My legs were amputated using this Civil War-era methodology. +I can feel my feet, I can feel them right now as a phantom awareness. +But when I try to move them, I cannot. +It feels like they're stuck inside rigid ski boots. +To solve these problems, at MIT, we invented the agonist-antagonist myoneural interface, or AMI, for short. +The AMI is a method to connect nerves within the residuum to an external, bionic prosthesis. +How is the AMI designed, and how does it work? +The AMI comprises two muscles that are surgically connected, an agonist linked to an antagonist. +When the agonist contracts upon electrical activation, it stretches the antagonist. +This muscle dynamic interaction causes biological sensors within the muscle tendon to send information through the nerve to the central nervous system, relating information on the muscle tendon's length, speed and force. +This is how muscle tendon proprioception works, and it's the primary way we, as humans, can feel and sense the positions, movements and forces on our limbs. +When a limb is amputated, the surgeon connects these opposing muscles within the residuum to create an AMI. +Now, multiple AMI constructs can be created for the control and sensation of multiple prosthetic joints. +Artificial electrodes are then placed on each AMI muscle, and small computers within the bionic limb decode those signals to control powerful motors on the bionic limb. +When the bionic limb moves, the AMI muscles move back and forth, sending signals through the nerve to the brain, enabling a person wearing the prosthesis to experience natural sensations of positions and movements of the prosthesis. +Can these tissue-design principles be used in an actual human being? +A few years ago, my good friend Jim Ewing — of 34 years — reached out to me for help. +Jim was in an a terrible climbing accident. +He fell 50 feet in the Cayman Islands when his rope failed to catch him hitting the ground's surface. +He suffered many, many injuries: punctured lungs and many broken bones. +After his accident, he dreamed of returning to his chosen sport of mountain climbing, but how might this be possible? +The answer was Team Cyborg, a team of surgeons, scientists and engineers assembled at MIT to rebuild Jim back to his former climbing prowess. +Team member Dr. Matthew Carty amputated Jim's badly damaged leg at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, using the AMI surgical procedure. +Tendon pulleys were created and attached to Jim's tibia bone to reconnect the opposing muscles. +The AMI procedure reestablished the neural link between Jim's ankle-foot muscles and his brain. +When Jim moves his phantom limb, the reconnected muscles move in dynamic pairs, causing signals of proprioception to pass through nerves to the brain, so Jim experiences normal sensations with ankle-foot positions and movements, even when blindfolded. +Here's Jim at the MIT laboratory after his surgeries. +We electrically linked Jim's AMI muscles, via the electrodes, to a bionic limb, and Jim quickly learned how to move the bionic limb in four distinct ankle-foot movement directions. +We were excited by these results, but then Jim stood up, and what occurred was truly remarkable. +All the natural biomechanics mediated by the central nervous system emerged via the synthetic limb as an involuntary, reflexive action. +All the intricacies of foot placement during stair ascent — +emerged before our eyes. Here's Jim descending steps, reaching with his bionic toe to the next stair tread, automatically exhibiting natural motions without him even trying to move his limb. +Because Jim's central nervous system is receiving the proprioceptive signals, it knows exactly how to control the synthetic limb in a natural way. +Now, Jim moves and behaves as if the synthetic limb is part of him. +For example, one day in the lab, he accidentally stepped on a roll of electrical tape. +Now, what do you do when something's stuck to your shoe? +You don't reach down like this; it's way too awkward. +Instead, you shake it off, and that's exactly what Jim did after being neurally connected to the limb for just a few hours. +What was most interesting to me is what Jim was telling us he was experiencing. +He said, "The robot became part of me." +Jim Ewing: The morning after the first time I was attached to the robot, my daughter came downstairs and asked me how it felt to be a cyborg, and my answer was that I didn't feel like a cyborg. +I felt like I had my leg, and it wasn't that I was attached to the robot so much as the robot was attached to me, and the robot became part of me. +It became my leg pretty quickly. +Hugh Herr: Thank you. +By connecting Jim's nervous system bidirectionally to his synthetic limb, neurological embodiment was achieved. +I hypothesized that because Jim can think and move his synthetic limb, and because he can feel those movements within his nervous system, the prosthesis is no longer a separate tool, but an integral part of Jim, an integral part of his body. +Because of this neurological embodiment, Jim doesn't feel like a cyborg. +He feels like he just has his leg back, that he has his body back. +Now I'm often asked when I'm going to be neurally linked to my synthetic limbs bidirectionally, when I'm going to become a cyborg. +The truth is, I'm hesitant to become a cyborg. +Before my legs were amputated, I was a terrible student. +I got D's and often F's in school. +Then, after my limbs were amputated, I suddenly became an MIT professor. +Now I'm worried that once I'm neurally connected to my limbs once again, my brain will remap back to its not-so-bright self. +But you know what, that's OK, because at MIT, I already have tenure. +I believe the reach of NeuroEmbodied Design will extend far beyond limb replacement and will carry humanity into realms that fundamentally redefine human potential. +In this 21st century, designers will extend the nervous system into powerfully strong exoskeletons that humans can control and feel with their minds. +Muscles within the body can be reconfigured for the control of powerful motors, and to feel and sense exoskeletal movements, augmenting humans' strength, jumping height and running speed. +In this 21st century, I believe humans will become superheroes. +Humans may also extend their bodies into non-anthropomorphic structures, such as wings, controlling and feeling each wing movement within the nervous system. +Leonardo da Vinci said, "When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return." During the twilight years of this century, I believe humans will be unrecognizable in morphology and dynamics from what we are today. +Humanity will take flight and soar. +Jim Ewing fell to earth and was badly broken, but his eyes turned skyward, where he always longed to return. +After his accident, he not only dreamed to walk again, but also to return to his chosen sport of mountain climbing. +At MIT, Team Cyborg built Jim a specialized limb for the vertical world, a brain-controlled leg with full position and movement sensations. +Using this technology, Jim returned to the Cayman Islands, the site of his accident, rebuilt as a cyborg to climb skyward once again. +(Crashing waves) +Thank you. +Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Ewing, the first cyborg rock climber. + + +talks, refugees, mental health, humanity, children, communication, community, compassion, emotions, empathy, global issues, education, war, society, social change, Syria, TED Fellows +Essam Daod +18394 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: The global refugee crisis is a mental health catastrophe, leaving millions in need of psychological support to overcome the traumas of dislocation and conflict. To undo the damage, child psychiatrist and TED Fellow Essam Daod has been working in camps, rescue boats and the shorelines of Greece and the Mediterranean Sea to help refugees (a quarter of which are children) reframe their experiences through short, powerful psychological interventions. "We can all do something to prevent this mental health catastrophe," Daod says. "We need to acknowledge that first aid is not just needed for the body, but it has also to include the mind, the soul." +Essam Daod: How we can bring mental health support to refugees +For the last two and a half years, I'm one of the few, if not the only, child psychiatrist operating in refugee camps, shorelines and rescue boats in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea. +And I can say, with great confidence, that we are witnessing a mental-health catastrophe that will affect most of us, and it will change our world. +I live in Haifa, but nowadays, I spend most of my time abroad. +During my time on the Greek island of Lesbos and on the rescue boats in the Mediterranean, thousands of refugee boats arrived to the shoreline, crowded with more than 1.5 million refugees. +One-fourth of them are children, fleeing war and hardship. +Each boat carries different sufferings and traumas from Syria, Iraq, Afganistan and different countries in Africa. +In the last three years alone, more than 12,000 refugees lost their lives. +And hundreds of thousands lost their souls and their mental health due to this cruel and traumatic experience. +I want to tell you about Omar, a five-year-old Syrian refugee boy who arrived to the shore on Lesbos on a crowded rubber boat. +Crying, frightened, unable to understand what's happening to him, he was right on the verge of developing a new trauma. +I knew right away that this was a golden hour, a short period of time in which I could change his story, I could change the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life. +I could reframe his memories. +I quickly held out my hands and said to his shaking mother in Arabic, +"Ateeni elwalad o khudi nafas." "Give me the boy, and take a breath." His mother gave him to me. +Omar looked at me with scared, tearful eyes and said, "Ammo (uncle in Arabic), shu hada?" "What is this?" as he pointed out to the police helicopter hovering above us. +"It's a helicopter! +It's here to photograph you with big cameras, because only the great and the powerful heroes, like you, Omar, can cross the sea. " +Omar looked at me, stopped crying and asked me, "Ana batal?" "I'm a hero?" +I talked to Omar for 15 minutes. +And I gave his parents some guidance to follow. +This short psychological intervention decreases the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues in the future, preparing Omar to get an education, join the workforce, raise a family and beyond. How? By stimulating the good memories that will be stored in the amygdala, the emotional storage of the human brain. +These memories will fight the traumatic ones, if they are reactivated in the future. +To Omar, the smell of the sea will not just remind him of his traumatic journey from Syria. +Because to Omar, this story is now a story of bravery. +This is the power of the golden hour, which can reframe the trauma and establish a new narrative. +But Omar is only one out of more than 350,000 children without the proper mental health support in this crisis alone. +Three hundred and fifty thousand children and me. +We need mental health professionals to join rescue teams during times of active crisis. +This is why my wife and I and friends co-founded "Humanity Crew." One of the few aid organizations in the world that specializes in providing psychosocial aid and first-response mental health interventions to refugees and displaced populations. +To provide them with a suitable intervention, we create the four-step approach, a psychosocial work plan that follows the refugees on each step of their journey. +Starting inside the sea, on the rescue boats, as mental health lifeguards. +Later in the camps, hospitals and through our online clinic that breaks down borders and overcomes languages. +And ending in the asylum countries, helping them integrate. +Since our first mission in 2015, "Humanity Crew" had 194 delegations of qualified, trained volunteers and therapists. +We have provided 26,000 hours of mental health support to over 10,000 refugees. +We can all do something to prevent this mental health catastrophe. +We need to acknowledge that first aid is not just needed for the body, but it has also to include the mind, the soul. +The impact on the soul is hardly visible, but the damage can be there for life. +Let's not forget that what distinguishes us humans from machines is the beautiful and the delicate soul within us. +Let's try harder to save more Omars. +Thank you. + + +talks, art, creativity, design, culture, empathy, humor, beauty, communication, humanity +Christoph Niemann +20089 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Without realizing it, we're fluent in the language of pictures, says illustrator Christoph Niemann. In a charming talk packed with witty, whimsical drawings, Niemann takes us on a hilarious visual tour that shows how artists tap into our emotions and minds -- all without words. +Christoph Niemann: You are fluent in this language (and don't even know it) +I'm an artist. Being an artist is the greatest job there is. +And I really pity each and every one of you who has to spend your days discovering new galaxies or saving humanity from global warming. +But being an artist is also a daunting job. +I spend every day, from nine to six, doing this. +I even started a side career that consists entirely of complaining about the difficulty of the creative process. +But today, I don't want to talk about what makes my life difficult. +I want to talk about what makes it easy. +And that is you — and the fact that you are fluent in a language that you're probably not even aware of. +You're fluent in the language of reading images. +Deciphering an image like that takes quite a bit of an intellectual effort. +But nobody ever taught you how this works, you just know it. +College, shopping, music. +What makes a language powerful is that you can take a very complex idea and communicate it in a very simple, efficient form. +These images represent exactly the same ideas. +But when you look, for example, at the college hat, you know that this doesn't represent the accessory you wear on your head when you're being handed your diploma, but rather the whole idea of college. +Now, what drawings can do is they cannot only communicate images, they can even evoke emotions. +Let's say you get to an unfamiliar place and you see this. +You feel happiness and relief. +Or a slight sense of unease or maybe downright panic. +Or blissful peace and quiet. +But visuals, they're of course more than just graphic icons. +You know, if I want to tell the story of modern-day struggle, I would start with the armrest between two airplane seats and two sets of elbows fighting. +What I love there is this universal law that, you know, you have 30 seconds to fight it out and once it's yours, you get to keep it for the rest of the flight. +Now, commercial flight is full of these images. +If I want to illustrate the idea of discomfort, nothing better than these neck pillows. +They're designed to make you more comfortable — +except they don't. +So I never sleep on airplanes. +What I do occasionally is I fall into a sort of painful coma. +And when I wake up from that, I have the most terrible taste in my mouth. +It's a taste that's so bad, it cannot be described with words, but it can be drawn. +The thing is, you know, I love sleeping. +And when I sleep, I really prefer to do it while spooning. +I've been spooning on almost a pro level for close to 20 years, but in all this time, I've never figured out what to do with that bottom arm. +And the only thing — the only thing that makes sleeping even more complicated than trying to do it on an airplane is when you have small children. They show up at your bed at around 4am with some bogus excuse of, "I had a bad dream." +And then, of course you feel sorry for them, they're your kids, so you let them into your bed. +And I have to admit, at the beginning, they're really cute and warm and snugly. +The minute you fall back asleep, they inexplicably — +start rotating. +We like to call this the helicopter mode. +Now, the deeper something is etched into your consciousness, the fewer details we need to have an emotional reaction. +So why does an image like this work? +It works, because we as readers are incredibly good at filling in the blanks. +Now, when you draw, there's this concept of negative space. +And the idea is, that instead of drawing the actual object, you draw the space around it. +So the bowls in this drawing are empty. +But the black ink prompts your brain to project food into a void. +What we see here is not a owl flying. +What we actually see is a pair of AA batteries standing on a nonsensical drawing, and I animate the scene by moving my desk lamp up and down. +The image really only exists in your mind. +So, how much information do we need to trigger such an image? +My goal as an artist is to use the smallest amount possible. +I try to achieve a level of simplicity where, if you were to take away one more element, the whole concept would just collapse. +And that's why my personal favorite tool as an artist is abstraction. +I've come up with this system which I call the abstract-o-meter, and this is how it works. +So you take a symbol, any symbol, for example the heart and the arrow, which most of us would read as the symbol for love, and I'm an artist, so I can draw this in any given degree of realism or abstraction. +Now, if I go too realistic on it, it just grosses everybody out. +If I go too far on the other side and do very abstract, nobody has any idea what they're looking at. +So I have to find the perfect place on that scale, in this case it's somewhere in the middle. +Now, once we have reduced an image to a more simple form, all sorts of new connections become possible. +And that allows for totally new angles in storytelling. +And so, what I like to do is, I like to take images from really remote cultural areas and bring them together. Now, with more daring references — +I can have more fun. +But of course, I know that eventually things become so obscure that I start losing some of you. +So as a designer, it's absolutely key to have a good understanding of the visual and cultural vocabulary of your audience. +With this image here, a comment on the Olympics in Athens, I assumed that the reader of the "New Yorker" would have some rudimentary idea of Greek art. +If you don't, the image doesn't work. +But if you do, you might even appreciate the small detail, like the beer-can pattern here on the bottom of the vase. +A recurring discussion I have with magazine editors, who are usually word people, is that their audience, you, are much better at making radical leaps with images than they're being given credit for. +And the only thing I find frustrating is that they often seem to push me towards a small set of really tired visual clichés that are considered safe. +You know, it's the businessman climbing up a ladder, and then the ladder moves, morphs into a stock market graph, and anything with dollar signs; that's always good. +If there are editorial decision makers here in the audience, I want to give you a piece of advice. +Every time a drawing like this is published, a baby panda will die. +Literally. +When is a visual cliché good or bad? +It's a fine line. +And it really depends on the story. +In 2011, during the earthquake and the tsunami in Japan, I was thinking of a cover. +And I went through the classic symbols: the Japanese flag, "The Great Wave" by Hokusai, one of the greatest drawings ever. +And then the story changed when the situation at the power plant in Fukushima got out of hand. +And I remember these TV images of the workers in hazmat suits, just walking through the site, and what struck me was how quiet and serene it was. +And so I wanted to create an image of a silent catastrophe. +And that's the image I came up with. +Thank you. +What I want to do is create an aha moment, for you, for the reader. +And unfortunately, that does not mean that I have an aha moment when I create these images. +I never sit at my desk with the proverbial light bulb going off in my head. +What it takes is actually a very slow, unsexy process of minimal design decisions that then, when I'm lucky, lead to a good idea. +So one day, I'm on a train, and I'm trying to decode the graphic rules for drops on a window. +And eventually I realize, "Oh, it's the background blurry upside-down, contained in a sharp image." And I thought, wow, that's really cool, and I have absolutely no idea what to do with that. +A while later, I'm back in New York, and I draw this image of being stuck on the Brooklyn bridge in a traffic jam. +It's really annoying, but also kind of poetic. +And only later I realized, I can take both of these ideas and put them together in this idea. +And what I want to do is not show a realistic scene. +But, maybe like poetry, make you aware that you already had this image with you, but only now I've unearthed it and made you realize that you were carrying it with you all along. +But like poetry, this is a very delicate process that is neither efficient nor scalable, I think. +And maybe the most important skill for an artist is really empathy. +You need craft and you need — +you need creativity — +thank you — to come up with an image like that. +But then you need to step back and look at what you've done from the perspective of the reader. +I've tried to become a better artist by becoming a better observer of images. +And for that, I started an exercise for myself which I call Sunday sketching, which meant, on a Sunday, I would take a random object I found around the house and try to see if that object could trigger an idea that had nothing to do with the original purpose of that item. +And it usually just means I'm blank for a long while. +And the only trick that eventually works is if I open my mind and run through every image I have stored up there, and see if something clicks. +And if it does, just add a few lines of ink to connect — to preserve this very short moment of inspiration. +And the great lesson there was that the real magic doesn't happen on paper. It happens in the mind of the viewer. +When your expectations and your knowledge clash with my artistic intentions. +Your interaction with an image, your ability to read, question, be bothered or bored or inspired by an image is as important as my artistic contribution. +Because that's what turns an artistic statement really, into a creative dialogue. +And so, your skill at reading images is not only amazing, it is what makes my art possible. +And for that, I thank you very much. +Thank you. + + +talks, poetry, performance, performance art, personal growth, art +Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes +20172 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Writer and activist Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes lights up the stage with a powerful poem about hope, truth and the space between who we are and who we want to be. +Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes: "Chasms" +There are some chasms so deep and so wide, we find it hard to imagine how we'll ever make it to the other side. +That space between who we are and who we want to be, the gaps between our high ideals and our base realities. +The distance between what we say and what we really mean. +The raging river that flows between what actually happened and our convenient memories. +The lies we tell ourselves are lakes, overflowing their banks, flooding our speech with waters, caustic and rank. +The only bridge is the truth, passing through me and you, as we look one another eye to eye. +But so often, that look is filled with our hesitations, and we can't help but glance to the side. +See, we've long ago let go of the language with which we describe our softer parts. +We learn early that those with softer hearts suffer. +So we allow lean emotion to reign, never noticing that only strain has been the fruit of our restraints. +We haven't escaped pain. +And our battle scars are far from faint. +Yet and still, despite our desire and willingness to heal, we often find ourselves fighting hard in the paint, holding onto false images of everything we ain't. +So while our dream coincide, our fears collide. +And we want to know one another, but think we can't. +The gulf between empathy and equity is as unfathomable as the fissures that line our collective integrity. +And we spend eternal eternities trying to translate that into virtue. +Perhaps you have met one or two of the virtuous on your path. +They are only very few, and I know that I have, from time to time, mistaken pretenders for real, yet still make room for the possibility that it's I who's been pretending. +Please, bear with me, I'm still mending, but I'm no longer bending to the will of my injuries, nor my injurers. +I much prefer to stretch my arms like Nüt until I become the sky. +I'd rather stretch my tongue with truth, our bridge to cross when we look one another in the eye. +But the tongue, like the heart, gets tired. +The weak make it hard for the strong to stay inspired, like the lost prevent the found from escaping the mire, and the degraded stop the enlightened from taking us higher. +But no matter what you hear from the mouths of these liars, we are one people with one destiny and the common enemy, that's why it really stresses me to see our hearts so tattered, our minds so scattered, our egos so easily flattered. +We're enslaved, yet think of our shackles as gifts. +Rather than resist our masters, we let them widen our rifts, like mindless, material junkies, we seek that which lowers, not lifts. +But somewhere in our midst, there's been a paradigm shift. +Justice is getting restless in its chains. +Our youth find it useless to separate their souls from their brains, their truth is ingrained, their integrity insustained. +Let me call your attention to those who serve as examples. +Those who daily give their all, but their reserves are still ample. +Those who battle friend and foe, yet their hope is never trampled, they make music, never sample, and the world's ugly could never cancel the fullness and the sweetness of their composition. +Nor the unadulterated truth of their mission. +It's time we shut our mouths and listen. Close our eyes and pray for the humility and the guidance to follow them to the way. Thank you. +Thank you. +Thank you all so much, you have no idea how fulfilling and energizing that is. +For the past three years, I've had the privilege of codesigning with my neighbors a space in New Orleans known as Under the Bridge. +In 1966, Interstate 10 landed on the Tremé neighborhood, displacing 326 black-owned businesses, over 300 live oak trees, effectively destroying the region's most successful black commercial district, disrupting intergenerational wealth and truly unraveling the fabric of the nation's oldest African American neighborhood. +Today, after 45 years of community advocacy, after 500 hours of community engagement and 80 hours of community design, we are so excited that in 2018, after capturing the voices of thousands of residents and the support of our local, federal and philanthropic partners, as the city celebrates 300 years of transforming the world, we will get to transform 19 blocks under the Interstate into community space, into black-owned businesses, in the form of the Claiborne Corridor Cultural Innovation District. +We will be bridging time, we will bridge memory, we will bridge disparity and injustice, and we can't wait to see you all on the other side. +Thank you. + + +talks, AI, media, future, invention, innovation, technology, machine learning, society, computers, intelligence +Kai-Fu Lee +20368 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: AI is massively transforming our world, but there's one thing it cannot do: love. In a visionary talk, computer scientist Kai-Fu Lee details how the US and China are driving a deep learning revolution -- and shares a blueprint for how humans can thrive in the age of AI by harnessing compassion and creativity. "AI is serendipity," Lee says. "It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human." +Kai-Fu Lee: How AI can save our humanity +I'm going to talk about how AI and mankind can coexist, but first, we have to rethink about our human values. +So let me first make a confession about my errors in my values. +It was 11 o'clock, December 16, 1991. +I was about to become a father for the first time. +My wife, Shen-Ling, lay in the hospital bed going through a very difficult 12-hour labor. +I sat by her bedside but looked anxiously at my watch, and I knew something that she didn't. +I knew that if in one hour, our child didn't come, I was going to leave her there and go back to work and make a presentation about AI to my boss, Apple's CEO. +Fortunately, my daughter was born at 11: 30 — +sparing me from doing the unthinkable, and to this day, I am so sorry for letting my work ethic take precedence over love for my family. +My AI talk, however, went off brilliantly. +Apple loved my work and decided to announce it at TED1992, 26 years ago on this very stage. +I thought I had made one of the biggest, most important discoveries in AI, and so did the "Wall Street Journal" on the following day. +But as far as discoveries went, it turned out, I didn't discover India, or America. +Perhaps I discovered a little island off of Portugal. +But the AI era of discovery continued, and more scientists poured their souls into it. +About 10 years ago, the grand AI discovery was made by three North American scientists, and it's known as deep learning. +Deep learning is a technology that can take a huge amount of data within one single domain and learn to predict or decide at superhuman accuracy. +For example, if we show the deep learning network a massive number of food photos, it can recognize food such as hot dog or no hot dog. +Or if we show it many pictures and videos and sensor data from driving on the highway, it can actually drive a car as well as a human being on the highway. +And what if we showed this deep learning network all the speeches made by President Trump? +Then this artificially intelligent President Trump, actually the network — +can — +You like double oxymorons, huh? +So this network, if given the request to make a speech about AI, he, or it, might say — +Donald Trump: It's a great thing to build a better world with artificial intelligence. +Kai-Fu Lee: And maybe in another language? +DT: (Speaking Chinese) +KFL: You didn't know he knew Chinese, did you? +So deep learning has become the core in the era of AI discovery, and that's led by the US. +But we're now in the era of implementation, where what really matters is execution, product quality, speed and data. +And that's where China comes in. +Chinese entrepreneurs, who I fund as a venture capitalist, are incredible workers, amazing work ethic. +My example in the delivery room is nothing compared to how hard people work in China. +As an example, one startup tried to claim work-life balance: "Come work for us because we are 996." And what does that mean? +It means the work hours of 9am to 9pm, six days a week. +That's contrasted with other startups that do 997. +And the Chinese product quality has consistently gone up in the past decade, and that's because of a fiercely competitive environment. +In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs compete in a very gentlemanly fashion, sort of like in old wars in which each side took turns to fire at each other. +But in the Chinese environment, it's truly a gladiatorial fight to the death. +In such a brutal environment, entrepreneurs learn to grow very rapidly, they learn to make their products better at lightning speed, and they learn to hone their business models until they're impregnable. +As a result, great Chinese products like WeChat and Weibo are arguably better than the equivalent American products from Facebook and Twitter. +And the Chinese market embraces this change and accelerated change and paradigm shifts. +As an example, if any of you go to China, you will see it's almost cashless and credit card-less, because that thing that we all talk about, mobile payment, has become the reality in China. +In the last year, 18.8 trillion US dollars were transacted on mobile internet, and that's because of very robust technologies built behind it. +It's even bigger than the China GDP. +And this technology, you can say, how can it be bigger than the GDP? +Because it includes all transactions: wholesale, channels, retail, online, offline, going into a shopping mall or going into a farmers market like this. +The technology is used by 700 million people to pay each other, not just merchants, so it's peer to peer, and it's almost transaction-fee-free. +And it's instantaneous, and it's used everywhere. +And finally, the China market is enormous. +This market is large, which helps give entrepreneurs more users, more revenue, more investment, but most importantly, it gives the entrepreneurs a chance to collect a huge amount of data which becomes rocket fuel for the AI engine. +So as a result, the Chinese AI companies have leaped ahead so that today, the most valuable companies in computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation and drones are all Chinese companies. +So with the US leading the era of discovery and China leading the era of implementation, we are now in an amazing age where the dual engine of the two superpowers are working together to drive the fastest revolution in technology that we have ever seen as humans. +And this will bring tremendous wealth, unprecedented wealth: 16 trillion dollars, according to PwC, in terms of added GDP to the worldwide GDP by 2030. +It will also bring immense challenges in terms of potential job replacements. +Whereas in the Industrial Age it created more jobs because craftsman jobs were being decomposed into jobs in the assembly line, so more jobs were created. +But AI completely replaces the individual jobs in the assembly line with robots. +And it's not just in factories, but truckers, drivers and even jobs like telesales, customer service and hematologists as well as radiologists over the next 15 years are going to be gradually replaced by artificial intelligence. +And only the creative jobs — +I have to make myself safe, right? +Really, the creative jobs are the ones that are protected, because AI can optimize but not create. +But what's more serious than the loss of jobs is the loss of meaning, because the work ethic in the Industrial Age has brainwashed us into thinking that work is the reason we exist, that work defined the meaning of our lives. +And I was a prime and willing victim to that type of workaholic thinking. +I worked incredibly hard. +That's why I almost left my wife in the delivery room, that's why I worked 996 alongside my entrepreneurs. +And that obsession that I had with work ended abruptly a few years ago when I was diagnosed with fourth stage lymphoma. +The PET scan here shows over 20 malignant tumors jumping out like fireballs, melting away my ambition. +But more importantly, it helped me reexamine my life. +Knowing that I may only have a few months to live caused me to see how foolish it was for me to base my entire self-worth on how hard I worked and the accomplishments from hard work. +My priorities were completely out of order. +I neglected my family. +My father had passed away, and I never had a chance to tell him I loved him. +My mother had dementia and no longer recognized me, and my children had grown up. +During my chemotherapy, I read a book by Bronnie Ware who talked about dying wishes and regrets of the people in the deathbed. +She found that facing death, nobody regretted that they didn't work hard enough in this life. +They only regretted that they didn't spend enough time with their loved ones and that they didn't spread their love. +So I am fortunately today in remission. +So I can be back at TED again to share with you that I have changed my ways. +I now only work 965 — occasionally 996, but usually 965. +I moved closer to my mother, my wife usually travels with me, and when my kids have vacation, if they don't come home, I go to them. +So it's a new form of life that helped me recognize how important it is that love is for me, and facing death helped me change my life, but it also helped me see a new way of how AI should impact mankind and work and coexist with mankind, that really, AI is taking away a lot of routine jobs, but routine jobs are not what we're about. +Why we exist is love. +When we hold our newborn baby, love at first sight, or when we help someone in need, humans are uniquely able to give and receive love, and that's what differentiates us from AI. +Despite what science fiction may portray, I can responsibly tell you that AI has no love. +When AlphaGo defeated the world champion Ke Jie, while Ke Jie was crying and loving the game of go, AlphaGo felt no happiness from winning and certainly no desire to hug a loved one. +So how do we differentiate ourselves as humans in the age of AI? +We talked about the axis of creativity, and certainly that is one possibility, and now we introduce a new axis that we can call compassion, love, or empathy. +Those are things that AI cannot do. +So as AI takes away the routine jobs, I like to think we can, we should and we must create jobs of compassion. +You might ask how many of those there are, but I would ask you: Do you not think that we are going to need a lot of social workers to help us make this transition? +Do you not think we need a lot of compassionate caregivers to give more medical care to more people? +Do you not think we're going to need 10 times more teachers to help our children find their way to survive and thrive in this brave new world? +And with all the newfound wealth, should we not also make labors of love into careers and let elderly accompaniment or homeschooling become careers also? +This graph is surely not perfect, but it points at four ways that we can work with AI. +AI will come and take away the routine jobs and in due time, we will be thankful. +AI will become great tools for the creatives so that scientists, artists, musicians and writers can be even more creative. +AI will work with humans as analytical tools that humans can wrap their warmth around for the high-compassion jobs. +And we can always differentiate ourselves with the uniquely capable jobs that are both compassionate and creative, using and leveraging our irreplaceable brains and hearts. +So there you have it: a blueprint of coexistence for humans and AI. +AI is serendipity. It is here to liberate us from routine jobs, and it is here to remind us what it is that makes us human. +So let us choose to embrace AI and to love one another. +Thank you. + + +talks, forensics, crime, science, human body, technology, criminal justice, molecular biology +Simona Francese +20390 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Our fingerprints are what make us unique -- but they're also home to a world of information hidden in molecules that reveal our actions, lifestyles and routines. In this riveting talk, chemist Simona Francese shows how she studies these microscopic traces using mass spectrometry, a technology that analyzes fingerprints in previously impossible detail, and demonstrates how this cutting-edge forensic science can help police catch criminals. (Note: This talk contains descriptions of sexual violence.) +Simona Francese: Your fingerprints reveal more than you think +Do you ever stop and think, during a romantic dinner, "I've just left my fingerprints all over my wine glass." +Or do you ever worry, when you visit a friend, about leaving a little piece of you behind on every surface that you touch? +And even this evening, have you paid any attention to sit without touching anything? +Well, you're not alone. +Thankfully, criminals underestimate the power of fingerprints, too. +And I'm not just talking about the twisted parting of lines that make our fingerprint unique. +I'm talking about an entire world of information hiding in a small, often invisible thing. +In fact, fingerprints are made up of molecules that belong to three classes: sweat molecules that we all produce in very different amounts... molecules that we introduce into our body and then we sweat out and molecules that we may contaminate our fingertips with when we come across substances like blood, paint, grease, but also invisible substances. +And molecules are the storytellers of who we are and what we've been up to. +We just need to have the right technology to make them talk. +So let me take you on a journey of unthinkable capabilities. +Katie has been raped and her lifeless body has been found in the woods three days later, after her disappearance. +The police is targeting three suspects, having narrowed down the search from over 20 men who had been seen in that area on the same day. +The only piece of evidence is two very faint, overlapping fingerprints on the tape that was found wrapped around Katie's neck. +Often, faint and overlapping fingerprints cannot help the police to make an identification. +And until recently, this might have been the end of the road, but this is where we can make the difference. +The tape is sent to our labs, where we're asked to use our cutting-edge technology to help with the investigation. +And here, we use an existing form of mass spectrometry imaging technology that we have further developed and adapted specifically for the molecular and imaging analysis of fingerprints. +In essence, we fire a UV laser at the print, and we cause the desorption of the molecules from the print, ready to be captured by the mass spectrometer. +Mass spectrometry measures the weight of the molecules — or as we say, the mass — and those numbers that you see there, they indicate that mass. +But more crucially, they indicate who those molecules are — whether I'm seeing paracetamol or something more sinister, forensically speaking. +We applied this technology to the evidence that we have and we found the presence of condom lubricants. +In fact, we've developed protocols that enable us to even suggest what brand of condom might have been used. +So we pass this information to the police, who, meanwhile, have obtained a search warrant and they found the same brand of condom in Dalton's premises. +And with Dalton and Thomson also having records for sexual assaults, then it is Chapman that may become the less likely suspect. +But is this information enough to make an arrest? +Of course not, and we are asked to delve deeper with our investigation. +So we found out, also, the presence of other two very interesting molecules. +One is an antidepressant, and one is a very special molecule. +It only forms in your body if you drink alcohol and consume cocaine at the same time. +And alcohol is known to potentiate the effects of cocaine, so here, we now have a hint on the state of mind of the individual whilst perpetrating the crime. +We passed this information to the police, and they found out that, actually, Thomson is a drug addict, and he also has a medical record for psychotic episodes, for which presumably the antidepressant was prescribed. +So now Thomson becomes the more likely suspect. +But the reality is that I still don't know where these molecules are coming from, from which fingerprint, and who those two fingerprints belong to. +Fear not. Mass spectrometry imaging can help us further. +In fact, the technology is so powerful that we can see where these molecules are on a fingerprint. +Like you see in this video, every single one of those peaks corresponds to a mass, every mass to a molecule, and we can interrogate the software, by selecting each of those molecules, as to where they are present on a fingermark. +And some images are not very revealing, some are better, some are really good. +And we can create multiple images of the same mark — in theory, hundreds of images of the same fingerprint — for as many of the molecules that we have detected. +So step one... for overlapping fingerprints, chances are, especially if they come from different individuals, that the molecular composition is not identical, so let's ask the software to visualize those unique molecules just present in one fingermark and not in the other one. +By doing so, that's how we can separate the two ridge patterns. +And this is really important because the police now are able to identify one of the two fingerprints, which actually corresponds to Katie. +And they've been able to say so because they've compared the two separate images with one taken posthumously from Katie. +So now, we can concentrate on one fingerprint only — that of the killer's. +So then, step two... where are these three molecules that I've seen? +Well, let's interrogate the software — show me where they are. +And by doing this, only portions of the image of the killer's fingerprint show up. +In other words, those substances are only present in the killer's print. +So now our molecular findings start matching very nicely the police intelligence about Thomson, should that fingerprint belong to him. +But the reality is that that print is still not good enough to make an identification. +Step three: since we can generate hundreds of images of the same fingerprint, why don't we superimpose them, and by doing so, try to improve the rich pattern of continuity and clarity? +That's the result. Striking. We now have a very clear image of the fingerprint and the police can run it through the database. +The match comes out to Thomson. +Thomson is our killer. +Katie, the suspects and the circumstances of the crime aren't real, but the story contains elements of the real police casework we've been confronted with, and is a composite of the intelligence that we can provide — that we have been able to provide the police. +And I'm really, really thrilled that after nine years of intense research, as of 2017, we are able to contribute to police investigations. +Mine is no longer a dream; it's a goal. +We're going to do this wider and wider, bigger and bigger, and we're going to know more about the suspect, and we're going to build an identikit. +I believe this is also a new era for criminal profiling. +The work of the criminologist draws on the expert recognition of behavioral patterns that have been observed before to belong to a certain type, to a certain profile. +As opposed to this expert but subjective evaluation, we're trying to do the same thing, but from the molecular makeup of the fingerprint, and the two can work together. +I did say that molecules are storytellers, so information on your health, your actions, your lifestyle, your routines, they're all there, accessible in a fingerprint. +And molecules are the storytellers of our secrets in just a touch. +Thank you. +Wow. + + +talks, communication, compassion, identity, data, race, teaching, social change, work +Tamekia MizLadi Smith +20554 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: It's time to invest in face-to-face training that empowers employees to have difficult conversations, says Tamekia MizLadi Smith. In a witty, provocative talk, Smith shares a workplace training program called "I'm G.R.A.C.E.D." that will inspire bosses and employees alike to communicate with compassion and respect. Bottom line: always let people know why their work matters. +Tamekia MizLadi Smith: How to train employees to have difficult conversations +We live in a world where the collection of data is happening 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. +This data is usually collected by what we call a front-desk specialist now. +These are the retail clerks at your favorite department stores, the cashiers at the grocery stores, the registration specialists at the hospital and even the person that sold you your last movie ticket. +They ask discreet questions, like: "May I please have your zip code?" Or, "Would you like to use your savings card today?" All of which gives us data. +However, the conversation becomes a little bit more complex when the more difficult questions need to be asked. +Let me tell you a story, see. +Once upon a time, there was a woman named Miss Margaret. +Miss Margaret had been a front-desk specialist for almost 20 years. +And in all that time, she has never, and I do mean never, had to ask a patient their gender, race or ethnicity. +Because, see, now Miss Margaret has the ability to just look at you. Uh-huh. And she can tell if you are a boy or a girl, black or white, American or non-American. +And in her mind, those were the only categories. +So imagine that grave day, when her sassy supervisor invited her to this "change everything" meeting and told her that would have to ask each and every last one of her patients to self-identify. +She gave her six genders, eight races and over 100 ethnicities. +Well, now, Miss Margaret was appalled. +I mean, highly offended. So much so that she marched down to that human-resource department to see if she was eligible for an early retirement. +And she ended her rant by saying that her sassy supervisor invited her to this "change everything" meeting and didn't, didn't, even, even bring, bring food, food, food, food. +You know you've got to bring food to these meetings. +Anyway. +Now, that was an example of a healthcare setting, but of course, all businesses collect some form of data. +True story: I was going to wire some money. +And the customer service representative asked me if I was born in the United States. +Now, I hesitated to answer her question, and before she even realized why I hesitated, she began to throw the company she worked for under the bus. +She said, "Girl, I know it's stupid, but they makin 'us ask this question." +Because of the way she presented it to me, I was like, "Girl, why? +Why they makin 'you ask this question? +Is they deportin 'people? " +But then I had to turn on the other side of me, the more professional speaker-poet side of me. +The one that understood that there were little Miss Margarets all over the place. +People who were good people, maybe even good employees, but lacked the ability to ask their questions properly and unfortunately, that made her look bad, but the worst, that made the business look even worse than how she was looking. +Because she had no idea who I was. +I mean, I literally could have been a woman who was scheduled to do a TED Talk and would use her as an example. Imagine that. +And unfortunately, what happens is people would decline to answer the questions, because they feel like you would use the information to discriminate against them, all because of how you presented the information. +And at that point, we get bad data. +And everybody knows what bad data does. +Bad data costs you time, it costs you money and it costs you resources. +Unfortunately, when you have bad data, it also costs you a lot more, because we have health disparities, and we have social determinants of health, and we have the infant mortality, all of which depends on the data that we collect, and if we have bad data, than we have those issues still. +And we have underprivileged populations that remain unfortunate and underprivileged, because the data that we're using is either outdated, or is not good at all or we don't have anything at all. +Now, wouldn't it be amazing if people like Miss Margaret and the customer-service representative at the wiring place were graced to collect data with compassionate care? +Can I explain to you what I mean by "graced?" I wrote an acrostic poem. +G: Getting the front desk specialist involved and letting them know +R: the Relevance of their role as they become +A: Accountable for the accuracy of data while implementing +C: Compassionate care within all encounters by becoming +E: Equipped with the education needed to inform people of why data collection is so important. +Now, I'm an artist. +And so what happens with me is that when I create something artistically, the trainer in me is awakened as well. +So what I did was, I began to develop that acrostic poem into a full training entitled "I'm G.R.A.C.E.D." Because I remember, being the front-desk specialist, and when I went to the office of equity to start working, I was like, "Is that why they asked us to ask that question?" It all became a bright light to me, and I realized that I asked people and I told people about — I called them by the wrong gender, I called them by the wrong race, I called them by the wrong ethnicity, and the environment became hostile, people was offended and I was frustrated because I was not graced. +I remember my computerized training, and unfortunately, that training did not prepare me to deescalate a situation. +It did not prepare me to have teachable moments when I had questions about asking the questions. +I would look at the computer and say, "So, what do I do when this happens?" And the computer would say... nothing, because a computer cannot talk back to you. +So that's the importance of having someone there who was trained to teach you and tell you what you do in situations like that. +So, when I created the "I'm G.R.A.C.E.D" training, I created it with that experience that I had in mind, but also that conviction that I had in mind. +Because I wanted the instructional design of it to be a safe space for open dialogue for people. +I wanted to talk about biases, the unconscious ones and the conscious ones, and what we do. +Because now I know that when you engage people in the why, it challenges their perspective, and it changes their attitudes. +Now I know that data that we have at the front desk translates into research that eliminates disparities and finds cures. +Now I know that teaching people transitional change instead of shocking them into change is always a better way of implementing change. +See, now I know people are more likely to share information when they are treated with respect by knowledgeable staff members. +Now I know that you don't have to be a statistician to understand the power and the purpose of data, but you do have to treat people with respect and have compassionate care. +Now I know that when you've been graced, it is your responsibility to empower somebody else. +But most importantly, now I know that when teaching human beings to communicate with other human beings, it should be delivered by a human being. +So when y'all go to work and y'all schedule that "change everything" meeting — +remember Miss Margaret. And don't forget the food, the food, the food, the food. +Thank you. + + +talks, TED Fellows, astronomy, physics, space, science, discovery, universe +Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil +20753 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: What's it like to discover a galaxy -- and have it named after you? Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil lets us know in this quick talk about her team's surprising discovery of a mysterious new galaxy type. +Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil: A rare galaxy that's challenging our understanding of the universe +There are more than a trillion galaxies in the universe. +And my team discovered an extremely rare one, a galaxy that doesn't look quite like anything observed before. +This galaxy is so peculiar, that it challenges our theories and our assumptions about how the universe works. +The majority of the galaxies are spiral, similar to our own Milky Way. +We have strong theories about how these common galaxies form and evolve. +But we don't understand how rare galaxies form and evolve. +An especially puzzling rare case is Hoag's Object. +It has a very symmetric central body surrounded by a circular outer ring, with nothing visible connecting them. +Hoag-type galaxies are among the rarest types of galaxies currently known. +There are fewer than one in 1,000 galaxies. +It's a mystery how the stars in the outer ring are just floating there in such an orderly manner. +That's interesting, right? Hold on. Things are about to get more mysterious. +The galaxy that my team discovered is even rarer and much more complex than that. +You know, sometimes, you search and search for these objects, and you find nothing. +But sometimes, it just appears in the background, when you are not even looking for it. +This system looks very similar to Hoag's Object, with its central body and circular outer ring. +We got very excited and thought we discovered another Hoag's Object. +But my research showed this is an entirely new galaxy type, now commonly referred to as "Burçin's Galaxy." +We will not be visiting this galaxy anytime soon. +It is approximately 359 million light years away from Earth. +You may think this is far. +Well, actually, this is one of the nearby galaxies. +I study this object in different light — in ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared. +Small details on our body, like a scar or wrinkles, tell the story of our lives. +Similarly, a galaxy's structure in different light can help us trace back their origin and evolution. +How do I look for these details? +I model the bright central body and remove my model from the image to check for any hidden features, because a bright structure in a galaxy may blind our views of faint features, just like using sunglasses when you are blinded by the intense light. +The result was a big surprise. +This galaxy doesn't just have an outer ring, it has an additional, diffused inner ring. +We were having a hard time explaining the origin of the outer ring in Hoag-type galaxies. +Now we also need to explain this mysterious second ring. +There is currently no known mechanism that can explain the existence of an inner ring in such a peculiar galaxy. +So the discovery of Burçin's Galaxy clearly highlights the gap in our knowledge of galaxy evolution. +Further research into how this extremely rare galaxy was formed can provide us with new clues on how the universe works. +This discovery tells us that we still have a lot to learn, and we should keep looking deeper and deeper in space and keep searching for the unknown. +Thank you. + + +talks, collaboration, disability, creativity, exoskeleton, human body, love, neurology, personal growth, science, technology, future, innovation +Mark Pollock and Simone George +20975 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: When faced with life's toughest circumstances, how should we respond: as an optimist, a realist or something else? In an unforgettable talk, explorer Mark Pollock and human rights lawyer Simone George explore the tension between acceptance and hope in times of grief -- and share the groundbreaking work they're undertaking to cure paralysis. +Mark Pollock and Simone George: A love letter to realism in a time of grief +Simone George: I met Mark when he was just blind. +I had returned home to live in Dublin after the odyssey that was my 20s, educating my interest in human rights and equality in university, traveling the world, like my nomad grandmother. +And during a two-year stint working in Madrid, dancing many nights till morning in salsa clubs. +When I met Mark, he asked me to teach him to dance. And I did. +They were wonderful times, long nights talking, becoming friends and eventually falling for each other. +Mark had lost his sight when he was 22, and the man that I met eight years later was rebuilding his identity, the cornerstone of which was this incredible spirit that had taken him to the Gobi Desert, where he ran six marathons in seven days. And to marathons at the North Pole, and from Everest Base Camp. +When I asked him what had led to this high-octane life, he quoted Nietzsche: "He, who has a Why to live, can bear with almost any How." He had come across the quote in a really beautiful book called "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor Frankl, a neurologist and psychiatrist who survived years in a Nazi concentration camp. +Frankl used this Nietzsche quote to explain to us that when we can no longer change our circumstances, we are challenged to change ourselves. +Mark Pollock: Eventually, I did rebuild my identity, and the Why for me was about competing again, because pursuing success and risking failure was simply how I felt normal. +And I finished the rebuild on the 10th anniversary of losing my sight. +I took part in a 43-day expedition race in the coldest, most remote, most challenging place on earth. +It was the first race to the South Pole since Shackleton, Scott and Amundsen set foot in Antarctica, 100 years before. +And putting the demons of blindness behind me with every step towards the pole, it offered me a long-lasting sense of contentment. +As it turned out, I would need that in reserve, because one year after my return, in, arguably, the safest place on earth, a bedroom at a friend's house, I fell from a third-story window onto the concrete below. +I don't know how it happened. +I think I must have got up to go to the bathroom. +And because I'm blind, I used to run my hand along the wall to find my way. +That night, my hand found an open space where the closed window should have been. +And I cartwheeled out. +My friends who found me thought I was dead. +When I got to hospital, the doctors thought I was going to die, and when I realized what was happening to me, I thought that dying might have been... might have been the best outcome. +And lying in intensive care, facing the prospect of being blind and paralyzed, high on morphine, I was trying to make sense of what was going on. +And one night, lying flat on my back, I felt for my phone to write a blog, trying to explain how I should respond. +It was called "Optimist, Realist or Something Else?" and it drew on the experiences of Admiral Stockdale, who was a POW in the Vietnam war. +He was incarcerated, tortured, for over seven years. +His circumstances were bleak, but he survived. +The ones who didn't survive were the optimists. +They said, "We'll be out by Christmas," and Christmas would come and Christmas would go, and then it would be Christmas again, and when they didn't get out, they became disappointed, demoralized and many of them died in their cells. +Stockdale was a realist. +He was inspired by the stoic philosophers, and he confronted the brutal facts of his circumstances while maintaining a faith that he would prevail in the end. +And in that blog, I was trying to apply his thinking as a realist to my increasingly bleak circumstances. +During the many months of heart infections and kidney infections after my fall, at the very edge of survival, Simone and I faced the fundamental question: How do you resolve the tension between acceptance and hope? +And it's that that we want to explore with you now. +SG: After I got the call, I caught the first flight to England and arrived into the brightly lit intensive care ward, where Mark was lying naked, just under a sheet, connected to machines that were monitoring if he would live. +I said, "I'm here, Mark." And he cried tears he seemed to have saved just for me. +I wanted to gather him in my arms, but I couldn't move him, and so I kissed him the way you kiss a newborn baby, terrified of their fragility. +Later that afternoon, when the bad news had been laid out for us — fractured skull, bleeds on his brain, a possible torn aorta and a spine broken in two places, no movement or feeling below his waist — Mark said to me, "Come here. +You need to get yourself as far away from this as possible. "As I tried to process what he was saying, I was thinking," What the hell is wrong with you? " +"We can't do this now." So I asked him, "Are you breaking up with me?" +And he said, "Look, you signed up for the blindness, but not this." And I answered, "We don't even know what this is, but what I do know is what I can't handle right now is a breakup while someone I love is in intensive care." +So I called on my negotiation skills and suggested we make a deal. +I said, "I will stay with you as long as you need me, as long as your back needs me. +And when you no longer need me, then we talk about our relationship. "Like a contract with the possibility to renew in six months. +He agreed and I stayed. +In fact, I refused to go home even to pack a bag, I slept by his bed, when he could eat, I made all his food, and we cried, one or other or both of us together, every day. +I made all the complicated decisions with the doctors, I climbed right into that raging river over rapids that was sweeping Mark along. +And at the first bend in that river, Mark's surgeon told us what movement and feeling he doesn't get back in the first 12 weeks, he's unlikely to get back at all. +So, sitting by his bed, I began to research why, after this period they call spinal shock, there's no recovery, there's no therapy, there's no cure, there's no hope. +And the internet became this portal to a magical other world. +I emailed scientists, and they broke through paywalls and sent me their medical journal and science journal articles directly. +I read everything that "Superman" actor Christopher Reeve had achieved, after a fall from a horse left him paralyzed from the neck down and ventilated. +Christopher had broken this 12-week spell; he had regained some movement and feeling years after his accident. +He dreamed of a world of empty wheelchairs. +And Christopher and the scientists he worked with fueled us with hope. +MP: You see, spinal cord injury strikes at the very heart of what it means to be human. +And it had turned me from my upright, standing, running form, into a seated compromise of myself. +And it's not just the lack of feeling and movement. +Paralysis also interferes with the body's internal systems, which are designed to keep us alive. +Multiple infections, nerve pain, spasms, shortened life spans are common. +And these are the things that exhaust even the most determined of the 60 million people around the world who are paralyzed. +Over 16 months in hospital, Simone and I were presented with the expert view that hoping for a cure had proven to be psychologically damaging. +It was like the formal medical system was canceling hope in favor of acceptance alone. +But canceling hope ran contrary to everything that we believed in. +Yes, up to this point in history, it had proven to be impossible to find a cure for paralysis, but history is filled with the kinds of the impossible made possible through human endeavor. +The kind of human endeavor that took explorers to the South Pole at the start of the last century. +And the kind of human endeavor that will take adventurers to Mars in the early part of this century. +So we started asking, "Why can't that same human endeavor cure paralysis in our lifetime?" +SG: Well, we really believed that it can. +My research taught us that we needed to remind Mark's damaged and dormant spinal cord of its upright, standing, running form, and we found San Francisco-based engineers at Ekso Bionics, who created this robotic exoskeleton that would allow Mark to stand and walk in the lab that we started to build in Dublin. +Mark became the first person to personally own an exo, and since then, he and the robot have walked over one million steps. +It was bit of an early celebration, because actually it wasn't enough, the robot was doing all of the work, so we needed to plug Mark in. +So we connected the San Francisco engineers with a true visionary in UCLA, Dr. Reggie Edgerton, the most beautiful man and his team's life work had resulted in a scientific breakthrough. +Using electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, a number of subjects have been able to stand, and because of that, regain some movement and feeling and most importantly, to regain some of the body's internal functions that are designed to keep us alive and to make that life a pleasure. +Electrical stimulation of the spinal cord, we think, is the first meaningful therapy ever for paralyzed people. +Now, of course, the San Francisco engineers and the scientists in UCLA knew about each other, knew about each other's work. +But as so often happens when we're busy creating groundbreaking scientific research, they hadn't quite yet got together. +That seemed to be our job now. +So we created our first collaboration, and the moment when we combined the electrical stimulation of Mark's spinal cord, as he walked in his robotic exoskeleton, was like that moment when Iron Man plugs the mini arc reactor into his chest and suddenly he and his suit become something else altogether. +MP: Simone, my robot and I moved into the lab at UCLA for three months. +And every day, Reggie and his team put electrodes onto the skin on my lower back, pushed electricity into my spinal cord to excite my nervous system, as I walked in my exo. +And for the first time since I was paralyzed, I could feel my legs underneath me. Not normally — +It wasn't a normal feeling, but with the stimulator turned on, upright in my exo, my legs felt substantial. +I could feel the meat of my muscles on the bones of my legs, and as I walked, because of the stimulation, I was able to voluntarily move my paralyzed legs. +And as I did more, the robot intelligently did less. +My heart rate got a normal running, training zone of 140 to 160 beats per minute, and my muscles, which had almost entirely disappeared, started to come back. +And during some standard testing throughout the process, flat on my back, twelve weeks, six months and three whole years after I fell out that window and became paralyzed, the scientists turned the stimulator on and I pulled my knee to my chest. +Man: OK, start, go, go, go, go, go. +Good, good, good. +SG: Yeah, yeah, go on, Mark, go on, go, go, go, go, go, wow! +SG: Well done! +MP: Do you know, this week, I've been saying to Simone, if we could forget about the paralysis, you know, the last few years have been incredibly exciting. +Now, the problem is, we can't quite forget about the paralysis just yet. +And clearly, we're not finished, because when we left that pilot study and went back to Dublin, I rolled home in my wheelchair and I'm still paralyzed and I'm still blind and we're primarily focusing on the paralysis at the moment, but being at this conference, we're kind of interested if anyone does have a cure for blindness, we'll take that as well. +But if you remember the blog that I mentioned, it posed a question of how we should respond, optimist, realist or something else? +And I think we have come to understand that the optimists rely on hope alone and they risk being disappointed and demoralized. +The realists, on the other hand, they accept the brutal facts and they keep hope alive, as well. +The realists have managed to resolve the tension between acceptance and hope by running them in parallel. +And that's what Simone and I have been trying to do over the last number of years. +Look, I accept the wheelchair — I mean, it's almost impossible not to. +And we're sad, sometimes, for what we've lost. +I accept that I, and other wheelchair users, can and do live fulfilling lives, despite the nerve pain and the spasms and the infections and the shortened life spans. +And I accept that it is way more difficult for people who are paralyzed from the neck down. +For those who rely on ventilators to breathe, and for those who don't have access to adequate, free health care. +So, that is why we also hope for another life. +A life where we have created a cure through collaboration. +A cure that we are actively working to release from university labs around the world and share with everyone who needs it. +SG: I met Mark when he was just blind. +He asked me to teach him to dance, and I did. +One night, after dance classes, I turned to say goodnight to him at his front door, and to his gorgeous guide dog, Larry. I realized, that in switching all the lights off in the apartment before I left, that I was leaving him in the dark. +I burst into uncontrollable tears and tried to hide it, but he knew. +And he hugged me and said, "Ah, poor Simone. +You're back in 1998, when I went blind. +Don't worry, it turns out OK in the end. " +Acceptance is knowing that grief is a raging river. +And you have to get into it. +Because when you do, it carries you to the next place. +It eventually takes you to open land, somewhere where it will turn out OK in the end. +And it truly has been a love story, an expansive, abundant, deeply satisfying kind of love for our fellow humans and everyone in this act of creation. Science is love. Everyone we've met in this field just wants to get their work from the bench and into people's lives. +And it's our job to help them to do that. +Because when we do, we and everyone with us in this act of creation will be able to say, "We did it. And then we danced." +SG: Thank you. + + +talks, storytelling, gaming, design, media, entertainment, technology, culture, innovation, animation, art, creativity +David Cage +22919 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Have you ever watched a film or read a novel, wishing that you could change the narrative to save your favorite character? Game designer David Cage allows you do just that in his video games, where players make decisions that shape an ever-changing plot. In a talk and live demo, Cage presents a scene from his new project, letting the audience control a character's decisions. "Interactive storytelling can be what cinema was in the 20th century: an art that deeply changes its time," Cage says. +David Cage: How video games turn players into storytellers +The way we tell stories has naturally changed since Aristotle defined the rules of tragedy about 2,500 years ago. +According to him, the role of storytelling is to mimic life and make us feel emotions. +And that's exactly what storytelling as we know it has done very well since then. +But there is a dimension of life that storytelling could never really reproduce. It is the notion of choices. +Choices are a very important part of our lives. +We as individuals are defined by the choices we make. +Some of our decisions can have very significant consequences and totally change the courses of our lives. +But in a play, a novel or a film, the writer makes all the decisions in advance for the characters, and as the audience, we can only watch, passively, the consequences of his decisions. +As a storyteller, I've always been fascinated with the idea of recreating this notion of choices in fiction. +My dream was to put the audience in the shoes of the main protagonists, let them make their own decisions, and by doing so, let them tell their own stories. +Finding a way to achieve this is what I did in the past 20 years of my life. +Today, I would like to introduce you to this new way of telling stories, a way that has interactivity at its heart. +Rather than exposing the theory behind it, which could have been kind of abstract and probably a little bit boring, I thought it would be a great opportunity to do a little experiment. +I would like you, the people here at TED, to tell your own story. +So I came with an interactive scene that we are going to play together. +I've asked Vicky — hello, Vicky — to control the main character for us. +And your role — you, the audience — will be to make the choices. +So Vicky and I don't know what's going to happen, because it will all be based on your decisions. +This scene comes from our next game, called "Detroit: Become Human," and we are in the near future, where technology made possible the creation of androids that look exactly like human beings. +We are in the shoes of this character called Connor, who is an android, and he can do very fancy things with coins, as you can see. +He has this blue triangle on this chest, as all androids do, and now Vicky is in control of this character. +She can walk around, she can go anywhere, she can look around, she can interact with her environment, and now she can tell her own stories by making choices. +So here we have our first choice. +There is a fish on the ground. What should we do? +Should we save it or should we leave it? +Remember, we are under time pressure, so we'd better be fast. +What should we do? +Audience: Save it! +David Cage: Save it? Save the fish? (Fish plops) DC: There we go. OK, we have an android who likes animals. +Remember, we have a hostage situation. Woman: Please, please, you've got to save my little girl! Wait — you're sending an android? +Officer: All right, ma'am, you need to go. +W: You can't do that! +DC: OK, she's not really happy. +Her daughter's been taken hostage by an android, and of course, she's in a state of shock. +Now we can continue to explore this apartment. We see all the SWAT forces in place. +But we need to find this Captain Allen first. +So, again, we can go anywhere. Vicky's still in control of the character. +Let's see — oh, I think this is Captain Allen. +He's on the phone. Connor: Captain Allen, my name is Connor. I'm the android sent by CyberLife. +Captain Allen: Let's fire at everything that moves. It already shot down two of my men. +We could easily get it, but they're on the edge of the balcony — it if falls, she falls. +DC: OK, now we need to decide what we want to ask the captain. +What should be our choice? Deviant's name? Deviant's behavior? Emotional shock? C: Has it experienced an emotional shock recently? +Capt A: I haven't got a clue. Does it matter? C: I need information to determine the best approach. DC: OK, a second choice. +DC: OK, deviant behavior, Vicky. C: Do you know if it's been behaving strangely before this? +Capt A: Listen... saving that kid is all that matters. +DC: OK, we are not going to learn anything from this guy. +We need to do something. +Let's try to go back in the lobby. Oh, wait — there's a room over there on your right, Vicky, I think. +Maybe there's something we can learn here. +Oh, there's a tablet. +Let's have a look. Girl: This is Daniel, the coolest android in the world. +DC: That was just one way of playing the scenes, but there are many other ways of playing it. +Depending on the choices you make, we could have seen many different actions, many different consequences, many different outcomes. +So that gives you an idea of what my work is about as an interactive writer. +Where a linear writer needs to deal with time and space, as an interactive writer, I need to deal with time, space and possibilities. +I have to manage massive tree structures, where each branch is a new variation of the story. +I need to think about all the possibilities in a given scene and try to imagine everything that can happen. +I need to deal with thousands and thousands of variables, conditions and possibilities. +As a consequence, where a film script is about 100 pages, an interactive script like this is between four and five thousand pages. +So that gives you an idea of what this work is about. +But I think, in the end, the experience is very unique, because it is the result of the collaboration between a writer creating this narrative landscape and the player making his own decisions, telling his own story and becoming the cowriter but also the coactor and the codirector of the story. +Interactive storytelling is a revolution in the way we tell stories. +With the emergence of new platforms like interactive television, virtual reality and video games, it can become a new form of entertainment and maybe even a new form of art. +I am convinced that in the coming years, we will see more and more moving and meaningful interactive experiences, created by a new generation of talents. +This is a medium waiting for its Orson Welles or its Stanley Kubrick, and I have no doubt that they will soon emerge and be recognized as such. +I believe that interactive storytelling can be what cinema was in the 20th century: an art that deeply changes its time. +Thank you. + + +talks, music, cello, performance art, performance, TED Fellows +Paul Rucker +24865 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Multidisciplinary artist and TED Fellow Paul Rucker has developed his own style of cello; he puts chopsticks between his strings, uses the instrument as a drum and experiments with electronics like loop pedals. Moving between reflective storytelling and performance, Rucker shares his inspiration -- and definitely doesn't play the same old Bach. +Paul Rucker: How my mom inspired my approach to the cello +On the flight here, I was reminded about my mom. +I'm a self-taught cellist, I've never had a lesson. +I studied double bass, but I just picked up the cello and started playing because I love doing it. +But my mom was an inspiration to me. +I did not realize she was an inspiration, because she got her music degree through a mail-order course, the US School of Music. +While raising two kids, she received a lesson a week in the mail, and practiced. +And at the end of a couple of years, she put on a recital. +And I'll be 50 this month, and it took me that long to realize that she was that big of an inspiration. +I'm just going to keep — yeah, thanks, mom. +She's also one of the most extraordinary people I know, beyond being a wonderful musician. +I want to play a little bit for mom and your moms as well, actually. +(Music ends) +You know, when you normally hear a cello, you think of this. +(Plays Bach Cello Suite No.1) +We're not going to do that today. +(Laughter and applause) +Hey! +(Looped samples of onstage sounds) + + +talks, entrepreneur, Africa, women in business, business, global issues, economics, global development, investment, future +Magatte Wade +25029 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Many African countries are poor for a simple reason, says entrepreneur Magatte Wade: governments have created far too many obstacles to starting and running a business. In this passionate talk, Wade breaks down the challenges of doing business on the continent and offers some solutions of her own -- while calling on leaders to do their part, too. +Magatte Wade: Why it's too hard to start a business in Africa -- and how to change it +Today, what I want to share with you is something that happened to me, actually, around four weeks ago, it happened. +Words were said to me that I never thought I would ever hear it said to my face by another human being. +And those words, they shattered my heart. +And at the same time, they filled it with so much hope. +And the whole experience renewed my commitment to the idea that I came to share with you today. +You see, I tell everyone that I am a haunted person. +What haunts me is the impossible stories, story after story after story after story of young people, my people, people like me dying out there on the ocean, right now, laying at the bottom of the ocean, serving as fish food. +Do you really think that's the best we can do? To serve as fish food? +And for those of them who are trying to migrate to Europe — because that's what it is all about, they are trying to migrate to Europe to find a job. Going through Libya. Do you know what happens to us when we're trying to cross through Libya and we're trapped over there? +Well, we're being sold as slaves. +For 300 dollars, maybe sometimes 500 dollars. +Sometimes I hear stories of bodies that fall off an airplane. +Somebody hid in the landing gear of a plane or in the cargo section of a plane, and then you find them frozen to death. +Wouldn't you be haunted if, like me, from the moment you were a little girl, you hear these stories and they keep repeating themselves, over and over and over? +Wouldn't you be haunted? That's my case. +And at the same time, you know, as my people are dying, my culture is also dying. +There, I said it. +Because, you know, we have this culture inferiority, which means that anything that comes from us is not good enough. +But you know, in my situation, and because I was raised to criticize by creating, it's Michelangelos. +My father said, "Do not come to me with problems unless you thought of a couple alternatives. +They don't have to be right, but I just want to know that you thought of something. " +So, I have this attitude in life — something is wrong, find a way to fix it. +And that's why I start the businesses that I start, that's usually consumer brands, that have embedded in them the very best of my African culture. +And what I do is it's all packaged, 21st century, world-class tendered, and I bring that to one of the most sophisticated markets in the world, which is the US. +First company was a beverage company, second one is a skin care company, third one is launching next month, and they all have that in common. +So, why are these people leaving? +They're leaving because they have no jobs. +They're leaving because where they are, there's no jobs. +So... But poverty, that's really striking them, is the root cause of why they're leaving. +Now, why are people poor? +People are poor because they have no money. +You have no money because you have no source of income. +And for most of us, what is a source of income? +For most of us, what is our source of income, what is it, tell me? Jobs, thank you. Where do jobs come from? Come from where? Businesses, thank you. +Now, if jobs is what fixes poverty, and jobs come from businesses, don't you think — especially, they come from small and medium size enterprises, SMEs — then don't you think, maybe for a second, that we should focus on making it easy for a small-business person to start and run their business? +Don't you think that it makes sense? +Why is it that when I look at the Doing Business index ranking of the World Bank, that ranks every country in the world in terms of how easy or hard it is to start a company, you tell me why African countries, all 50 of them, are basically at the bottom of that list? +That's why we're poor. +We're poor because it is literally impossible to do businesses in these countries of ours. +But I'm going to tell you exactly what it means on the ground for someone like me. +I have a manufacturing facility in Senegal. +Did you know that for all my raw material that I can't find in the country, I have to pay a 45 percent tariff on everything that comes in? Forty-five percent tariff. Do you know that, even to look for fine cardboard to ship my finished products to the US, I can't find new, finished cardboard? Impossible. Because the distributors are not going to come here to start their business, because it makes no sense, either. +So right now, I have to mobilize 3000 dollars' worth of cardboard in my warehouse, so that I can have cardboard, and they won't arrive for another five weeks. +The fact that we are stifled with the most nonsensical laws out there. +That's why we can't run businesses. +It's like swimming through molasses. +So, what can you do about that? +I told you today that someone said to me words that marked me, because I explained the same thing to my employees in Senegal. +And one of them started crying — her name is Yahara. She started crying. I said, "Why are you crying?" She said, "I'm crying because I had come to believe — always seeing us represented as poor people — I had come to believe that maybe, yes, maybe we are inferior. +Because, otherwise, how do you explain that we're always in the begging situation? "That's what broke my heart. +But at the same time that she said that, because of how I explained just what I explained to you, she said, "But now, I know that I am not the problem. +It is my environment in which I live, that's my problem. "I said," Yes. "And that's what gave me hope — that once people get it, they now change their outlook on life. +Here, what are some of our solutions, then? +If jobs is a solution, don't you think, then, that we should be simplifying the business environment of all of these countries? +Don't you think? +And along with you, I would like for all of your friends from the other 50 countries that are on the bottom of that list to do the same thing. +You do that, we do the rest of the job. +I'm doing my part of the game, what are you doing? +What are you doing? +What are you doing? +And as for you, everybody here in this room, I leave you with two marching orders. +Get in the game, and the way you get in it is educate yourself, build awareness around yourself, and then also advocate for e-government solutions. +He said, "Oh, corruption, how do we fight corruption?" Well, as a matter of fact, I'm here to tell you that yes, you can do it by the stroke of a pen. +You do not need anyone to tell you when and how to do that. +It is one thing, actually, that you don't need to wait for anyone to do, so do it. +Otherwise, don't come and tell me that you want to fix corruption. +You and your other 50 friends from the other 50 countries that are at the bottom of that list. +That's how you fight corruption. +If you were only charging me 5 percent to get my stuff in the country, my raw material, instead of the 45 percent, do you really think that I would have to go a pay a bribe? That's what breeds corruption. Bad laws, sets of horrible, nonsense laws. +You want to fight corruption? That's what you do. +And again, remember, you don't need to wait for anyone. +You can do that by yourself. +Unless you're telling me that maybe you have no sovereignty, and that's a whole other problem. +OK, so, from here on, I have simple words for our "leaders." This can go two ways. +It can go the nasty way, because we have hundreds of millions of young people coming to life right now, here, and if they don't have an outlook in life, they are going to go for a revolution. +They're going to go for violence. +And none of us wants that. +None, none of us. +That's the one way it can go. +Or the second way it can go is, all this happens peacefully, productively, and everything is good, and you do what you need to do, you get out of my way, you let people like me do our job, we create all these jobs we need, and then Africa becomes this very prosperous country that it's designed to be, it should have been for a long time. +It happens like that, everybody's happy, we move on with our lives. +It can happen in two ways — pick violence or you pick the calm, productive way. I want the calm, productive way. None of us should ever, ever even try to think about what else could happen if we don't go there. So, please. And the time has come. +This type of picture — prosperity, happiness, human flourishing — that's what I see if we do our job. +Thank you. +Thank you. + + +talks, science, electricity, invention, history, technology, curiosity, TEDx, physics, discovery, society +Suzie Sheehy +27219 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Seemingly pointless scientific research can lead to extraordinary discoveries, says physicist Suzie Sheehy. In a talk and tech demo, she shows how many of our modern technologies are tied to centuries-old, curiosity-driven experiments -- and makes the case for investing in more to arrive at a deeper understanding of the world. +Suzie Sheehy: The case for curiosity-driven research +In the late 19th century, scientists were trying to solve a mystery. +They found that if they had a vacuum tube like this one and applied a high voltage across it, something strange happened. +They called them cathode rays. +But the question was: What were they made of? +In England, the 19th-century physicist J.J. Thompson conducted experiments using magnets and electricity, like this. +And he came to an incredible revelation. +These rays were made of negatively charged particles around 2,000 times lighter than the hydrogen atom, the smallest thing they knew. +So Thompson had discovered the first subatomic particle, which we now call electrons. +Now, at the time, this seemed to be a completely impractical discovery. +I mean, Thompson didn't think there were any applications of electrons. +Around his lab in Cambridge, he used to like to propose a toast: "To the electron. +May it never be of use to anybody. " +He was strongly in favor of doing research out of sheer curiosity, to arrive at a deeper understanding of the world. +And what he found did cause a revolution in science. +But it also caused a second, unexpected revolution in technology. +Today, I'd like to make a case for curiosity-driven research, because without it, none of the technologies I'll talk about today would have been possible. +Now, what Thompson found here has actually changed our view of reality. +I mean, I think I'm standing on a stage, and you think you're sitting in a seat. +But that's just the electrons in your body pushing back against the electrons in the seat, opposing the force of gravity. +You're not even really touching the seat. +You're hovering ever so slightly above it. +But in many ways, our modern society was actually built on this discovery. +I mean, these tubes were the start of electronics. +And then for many years, most of us actually had one of these, if you remember, in your living room, in cathode-ray tube televisions. +But — I mean, how impoverished would our lives be if the only invention that had come from here was the television? +Thankfully, this tube was just a start, because something else happens when the electrons here hit the piece of metal inside the tube. +Let me show you. +Pop this one back on. +So as the electrons screech to a halt inside the metal, their energy gets thrown out again in a form of high-energy light, which we call X-rays. +And within 15 years of discovering the electron, these X-rays were being used to make images inside the human body, helping soldiers' lives being saved by surgeons, who could then find pieces of bullets and shrapnel inside their bodies. +But there's no way we could have come up with that technology by asking scientists to build better surgical probes. +Only research done out of sheer curiosity, with no application in mind, could have given us the discovery of the electron and X-rays. +Now, this tube also threw open the gates for our understanding of the universe and the field of particle physics, because it's also the first, very simple particle accelerator. +Now, I'm an accelerator physicist, so I design particle accelerators, and I try and understand how beams behave. +And my field's a bit unusual, because it crosses between curiosity-driven research and technology with real-world applications. +But it's the combination of those two things that gets me really excited about what I do. +Now, over the last 100 years, there have been far too many examples for me to list them all. +But I want to share with you just a few. +In 1928, a physicist named Paul Dirac found something strange in his equations. +And he predicted, based purely on mathematical insight, that there ought to be a second kind of matter, the opposite to normal matter, that literally annihilates when it comes in contact: antimatter. +I mean, the idea sounded ridiculous. +But within four years, they'd found it. +And nowadays, we use it every day in hospitals, in positron emission tomography, or PET scans, used for detecting disease. +If you can get these electrons up to a higher energy, so about 1,000 times higher than this tube, the X-rays that those produce can actually deliver enough ionizing radiation to kill human cells. +And if you can shape and direct those X-rays where you want them to go, that allows us to do an incredible thing: to treat cancer without drugs or surgery, which we call radiotherapy. +In countries like Australia and the UK, around half of all cancer patients are treated using radiotherapy. +And so, electron accelerators are actually standard equipment in most hospitals. +Or, a little closer to home: if you have a smartphone or a computer — and this is TEDx, so you've got both with you right now, right? +Well, inside those devices are chips that are made by implanting single ions into silicon, in a process called ion implantation. +And that uses a particle accelerator. +Without curiosity-driven research, though, none of these things would exist at all. +So, over the years, we really learned to explore inside the atom. +And to do that, we had to learn to develop particle accelerators. +The first ones we developed let us split the atom. +And then we got to higher and higher energies; we created circular accelerators that let us delve into the nucleus and then create new elements, even. +And at that point, we were no longer just exploring inside the atom. +We'd actually learned how to control these particles. +We'd learned how to interact with our world on a scale that's too small for humans to see or touch or even sense that it's there. +And then we built larger and larger accelerators, because we were curious about the nature of the universe. +As we went deeper and deeper, new particles started popping up. +Eventually, we got to huge ring-like machines that take two beams of particles in opposite directions, squeeze them down to less than the width of a hair and smash them together. +And then, using Einstein's E = mc2, you can take all of that energy and convert it into new matter, new particles which we rip from the very fabric of the universe. +Nowadays, there are about 35,000 accelerators in the world, not including televisions. +And inside each one of these incredible machines, there are hundreds of billions of tiny particles, dancing and swirling in systems that are more complex than the formation of galaxies. +You guys, I can't even begin to explain how incredible it is that we can do this. +So I want to encourage you to invest your time and energy in people that do curiosity-driven research. +It was Jonathan Swift who once said, "Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." And over a century ago, J.J. Thompson did just that, when he pulled back the veil on the subatomic world. +And now we need to invest in curiosity-driven research, because we have so many challenges that we face. +And we need patience; we need to give scientists the time, the space and the means to continue their quest, because history tells us that if we can remain curious and open-minded about the outcomes of research, the more world-changing our discoveries will be. +Thank you. + + +