diff --git "a/data/en-de/tst2019/IWSLT.TED.tst2019.en-de.en.xml" "b/data/en-de/tst2019/IWSLT.TED.tst2019.en-de.en.xml" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data/en-de/tst2019/IWSLT.TED.tst2019.en-de.en.xml" @@ -0,0 +1,2445 @@ + + + + +talks, Africa, TEDx, journalism, media, poverty +Leslie Dodson +1292 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Real narratives are complicated: Africa isn't a country, and it's not a disaster zone, says reporter and researcher Leslie Dodson. She calls for journalists, researchers and NGOs to stop representing entire continents as one big tragedy. +Leslie Dodson: Don't misrepresent Africa +I just want to start with a little bit of a word of warning, and that is: my job here tonight is to be a little bit of a "doctor bring-me-down." So bear with me for a few minutes, and know that after this, things will get lighter and brighter. +So let's start. +I know that many of you have heard the traveler's adage, "Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints." Well, I'm going to say I don't think that's either as benign nor as simple as it sounds, particularly for those of us in industries who are portraying people in poor countries, in developing countries and portraying the poor. +And those of us in those industries are reporters, researchers and people working for NGOs; I suspect there are a lot of us in those industries in the audience. +We're going overseas and bringing back pictures like this: of the utterly distressed or the displaced or the hungry or the child laborers or the exotic. +Now, Susan Sontag reminds us that photographs, in part, help define what we have the right to observe, but more importantly, they are an ethics of seeing. +And I think right now is a good time to review our ethics of seeing, as our industries of reporting and research and NGO work are collapsing and changing, in part, by what's being driven by what's happening in the economy. +But it's making us forge new relationships. +And those new relationships have some fuzzy boundaries. +I worked at the edge of some of these fuzzy boundaries, and I want to share with you some of my observations. +My ethics of seeing is informed by 25 years as a reporter covering emerging economies and international relations. +And I believe in a free and independent press. +I believe that journalism is a public good. +But it's getting harder to do that job, in part, because of the massive layoffs, because the budgets for international reporting aren't there anymore, new technologies and new platforms begging new content, and there are a lot of new journalisms. +There's activist journalism, humanitarian journalism, peace journalism, and we are all looking to cover the important stories of our time. +So we're going to NGOs and asking them if we can embed in their projects. This is in part because they're doing important work in interesting places. +That's one example here: this is a project I worked on in the Blue Nile in Ethiopia. +NGOs understand the benefits of having reporters tag along on their team. +They need the publicity, they are under tremendous pressure, they're competing in a very crowded market for compassion. +So they're also looking to reporters and to hire freelance reporters to help them develop their public relations material and their media material. +Now, researchers are also under pressure. +They're under pressure to communicate their science outside of the academy. +So they're collaborating with reporters, because for many researchers, it's difficult for them to write a simple story or a clear story. +And the benefit for reporters is that covering field research is some of the best work out there. +You not only get to cover science, but you get to meet interesting scientists, like my PhD advisor Revi Sterling, she, of the magic research high tops there. +And it was a discussion with Revi that brought us to the edge of the researcher and reporter, that fuzzy boundary. +And I said to her, "I was looking forward to going to developing countries and doing research and covering stories at the same time." She said, "I don't think so, girlfriend." And that confusion, that mutual confusion, drove us to publish a paper on the conflicting ethics and the contradictory practices of research and reporting. +We started with the understanding that researchers and reporters are distant cousins, equally storytellers and social analysts. +But we don't see nor portray developing communities the same way. +Here's a very classic example. This is Somalia, 1992. +It could be Somalia today. +And this is a standard operating procedure for much of the news video and the news pictures that you see, where a group of reporters will be trucked in, escorted to the site of a disaster, they'll produce their material, take their pictures, get their interviews, and then they'll be escorted out. +This is decidedly not a research setting. +Now, sometimes, we're working on feature stories. +This is an image I took of a woman in Bhongir Village in Andhra Pradesh in India. She's at a microfinance meeting. +You can see her face. +This also is not a research picture. +This is much more representative of a research picture. It's a research site: you see young women accessing new technologies. +It's more of a time stamp, it's a documentation of research. +I couldn't use this for news. +It doesn't tell enough, and it wouldn't sell. +But then, the differences are even deeper than that. +Revi and I analyzed some of the mandates that researchers are under. +They are under some very strict rules governed by their university research review boards when it comes to content and confidentiality. +Researchers are mandated to acquire document-informed consent. +Well, as a reporter, if I hang a microphone on someone, that is consent. +And when it comes to creating the story, I'll fact-check as a reporter, but I don't invite company to create that story, whereas social scientists, researchers, and particularly participatory researchers, will often work on constructing the narrative with the community. +And when it comes to paying for information, "checkbook journalism" is roundly discouraged, in part, because of the bias it introduces in the kind of information you get. +But social scientists understand that people's time is valuable so they pay them for that time. +So while journalists are well-placed to convey the beauty of the scientific process — and I would add, the NGO process — what about the warts? +What happens if a research project is not particularly well-designed, or an NGO project doesn't fulfill its goals? +Or the other kind of warts, you know, what happens after dark when the drinks happen. +Research environments and reporting trips and NGO projects are very intimate environments; you make good friends while you're doing good work. +But there's a little bit of Johnnie Walker journalism after dark, and what happens to that line between embedded and in-bedded? +Or what do you do with the odd and odious behavior? +The point is that you'll want to negotiate in advance what is on the record and off the record. +I'm going to turn now to some NGO imagery which will be familiar to some of you in this audience. +(Video) Narrator: For about 70 cents, you can buy a can of soda, regular or diet. +In Ethiopia, for just 70 cents a day, you can feed a child like Jamal nourishing meals. +For about 70 cents, you can also buy a cup of coffee. +In Guatemala, for 70 cents a day, you can help a child like Vilma get the clothes she needs to attend school. +Leslie Dodson: Now, there's some very common imagery that's been around for 40 years. +That's part of Sally Struthers's famine campaign. +Some of it is very familiar; it's the Madonna and child. +Women and children are very effective in terms of NGO campaigns. +We've been looking at this imagery for a long time, for hundreds and hundreds of years; the Madonna and child. +Here is [Duccio], and here is Michelangelo. +My concern is: Are we one-noting the genders in our narratives of poverty in developing communities? +Do we have women as victims, and are men only the perpetrators? +Are they the guys with the AK-47s or the boy soldiers? +Because that doesn't leave room for stories like the man who's selling ice cream at the refuge camp in Southern Sudan, where we did a project, or the stories of the men who are working on the bridge over the Blue Nile. +So I wonder: Are these stories inconvenient to our narratives? +And what about this narrative? This is a for-profit game, and its aim is to make development fun. +One question is: Did they inadvertently make fun of? +Another set of questions is: What are the rights of these children? +What rights of publicity or privacy do they have? Did they get paid? +This is a for-profit game. +Did they sign talent waivers? +I have to use these when I'm working with NGOs and documentary filmmakers here in the States. +In the States, we take our right to privacy and publicity very seriously. +So what is it about getting on a long-haul flight that makes these rights vaporize? +I don't want to just pick on our friends in the gaming arts; I'll turn to the graphic arts, where we often see these monolithic, homogeneous stories about the great country of Africa. +But Africa is not a country, it's a continent. It's 54 countries and thousands and thousands of languages. +So my question is: Is this imagery productive, or is it reductive? +I know that it's popular. +USAID just launched their campaign "Forward" — FWD: Famine, War and Drought. +And by looking at it, you would think that was happening all the time, all over Africa. +But this is about what's happening in the Horn of Africa. +And I'm still trying to make sense of Africa in a piece of Wonder Bread. +I'm wondering about that. +Germaine Greer has wondered about the same things and she says, "At breakfast and at dinner, we can sharpen our own appetites with a plentiful dose of the pornography of war, genocide, destitution and disease." She's right. +We have sharpened our appetites. +But we can also sharpen our insights. +It is not always war, insurrection and disease. +This is a picture out of South Sudan, just a couple of months before the new country was born. +I will continue to work as a researcher and a reporter in developing countries, but I do it with an altered ethic of seeing. +I ask myself whether my pictures are pandering, whether they contribute to stereotypes, whether the images match the message, am I complacent or am I complicit? +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, invention, Africa, engineering, innovation, technology, medicine, health, health care +Tania Douglas +13195 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: What good is a sophisticated piece of medical equipment to people in Africa if it can't handle the climate there? Biomedical engineer Tania Douglas shares stories of how we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology -- and how a deeper understanding of the context where it's used can lead us to better solutions. +Tania Douglas: To design better tech, understand context +It's a typical final resting place for medical equipment from hospitals in Africa. +Now, why is this? +Most of the medical devices used in Africa are imported, and quite often, they're not suitable for local conditions. +They may require trained staff that aren't available to operate and maintain and repair them; they may not be able to withstand high temperatures and humidity; and they usually require a constant and reliable supply of electricity. +An example of a medical device that may have ended up in an equipment graveyard at some point is an ultrasound monitor to track the heart rate of unborn babies. +This is the standard of care in rich countries. +In low-resource settings, the standard of care is often a midwife listening to the baby's heart rate through a horn. +Now, this approach has been around for more than a century. +It's very much dependent on the skill and the experience of the midwife. +Two young inventors from Uganda visited an antenatal clinic at a local hospital a few years ago, when they were students in information technology. +They noticed that quite often, the midwife was not able to hear any heart rate when trying to listen to it through this horn. +So they invented their own fetal heart rate monitor. +They adapted the horn and connected it to a smartphone. +An app on the smartphone records the heart rate, analyzes it and provides the midwife with a range of information on the status of the baby. These inventors — +(Applause) +are called Aaron Tushabe and Joshua Okello. +Another inventor, Tendekayi Katsiga, was working for an NGO in Botswana that manufactured hearing aids. +Now, he noticed that these hearing aids needed batteries that needed replacement, very often at a cost that was not affordable for most of the users that he knew. +In response, and being an engineer, Tendekayi invented a solar-powered battery charger with rechargeable batteries, that could be used in these hearing aids. +He cofounded a company called Deaftronics, which now manufactures the Solar Ear, which is a hearing aid powered by his invention. +My colleague, Sudesh Sivarasu, invented a smart glove for people who have suffered from leprosy. +Even though their disease may have been cured, the resulting nerve damage will have left many of them without a sense of touch in their hands. +The glove has sensors to detect temperature and pressure and warn the user. +It effectively serves as an artificial sense of touch and prevents injury. +Sudesh invented this glove after observing former leprosy patients as they carried out their day-to-day activities, and he learned about the risks and the hazards in their environment. +Now, the inventors that I've mentioned integrated engineering with healthcare. +This is what biomedical engineers do. +At the University of Cape Town, we run a course called Health Innovation and Design. +It's taken by many of our graduate students in biomedical engineering. +The aim of the course is to introduce these students to the philosophy of the design world. +The students are encouraged to engage with communities as they search for solutions to health-related problems. +One of the communities that we work with is a group of elderly people in Cape Town. +A recent class project had the task of addressing hearing loss in these elderly people. +The students, many of them being engineers, set out believing that they would design a better hearing aid. +They spent time with the elderly, chatted to their healthcare providers and their caregivers. +They soon realized that, actually, adequate hearing aids already existed, but many of the elderly who needed them and had access to them didn't have them. +And many of those who had hearing aids wouldn't wear them. +The students realized that many of these elderly people were in denial of their hearing loss. +There's a stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid. +They also discovered that the environment in which these elderly people lived did not accommodate their hearing loss. +For example, their homes and their community center were filled with echoes that interfered with their hearing. +So instead of developing and designing a new and better hearing aid, the students did an audit of the environment, with a view to improving the acoustics. +They also devised a campaign to raise awareness of hearing loss and to counter the stigma attached to wearing a hearing aid. +Now, this often happens when one pays attention to the user — in this case, the elderly — and their needs and their context. +One often has to move away from the focus of technology and reformulate the problem. +This approach to understanding a problem through listening and engaging is not new, but it often isn't followed by engineers, who are intent on developing technology. +One of our students has a background in software engineering. +He had often created products for clients that the client ultimately did not like. +When a client would reject a product, it was common at his company to proclaim that the client just didn't know what they wanted. +Having completed the course, the student fed back to us that he now realized that it was he who hadn't understood what the client wanted. +Another student gave us feedback that she had learned to design with empathy, as opposed to designing for functionality, which is what her engineering education had taught her. +So what all of this illustrates is that we're often blinded to real needs in our pursuit of technology. +But we need technology. +We need fetal heart rate monitors. +So how do we create more medical device success stories from Africa? +How do we create more inventors, rather than relying on a few exceptional individuals who are able to perceive real needs and respond in ways that work? +Well, we focus on needs and people and context. "But this is obvious," you might say, "Of course context is important." +But Africa is a diverse continent, with vast disparities in health and wealth and income and education. +If we assume that our engineers and inventors already know enough about the different African contexts to be able to solve the problems of our different communities and our most marginalized communities, then we might get it wrong. +But then, if we on the African continent don't necessarily know enough about it, then perhaps anybody with the right level of skill and commitment could fly in, spend some time listening and engaging and fly out knowing enough to invent for Africa. +But understanding context is not about a superficial interaction. +It's about deep engagement and an immersion in the realities and the complexities of our context. +And we in Africa are already immersed. +We already have a strong and rich base of knowledge from which to start finding solutions to our own problems. +So let's not rely too much on others when we live on a continent that is filled with untapped talent. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, business, education, work, technology, entrepreneur, art, science, science and art, creativity, innovation +Eric Berridge +13316 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: If you want to build a team of innovative problem-solvers, you should value the humanities just as much as the sciences, says entrepreneur Eric Berridge. He shares why tech companies should look beyond STEM graduates for new hires -- and how people with backgrounds in the arts and humanities can bring creativity and insight to technical workplaces. +Eric Berridge: Why tech needs the humanities +You've all been in a bar, right? +(Laughter) +But have you ever gone to a bar and come out with a $200 million business? +That's what happened to us about 10 years ago. +We'd had a terrible day. +We had this huge client that was killing us. +We're a software consulting firm, and we couldn't find a very specific programming skill to help this client deploy a cutting-edge cloud system. +We have a bunch of engineers, but none of them could please this client. +And we were about to be fired. +So we go out to the bar, and we're hanging out with our bartender friend Jeff, and he's doing what all good bartenders do: he's commiserating with us, making us feel better, relating to our pain, saying, "Hey, these guys are overblowing it. +I can figure it out. "So the next morning, we're hanging out in our team meeting, and we're all a little hazy... +(Laughter) +and I half-jokingly throw it out there. +I say, "Hey, I mean, we're about to be fired." So I say, "Why don't we send in Jeff, the bartender?" +(Laughter) +And there's some silence, some quizzical looks. +Finally, my chief of staff says, "That is a great idea." +(Laughter) +"Jeff is wicked smart. He's brilliant. He'll figure it out. +Let's send him in there. " +Now, Jeff was not a programmer. +In fact, he had dropped out of Penn as a philosophy major. +But he was brilliant, and he could go deep on topics, and we were about to be fired. +So we sent him in. +After a couple days of suspense, Jeff was still there. +They hadn't sent him home. +I couldn't believe it. +What was he doing? +Here's what I learned. +He had completely disarmed their fixation on the programming skill. +And he had changed the conversation, even changing what we were building. +The conversation was now about what we were going to build and why. +And yes, Jeff figured out how to program the solution, and the client became one of our best references. +Back then, we were 200 people, and half of our company was made up of computer science majors or engineers, but our experience with Jeff left us wondering: Could we repeat this through our business? +So we changed the way we recruited and trained. +And while we still sought after computer engineers and computer science majors, we sprinkled in artists, musicians, writers... and Jeff's story started to multiply itself throughout our company. +Our chief technology officer is an English major, and he was a bike messenger in Manhattan. +And today, we're a thousand people, yet still less than a hundred have degrees in computer science or engineering. +And yes, we're still a computer consulting firm. +We're the number one player in our market. We work with the fastest-growing software package to ever reach 10 billion dollars in annual sales. So it's working. +Meanwhile, the push for STEM-based education in this country — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — is fierce. +It's in all of our faces. +And this is a colossal mistake. +Since 2009, STEM majors in the United States have increased by 43 percent, while the humanities have stayed flat. +Our past president dedicated over a billion dollars towards STEM education at the expense of other subjects, and our current president recently redirected 200 million dollars of Department of Education funding into computer science. +And CEOs are continually complaining about an engineering-starved workforce. +These campaigns, coupled with the undeniable success of the tech economy — I mean, let's face it, seven out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world by market cap are technology firms — these things create an assumption that the path of our future workforce will be dominated by STEM. +I get it. On paper, it makes sense. It's tempting. But it's totally overblown. +It's like, the entire soccer team chases the ball into the corner, because that's where the ball is. +We shouldn't overvalue STEM. +We shouldn't value the sciences any more than we value the humanities. +And there are a couple of reasons. +Number one, today's technologies are incredibly intuitive. +The reason we've been able to recruit from all disciplines and swivel into specialized skills is because modern systems can be manipulated without writing code. +They're like LEGO: easy to put together, easy to learn, even easy to program, given the vast amounts of information that are available for learning. +Yes, our workforce needs specialized skill, but that skill requires a far less rigorous and formalized education than it did in the past. +Number two, the skills that are imperative and differentiated in a world with intuitive technology are the skills that help us to work together as humans, where the hard work is envisioning the end product and its usefulness, which requires real-world experience and judgment and historical context. +What Jeff's story taught us is that the customer was focused on the wrong thing. +It's the classic case: the technologist struggling to communicate with the business and the end user, and the business failing to articulate their needs. +I see it every day. +We are scratching the surface in our ability as humans to communicate and invent together, and while the sciences teach us how to build things, it's the humanities that teach us what to build and why to build them. +And they're equally as important, and they're just as hard. +It irks me... when I hear people treat the humanities as a lesser path, as the easier path. Come on! The humanities give us the context of our world. +They teach us how to think critically. They are purposely unstructured, while the sciences are purposely structured. +They teach us to persuade, they give us our language, which we use to convert our emotions to thought and action. +And they need to be on equal footing with the sciences. +And yes, you can hire a bunch of artists and build a tech company and have an incredible outcome. +Now, I'm not here today to tell you that STEM's bad. +I'm not here today to tell you that girls shouldn't code. +(Laughter) +Please. And that next bridge I drive over or that next elevator we all jump into — let's make sure there's an engineer behind it. +(Laughter) +But to fall into this paranoia that our future jobs will be dominated by STEM, that's just folly. +If you have friends or kids or relatives or grandchildren or nieces or nephews... encourage them to be whatever they want to be. +(Applause) +The jobs will be there. +Those tech CEOs that are clamoring for STEM grads, you know what they're hiring for? +Google, Apple, Facebook. +Sixty-five percent of their open job opportunities are non-technical: marketers, designers, project managers, program managers, product managers, lawyers, HR specialists, trainers, coaches, sellers, buyers, on and on. +These are the jobs they're hiring for. +And if there's one thing that our future workforce needs — and I think we can all agree on this — it's diversity. +But that diversity shouldn't end with gender or race. +We need a diversity of backgrounds and skills, with introverts and extroverts and leaders and followers. +That is our future workforce. +And the fact that the technology is getting easier and more accessible frees that workforce up to study whatever they damn well please. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, Africa, economics, trust, money +Robert Neuwirth +13340 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: From rides to homes and beyond, we're sharing everything these days, with the help of digital tools. But as modern and high-tech as the sharing economy seems, it's been alive in Africa for centuries, according to author Robert Neuwirth. He shares fascinating examples -- like apprenticeships that work like locally generated venture capital and systems for allocating scarce water -- and says that if we can propagate and scale these models, they could help communities thrive from the bottom up. +Robert Neuwirth: The age-old sharing economies of Africa -- and why we should scale them +So what I'm doing is a thought experiment. +Now you may know of or have read this book by this guy. +It's probably the first and maybe the only bestseller ever written about economics. +And you probably know a bit about what it says. +It talks about how nations all over the world will prosper through the individual pursuit of individual profit. +Individual profit will be the mechanism for the prosperity of the world. +But the funny thing about Adam Smith is that he was a stay-at-home kind of guy. +He actually never went further from Edinburgh than France and Switzerland. +So my thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened if Adam Smith had visited Africa. +And fortunately, there's actually an easy answer, because the Arab lawyer and traveler Ibn Battuta traveled down the east coast of Africa in the 14th century, and what he found when he got to Mogadishu was a market, and he wrote about it. +And basically, merchant ships came to the harbor, and they weren't even allowed to land. +They had to drop anchor in the harbor, and boats came out to them, and locals picked them and said, "You are my guest, I am now your broker." And they had to do business through the local broker, and if they went around that and didn't do business through the broker, they could go to court, and the deal would be canceled, and they would be thrown out of town. +And through this mechanism, everyone prospered. +And so if that was Adam Smith, he might look like this guy and say, "Ah! +That's a mutual aid society. +That's a share-the-wealth free market. "And when I put this question to Christian [Benimana], who had the stage at the beginning of this session, he responded that if Adam Smith had come to Africa, there would have been a sharing economy long before Airbnb and Uber. +And that's true. +So if we put this to work today, it would be very interesting. +There would be a lot of money flowing into the countries. +These are just figures of 10 percent of exports in these countries. +So the interesting thing is that this mutual aid economy still exists, and we can find examples of it in the strangest places. +So, this is Alaba International Market. +It's the largest electronics market in West Africa. +It's 10,000 merchants, they do about four billion dollars of turnover every year. +And they say they are ardent apostles of Adam Smith: competition is great, we're all in it individually, government doesn't help us. +But the interesting reality is that when I asked further, that's not what grew the market at all. +There's a behind-the-scenes principle that enables this market to grow. +And they do claim — you know, this is an interesting juxtaposition of the King James Bible and "How To Sell Yourself." That's what they say is their message. +But in reality, this market is governed by a sharing principle. +Every merchant, when you ask them, "How did you get started in global trade?" they say, "Well, when my master settled me." And when I finally got it into my head to ask, "What is this' settling? '" it turns out that when you've done your apprenticeship with someone you work for, they are required — required — to set you up in business. +That means paying your rent for two or three years and giving you a cash infusion so you can go out in the world and start trading. +That's locally generated venture capital. Right? And I can say with almost certainty that the Igbo apprenticeship system that governs Alaba International Market is the largest business incubator platform in the world. +And there are other sharing economies that we look for — merry-go-rounds, which are found in almost every shantytown. +They have different names in other cultures; this is the Kenyan name. +It's a way of generating cash. +It's a kitty — people throw money into a pot once a week, and once a week, one member of the group gets the money, and they can spend it on whatever they need to. +And there's also something called "acequias," and that is a Spanish word, but it comes from the North African Arabic; "saqiya" means "water wheel." And what the acequia is is a sharing system for scarce water. +It's migrated from North Africa to Spain, and from Spain to the west of the United States, where it still is used. +And it shares water by need rather than by who was there first. +And contrary, with all due respect, to what Llew [Claasen] said when he talked about blockchains and cryptocurrencies yesterday, there is no tragedy of the commons. +People in acequias have been commonly managing scarce water resources for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. +So taking this thought experiment, I wanted to go a little bit further and suggest that these things are managed communally, and they are taking care of scarce capital, scarce cash and scarce resources. +And it seems to me that we have actually two kinds of capitalism. +We have the capitalism of the top up. +And these are really interesting statistics, because three one-thousandths of one percent of the Nigerian population controls wealth equal to one-fourth of the GDP of the country. +One one-hundredth of one percent of the Kenyan population controls wealth equal to 75 percent of the GDP of the country. +That's the capitalism of top up. +And everyone else is with this guy, selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow on the highway in Lagos. +And when you're selling board games and bodybuilding equipment in a go-slow, that traffic jam is really, really, really bad, right? +Those of us in this sphere of the economy are caught in what I call "the capitalism of decay," because there's no way to rise up and get out of it, because they're lacking the resources that we talked about in those sharing economies. +And they're tripped up by the thesis of cassava and capitalism, that cassava has to be processed in order not to be poisonous, and I would argue that, similarly, the market economy needs to be processed in order to be fair to everyone. +So we have to look at what I call the "bottom down economy." These are these sharing models that exist out there that need to be propagated and used and scaled. OK? And if we propagate these things, we can begin to bring infrastructure to everyone, and that will ensure that communities are leading their own development, which is, I believe, what we need in the world, and, I would suggest, what we need in Africa. +I wanted to quote Steve Biko, and I thought it was really important to quote Steve Biko, because next month, September 12 to be exact, is the 40th anniversary of his murder by the South African state. +And you can read the quote. +He basically said that we're not here to compete. +And I love this quote: "... to make us a community of brothers and sisters jointly involved in the quest for a composite answer to the varied problems of life." And he also said that "the great powers of the world have done wonders in giving us an industrial and military look,..." and we don't have to copy that military-industrialist complex, because Africa can do things differently and restore the humanity of the world. +And so what I want to suggest here is that we have an opportunity, that we are all here in the mutual landscape to be able to do things, and that the journey starts now. +Thank you very much. +(Applause) + + +talks, leadership, business, motivation, communication, collaboration, cooperation, goal-setting, potential, personal growth +Amy Edmondson +13517 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Business school professor Amy Edmondson studies "teaming," where people come together quickly (and often temporarily) to solve new, urgent or unusual problems. Recalling stories of teamwork on the fly, such as the incredible rescue of 33 miners trapped half a mile underground in Chile in 2010, Edmondson shares the elements needed to turn a group of strangers into a quick-thinking team that can nimbly respond to challenges. +Amy Edmondson: How to turn a group of strangers into a team +It's August 5, 2010. +A massive collapse at the San José Copper Mine in Northern Chile has left 33 men trapped half a mile — that's two Empire State Buildings — below some of the hardest rock in the world. +They will find their way to a small refuge designed for this purpose, where they will find intense heat, filth and about enough food for two men for 10 days. +Aboveground, it doesn't take long for the experts to figure out that there is no solution. +No drilling technology in the industry is capable of getting through rock that hard and that deep fast enough to save their lives. +It's not exactly clear where the refuge is. +It's not even clear if the miners are alive. +And it's not even clear who's in charge. +Yet, within 70 days, all 33 of these men will be brought to the surface alive. +This remarkable story is a case study in the power of teaming. +So what's "teaming"? +Teaming is teamwork on the fly. +It's coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds — expertise, distance, time zone, you name it — to get work done. +Think of your favorite sports team, because this is different. +Sports teams work together: that magic, those game-saving plays. +Now, sports teams win because they practice. +But you can only practice if you have the same members over time. And so you can think of teaming... Sports teams embody the definition of a team, the formal definition. +It's a stable, bounded, reasonably small group of people who are interdependent in achieving a shared outcome. +You can think of teaming as a kind of pickup game in the park, in contrast to the formal, well-practiced team. +Now, which one is going to win in a playoff? +The answer is obvious. +So why do I study teaming? +It's because it's the way more and more of us have to work today. +With 24 / 7 global fast-paced operations, crazy shifting schedules and ever-narrower expertise, more and more of us have to work with different people all the time to get our work done. +We don't have the luxury of stable teams. +Now, when you can have that luxury, by all means do it. +But increasingly for a lot of the work we do today, we don't have that option. +One place where this is true is hospitals. +This is where I've done a lot of my research over the years. +So it turns out hospitals have to be open 24 / 7. +And patients — well, they're all different. +They're all different in complicated and unique ways. +The average hospitalized patient is seen by 60 or so different caregivers throughout his stay. +They come from different shifts, different specialties, different areas of expertise, and they may not even know each other's name. +But they have to coordinate in order for the patient to get great care. +And when they don't, the results can be tragic. +Of course, in teaming, the stakes aren't always life and death. +Consider what it takes to create an animated film, an award-winning animated film. +I had the good fortune to go to Disney Animation and study over 900 scientists, artists, storytellers, computer scientists as they teamed up in constantly changing configurations to create amazing outcomes like "Frozen." They just work together, and never the same group twice, not knowing what's going to happen next. +Now, taking care of patients in the emergency room and designing an animated film are obviously very different work. +Yet underneath the differences, they have a lot in common. +You have to get different expertise at different times, you don't have fixed roles, you don't have fixed deliverables, you're going to be doing a lot of things that have never been done before, and you can't do it in a stable team. +Now, this way of working isn't easy, but as I said, it's more and more the way many of us have to work, so we have to understand it. +And I would argue that it's especially needed for work that's complex and unpredictable and for solving big problems. +Paul Polman, the Unilever CEO, put this really well when he said, "The issues we face today are so big and so challenging, it becomes quite clear we can't do it alone, and so there is a certain humility in knowing you have to invite people in." Issues like food or water scarcity cannot be done by individuals, even by single companies, even by single sectors. +So we're reaching out to team across big teaming, grand-scale teaming. +Take the quest for smart cities. +Maybe you've seen some of the rhetoric: mixed-use designs, zero net energy buildings, smart mobility, green, livable, wonderful cities. +We have the vocabulary, we have the visions, not to mention the need. +We have the technology. +Two megatrends — urbanization, we're fast becoming a more urban planet, and climate change — have been increasingly pointing to cities as a crucial target for innovation. +And now around the world in various locations, people have been teaming up to design and try to create green, livable, smart cities. +It's a massive innovation challenge. +To understand it better, I studied a start-up — a smart-city software start-up — as it teamed up with a real estate developer, some civil engineers, a mayor, an architect, some builders, some tech companies. +Their goal was to build a demo smart city from scratch. OK. Five years into the project, not a whole lot had happened. +Six years, still no ground broken. +It seemed that teaming across industry boundaries was really, really hard. +OK, so... We had inadvertently discovered what I call "professional culture clash" with this project. +You know, software engineers and real estate developers think differently — really differently: different values, different time frames — time frames is a big one — and different jargon, different language. +And so they don't always see eye to eye. +I think this is a bigger problem than most of us realize. +In fact, I think professional culture clash is a major barrier to building the future that we aspire to build. +And so it becomes a problem that we have to understand, a problem that we have to figure out how to crack. +So how do you make sure teaming goes well, especially big teaming? +This is the question I've been trying to solve for a number of years in many different workplaces with my research. +Now, to begin to get just a glimpse of the answer to this question, let's go back to Chile. +In Chile, we witnessed 10 weeks of teaming by hundreds of individuals from different professions, different companies, different sectors, even different nations. +And as this process unfolded, they had lots of ideas, they tried many things, they experimented, they failed, they experienced devastating daily failure, but they picked up, persevered, and went on forward. +And really, what we witnessed there was they were able to be humble in the face of the very real challenge ahead, curious — all of these diverse individuals, diverse expertise especially, nationality as well, were quite curious about what each other brings. +And they were willing to take risks to learn fast what might work. +And ultimately, 17 days into this remarkable story, ideas came from everywhere. +They came from André Sougarret, who is a brilliant mining engineer who was appointed by the government to lead the rescue. +They came from NASA. +They came from Chilean Special Forces. They came from volunteers around the world. +And while many of us, including myself, watched from afar, these folks made slow, painful progress through the rock. +On the 17th day, they broke through to the refuge. +It's just a remarkable moment. +And with just a very small incision, they were able to find it through a bunch of experimental techniques. +And then for the next 53 days, that narrow lifeline would be the path where food and medicine and communication would travel, while aboveground, for 53 more days, they continued the teaming to find a way to create a much larger hole and also to design a capsule. +This is the capsule. +And then on the 69th day, over 22 painstaking hours, they managed to pull the miners out one by one. +So how did they overcome professional culture clash? +I would say in a word, it's leadership, but let me be more specific. +When teaming works, you can be sure that some leaders, leaders at all levels, have been crystal clear that they don't have the answers. +Let's call this "situational humility." It's appropriate humility. +We don't know how to do it. +You can be sure, as I said before, people were very curious, and this situational humility combined with curiosity creates a sense of psychological safety that allows you take risks with strangers, because let's face it: it's hard to speak up, right? +It's hard to ask for help. +It's hard to offer an idea that might be a stupid idea if you don't know people very well. +You need psychological safety to do that. +They overcame what I like to call the basic human challenge: it's hard to learn if you already know. +And unfortunately, we're hardwired to think we know. +And so we've got to remind ourselves — and we can do it — to be curious; to be curious about what others bring. +And that curiosity can also spawn a kind of generosity of interpretation. +But there's another barrier, and you all know it. +You wouldn't be in this room if you didn't know it. +And to explain it, I'm going to quote from the movie "The Paper Chase." This, by the way, is what Hollywood thinks a Harvard professor is supposed to look like. +You be the judge. +The professor in this famous scene, he's welcoming the new 1L class, and he says, "Look to your left. +Look to your right. one of you won't be here next year. "What message did they hear?" It's me or you. "For me to succeed, you must fail. +Now, I don't think too many organizations welcome newcomers that way anymore, but still, many times people arrive with that message of scarcity anyway. +It's me or you. +It's awfully hard to team if you inadvertently see others as competitors. +So we have to overcome that one as well, and when we do, the results can be awesome. +Abraham Lincoln said once, "I don't like that man very much. +I must get to know him better. "Think about that — I don't like him, that means I don't know him well enough. It's extraordinary. This is the mindset, I have to say, this is the mindset you need for effective teaming. +In our silos, we can get things done. +But when we step back and reach out and reach across, miracles can happen. +Miners can be rescued, patients can be saved, beautiful films can be created. +To get there, I think there's no better advice than this: look to your left, look to your right. +How quickly can you find the unique talents, skills and hopes of your neighbor, and how quickly, in turn, can you convey what you bring? +Because for us to team up to build the future we know we can create that none of us can do alone, that's the mindset we need. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, big problems, communication, future, humanity, computers, culture, social change, Internet, society, social media, virtual reality, technology +Jaron Lanier +14439 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In the early days of digital culture, Jaron Lanier helped craft a vision for the internet as public commons where humanity could share its knowledge -- but even then, this vision was haunted by the dark side of how it could turn out: with personal devices that control our lives, monitor our data and feed us stimuli. (Sound familiar?) In this visionary talk, Lanier reflects on a "globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake" companies like Google and Facebook made at the foundation of digital culture -- and how we can undo it. "We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them," he says. +Jaron Lanier: How we need to remake the internet +Back in the 1980s, actually, I gave my first talk at TED, and I brought some of the very, very first public demonstrations of virtual reality ever to the TED stage. +And at that time, we knew that we were facing a knife-edge future where the technology we needed, the technology we loved, could also be our undoing. +We knew that if we thought of our technology as a means to ever more power, if it was just a power trip, we'd eventually destroy ourselves. +That's what happens when you're on a power trip and nothing else. +So the idealism of digital culture back then was all about starting with that recognition of the possible darkness and trying to imagine a way to transcend it with beauty and creativity. +I always used to end my early TED Talks with a rather horrifying line, which is, "We have a challenge. +We have to create a culture around technology that is so beautiful, so meaningful, so deep, so endlessly creative, so filled with infinite potential that it draws us away from committing mass suicide. "So we talked about extinction as being one and the same as the need to create an alluring, infinitely creative future. +And I still believe that that alternative of creativity as an alternative to death is very real and true, maybe the most true thing there is. +In the case of virtual reality — well, the way I used to talk about it is that it would be something like what happened when people discovered language. +With language came new adventures, new depth, new meaning, new ways to connect, new ways to coordinate, new ways to imagine, new ways to raise children, and I imagined, with virtual reality, we'd have this new thing that would be like a conversation but also like waking-state intentional dreaming. +We called it post-symbolic communication, because it would be like just directly making the thing you experienced instead of indirectly making symbols to refer to things. +It was a beautiful vision, and it's one I still believe in, and yet, haunting that beautiful vision was the dark side of how it could also turn out. +And I suppose I could mention from one of the very earliest computer scientists, whose name was Norbert Wiener, and he wrote a book back in the '50s, from before I was even born, called "The Human Use of Human Beings." And in the book, he described the potential to create a computer system that would be gathering data from people and providing feedback to those people in real time in order to put them kind of partially, statistically, in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system, and he has this amazing line where he says, one could imagine, as a thought experiment — and I'm paraphrasing, this isn't a quote — one could imagine a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification. +And such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems. +And then he says, but this is only a thought experiment, and such a future is technologically infeasible. +(Laughter) +And yet, of course, it's what we have created, and it's what we must undo if we are to survive. So — +(Applause) +I believe that we made a very particular mistake, and it happened early on, and by understanding the mistake we made, we can undo it. +It happened in the '90s, and going into the turn of the century, and here's what happened. +Early digital culture, and indeed, digital culture to this day, had a sense of, I would say, lefty, socialist mission about it, that unlike other things that have been done, like the invention of books, everything on the internet must be purely public, must be available for free, because if even one person cannot afford it, then that would create this terrible inequity. +Now of course, there's other ways to deal with that. +If books cost money, you can have public libraries. And so forth. But we were thinking, no, no, no, this is an exception. +This must be pure public commons, that's what we want. +And so that spirit lives on. +You can experience it in designs like the Wikipedia, for instance, many others. +But at the same time, we also believed, with equal fervor, in this other thing that was completely incompatible, which is we loved our tech entrepreneurs. +We loved Steve Jobs; we loved this Nietzschean myth of the techie who could dent the universe. Right? And that mythical power still has a hold on us, as well. +So you have these two different passions, for making everything free and for the almost supernatural power of the tech entrepreneur. +How do you celebrate entrepreneurship when everything's free? +Well, there was only one solution back then, which was the advertising model. +And so therefore, Google was born free, with ads, Facebook was born free, with ads. +Now in the beginning, it was cute, like with the very earliest Google. +(Laughter) +The ads really were kind of ads. +They would be, like, your local dentist or something. +But there's thing called Moore's law that makes the computers more and more efficient and cheaper. +Their algorithms get better. +We actually have universities where people study them, and they get better and better. +And the customers and other entities who use these systems just got more and more experienced and got cleverer and cleverer. +And what started out as advertising really can't be called advertising anymore. +It turned into behavior modification, just as Norbert Wiener had worried it might. +And so I can't call these things social networks anymore. +I call them behavior modification empires. +(Applause) +And I refuse to vilify the individuals. +I have dear friends at these companies, sold a company to Google, even though I think it's one of these empires. +I don't think this is a matter of bad people who've done a bad thing. +I think this is a matter of a globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake, rather than a wave of evil. +Let me give you just another layer of detail into how this particular mistake functions. +So with behaviorism, you give the creature, whether it's a rat or a dog or a person, little treats and sometimes little punishments as feedback to what they do. +So if you have an animal in a cage, it might be candy and electric shocks. +But if you have a smartphone, it's not those things, it's symbolic punishment and reward. +Pavlov, one of the early behaviorists, demonstrated the famous principle. +You could train a dog to salivate just with the bell, just with the symbol. +So on social networks, social punishment and social reward function as the punishment and reward. +And we all know the feeling of these things. +You get this little thrill — "Somebody liked my stuff and it's being repeated." Or the punishment: "Oh my God, they don't like me, maybe somebody else is more popular, oh my God." So you have those two very common feelings, and they're doled out in such a way that you get caught in this loop. +As has been publicly acknowledged by many of the founders of the system, everybody knew this is what was going on. +But here's the thing: traditionally, in the academic study of the methods of behaviorism, there have been comparisons of positive and negative stimuli. +In this setting, a commercial setting, there's a new kind of difference that has kind of evaded the academic world for a while, and that difference is that whether positive stimuli are more effective than negative ones in different circumstances, the negative ones are cheaper. +They're the bargain stimuli. +So what I mean by that is it's much easier to lose trust than to build trust. +It takes a long time to build love. +It takes a short time to ruin love. +Now the customers of these behavior modification empires are on a very fast loop. +They're almost like high-frequency traders. +They're getting feedbacks from their spends or whatever their activities are if they're not spending, and they see what's working, and then they do more of that. +And so they're getting the quick feedback, which means they're responding more to the negative emotions, because those are the ones that rise faster, right? +And so therefore, even well-intentioned players who think all they're doing is advertising toothpaste end up advancing the cause of the negative people, the negative emotions, the cranks, the paranoids, the cynics, the nihilists. +Those are the ones who get amplified by the system. +And you can't pay one of these companies to make the world suddenly nice and improve democracy nearly as easily as you can pay to ruin those things. +And so this is the dilemma we've gotten ourselves into. +The alternative is to turn back the clock, with great difficulty, and remake that decision. +Remaking it would mean two things. +It would mean first that many people, those who could afford to, would actually pay for these things. +You'd pay for search, you'd pay for social networking. +How would you pay? +Maybe with a subscription fee, maybe with micro-payments as you use them. +There's a lot of options. +If some of you are recoiling, and you're thinking, "Oh my God, I would never pay for these things. +How could you ever get anyone to pay? "I want to remind you of something that just happened. +Around this same time that companies like Google and Facebook were formulating their free idea, a lot of cyber culture also believed that in the future, televisions and movies would be created in the same way, kind of like the Wikipedia. +But then, companies like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, said, "Actually, you know, subscribe. +We'll give you give you great TV. "And it worked! +We now are in this period called "peak TV," right? +So sometimes when you pay for stuff, things get better. +We can imagine a hypothetical — +(Applause) +We can imagine a hypothetical world of "peak social media." What would that be like? It would mean when you get on, you can get really useful, authoritative medical advice instead of cranks. +It could mean when you want to get factual information, there's not a bunch of weird, paranoid conspiracy theories. +We can imagine this wonderful other possibility. Ah. I dream of it. I believe it's possible. +I'm certain it's possible. +And I'm certain that the companies, the Googles and the Facebooks, would actually do better in this world. +I don't believe we need to punish Silicon Valley. +We just need to remake the decision. +Of the big tech companies, it's really only two that depend on behavior modification and spying as their business plan. +It's Google and Facebook. +(Laughter) +And I love you guys. +Really, I do. +Like, the people are fantastic. +I want to point out, if I may, if you look at Google, they can propagate cost centers endlessly with all of these companies, but they cannot propagate profit centers. +They cannot diversify, because they're hooked. +They're hooked on this model, just like their own users. +They're in the same trap as their users, and you can't run a big corporation that way. +So this is ultimately totally in the benefit of the shareholders and other stakeholders of these companies. +It's a win-win solution. +It'll just take some time to figure it out. +A lot of details to work out, totally doable. +(Laughter) +I don't believe our species can survive unless we fix this. +We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them. +(Applause) (Applause ends) +In the meantime, if the companies won't change, delete your accounts, OK? +(Laughter) +(Applause) +That's enough for now. Thank you so much. +(Applause) + + +talks, collaboration, communication, leadership, social change, society, trust, work, business +Frances Frei +15471 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Trust is the foundation for everything we do. But what do we do when it's broken? In an eye-opening talk, Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei gives a crash course in trust: how to build it, maintain it and rebuild it -- something she worked on during a recent stint at Uber. "If we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress," Frei says. +Frances Frei: How to build (and rebuild) trust +I want to talk to you about how to build and rebuild trust, because it's my belief that trust is the foundation for everything we do, and that if we can learn to trust one another more, we can have unprecedented human progress. +But what if trust is broken? +What if your CEO is caught on video, disparaging an employee? +What if your employees experience a culture of bias, exclusion and worse? +What if there's a data breach, and it feels an awful lot like a cover-up than seriously addressing it? +And most tragically, what if a technological fail leads to the loss of human life? +If I was giving this talk six months ago, I would have been wearing an Uber T-shirt. +I'm a Harvard Business School professor, but I was super attracted to going to an organization that was metaphorically and perhaps quite literally on fire. +I had read everything that was written in the newspaper, and that was precisely what drew me to the organization. +This was an organization that had lost trust with every constituent that mattered. +But there's a word about me that I should share. +My favorite trait is redemption. +I believe that there is a better version of us around every corner, and I have seen firsthand how organizations and communities and individuals change at breathtaking speed. +I went to Uber with the hopes that a turnaround there could give license to the rest of us who might have narrower versions of their challenges. +But when I got to Uber, I made a really big mistake. +I publicly committed to wearing an Uber T-shirt every day until every other employee was wearing an Uber T-shirt. +I had clearly not thought that through. +(Laughter) +It was 250 days of wearing an Uber T-shirt. +Now I am liberated from that commitment, as I am back at HBS, and what I'd like to do is share with you how far I have taken that liberty, which, it's baby steps, +(Laughter) +but I would just say I'm on my way. +(Laughter) +Now, trust, if we're going to rebuild it, we have to understand its component parts. +The component parts of trust are super well understood. +There's three things about trust. +If you sense that I am being authentic, you are much more likely to trust me. +If you sense that I have real rigor in my logic, you are far more likely to trust me. +And if you believe that my empathy is directed towards you, you are far more likely to trust me. +When all three of these things are working, we have great trust. +But if any one of these three gets shaky, if any one of these three wobbles, trust is threatened. +Now here's what I'd like to do. +I want each of us to be able to engender more trust tomorrow, literally tomorrow, than we do today. +And the way to do that is to understand where trust wobbles for ourselves and have a ready-made prescription to overcome it. +So that's what I would like to do together. +Would you give me some sense of whether or not you're here voluntarily? +(Laughter) +Yeah. OK. Alright. Awesome. OK. So — +(Laughter) +it's just super helpful feedback. +(Laughter) +So the most common wobble is empathy. +The most common wobble is that people just don't believe that we're mostly in it for them, and they believe that we're too self-distracted. +And it's no wonder. +We are all so busy with so many demands on our time, it's easy to crowd out the time and space that empathy requires. +For Dylan to be Dylan, that takes real time. +And for us, if we have too much to do, we may not have that time. +But that puts us into a vicious cycle, because without revealing empathy, it makes everything harder. +Without the benefit of the doubt of trust, it makes everything harder, and then we have less and less time for empathy, and so it goes. +So here's the prescription: identify where, when and to whom you are likely to offer your distraction. +That should trace pretty perfectly to when, where and to whom you are likely to withhold your empathy. +And if in those instances, we can come up with a trigger that gets us to look up, look at the people right in front of us, listen to them, deeply immerse ourselves in their perspectives, then we have a chance of having a sturdy leg of empathy. +And if you do nothing else, please put away your cell phone. +It is the largest distraction magnet yet to be made, and it is super difficult to create empathy and trust in its presence. +That takes care of the empathy wobblers. +Logic wobbles can come in two forms. +It's either the quality of your logic or it's your ability to communicate the logic. +Now if the quality of your logic is at risk, I can't really help you with that. +(Laughter) +It's like, not in this much time. +(Laughter) +But fortunately, it's often the case that our logic is sound, but it's our ability to communicate the logic that is in jeopardy. +Super fortunately, there's a very easy fix to this. +If we consider that there are two ways to communicate in the world, and Harvard Business School professors are known for two-by-twos — nonsense, it's the triangle that rocks. +(Laughter) +If we consider that there are two ways to communicate in the world, and the first one is when you take us on a journey, a magnificent journey that has twists and turns and mystery and drama, until you ultimately get to the point, and some of the best communicators in the world communicate just like this. +But if you have a logic wobble, this can be super dangerous. +So instead, I implore you, start with your point in a crisp half-sentence, and then give your supporting evidence. +This means that people will be able to get access to our awesome ideas, and just as importantly, if you get cut off before you're done... ladies — +(Laughter) +(Applause) +If you get cut off before you're done, you still get credit for the idea, as opposed to someone else coming in and snatching it from you. +(Applause) +You just gave me goosebumps. +(Laughter) +The third wobble is authenticity, and I find it to be the most vexing. +We as a human species can sniff out in a moment, literally in a moment, whether or not someone is being their authentic true self. +So in many ways, the prescription is clear. +You don't want to have an authenticity wobble? Be you. Great. And that is super easy to do when you're around people who are like you. +But if you represent any sort of difference, the prescription to "be you" can be super challenging. +I have been tempted at every step of my career, tempted personally and tempted by coaching of others, to mute who I am in the world. +I'm a woman of super strong opinions, with really deep convictions, direct speech. +I have a magnificent wife, and together, we have such crazy ambition. +I prefer men's clothes and comfortable shoes. +Thank you, Allbirds. +(Laughter) +In some contexts, this makes me different. +I hope that each person here has the beautiful luxury of representing difference in some context in your life. +But with that privilege comes a very sincere temptation to hold back who we are, and if we hold back who we are, we're less likely to be trusted. +And if we're less likely to be trusted, we're less likely to be given stretch assignments. +And without those stretch assignments, we're less likely to get promoted, and so on and so on until we are super depressed by the demographic tendencies of our senior leadership. +(Laughter) +And it all comes back to our being our authentic selves. +So here's my advice. +Wear whatever makes you feel fabulous. +Pay less attention to what you think people want to hear from you and far more attention to what your authentic, awesome self needs to say. +And to the leaders in the room, it is your obligation to set the conditions that not only make it safe for us to be authentic but make it welcome, make it celebrated, cherish it for exactly what it is, which is the key for us achieving greater excellence than we have ever known is possible. +So let's go back to Uber. +What happened at Uber? +When I got there, Uber was wobbling all over the place. +Empathy, logic, authenticity were all wobbling like crazy. +But we were able to find super effective, super quick fixes for two of the wobbles. +I'll give you an illustration of empathy. +In the meetings at Uber, it was not uncommon for people to be texting one another... about the meeting. +(Laughter) +I had never seen anything like it. +(Laughter) +It may have done many things, but it did not create a safe, empathetic environment. +The solution though, super clear: technology, off and away. +And that forced people to look up, to look at the people in front of them, to listen to them, to immerse themselves in their perspectives and to collaborate in unprecedented ways. +Logic was equally wobbly, and this was because the hypergrowth of the organization meant that people, managers were getting promoted again and again and again. +Soon, they were put in positions that they had no business being in. +Their positions outstripped their capability, and it was not their fault. +The solution: a massive influx of executive education that focused specifically on logic, on strategy and leadership. +It gave people the rigor of the quality of their logic, and it turned a whole lot of triangles, right-side up, so people were able to communicate effectively with one another. +The last one, authenticity, I'll say it's still mighty wobbly, but honestly, that doesn't make Uber very different from all of the other companies I've seen in Silicon Valley and beyond. +It is still much easier to coach people to fit in. +It is still much easier to reward people when they say something that you were going to say, as opposed to rewarding people when they say something entirely different than what you were going to say. +But when we figure out this, when we figure out how to celebrate difference and how to let people bring the best version of themselves forward, well holy cow, is that the world I want my sons to grow up in. +And with the collection of people here, it would be a privilege to lock arms with you and go ahead and rebuild trust in every corner of the globe. +Thank you very much. +(Applause) + + +talks, art, collaboration, communication, community, creativity, democracy, history, performance art, politics, society, social change, theater, United States +Oskar Eustis +17275 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Truth comes from the collision of different ideas, and theater plays an essential role in showing us that truth, says legendary artistic director Oskar Eustis. In this powerful talk, Eustis outlines his plan to reach (and listen to) people in places across the US where the theater, like many other institutions, has turned its back -- like the deindustrialized Rust Belt. "Our job is to try to hold up a vision to America that shows not only who all of us are individually, but that welds us back into the commonality that we need to be," Eustis says. "That's what the theater is supposed to do." +Oskar Eustis: Why theater is essential to democracy +Theater matters because democracy matters. +Theater is the essential art form of democracy, and we know this because they were born in the same city. +In the late 6th century BC, the idea of Western democracy was born. +It was, of course, a very partial and flawed democracy, but the idea that power should stem from the consent of the governed, that power should flow from below to above, not the other way around, was born in that decade. +And in that same decade, somebody — legend has it, somebody named Thespis — invented the idea of dialogue. +What does that mean, to invent dialogue? +Well, we know that the Festival of Dionysus gathered the entire citizenry of Athens on the side of the Acropolis, and they would listen to music, they would watch dancing, and they would have stories told as part of the Festival of Dionysus. +And storytelling is much like what's happening right now: I'm standing up here, the unitary authority, and I am talking to you. +And you are sitting back, and you are receiving what I have to say. +And you may disagree with it, you may think I'm an insufferable fool, you may be bored to death, but that dialogue is mostly taking place inside your own head. +But what happens if, instead of me talking to you — and Thespis thought of this — I just shift 90 degrees to the left, and I talk to another person onstage with me? +Everything changes, because at that moment, I'm not the possessor of truth; I'm a guy with an opinion. +And I'm talking to somebody else. +And you know what? +That other person has an opinion too, and it's drama, remember, conflict — they disagree with me. +There's a conflict between two points of view. +And the thesis of that is that the truth can only emerge in the conflict of different points of view. +It's not the possession of any one person. +And if you believe in democracy, you have to believe that. +If you don't believe that, you're an autocrat who is putting up with democracy. +But that's the basic thesis of democracy, that the conflict of different points of views leads to the truth. +What's the other thing that's happening? I'm not asking you to sit back and listen to me. I'm asking you to lean forward and imagine my point of view — what this looks like and feels like to me as a character. +And then I'm asking you to switch your mind and imagine what it feels like to the other person talking. +I'm asking you to exercise empathy. +And the idea that truth comes from the collision of different ideas and the emotional muscle of empathy are the necessary tools for democratic citizenship. +What else happens? The third thing really is you, is the community itself, is the audience. +And you know from personal experience that when you go to the movies, you walk into a movie theater, and if it's empty, you're delighted, because nothing's going to be between you and the movie. +You can spread out, put your legs over the top of the stadium seats, eat your popcorn and just enjoy it. +But if you walk into a live theater and you see that the theater is half full, your heart sinks. +You're disappointed immediately, because whether you knew it or not, you were coming to that theater to be part of an audience. +You were coming to have the collective experience of laughing together, crying together, holding your breath together to see what's going to happen next. +You may have walked into that theater as an individual consumer, but if the theater does its job, you've walked out with a sense of yourself as part of a whole, as part of a community. +That's built into the DNA of my art form. +Twenty-five hundred years later, Joe Papp decided that the culture should belong to everybody in the United States of America, and that it was his job to try to deliver on that promise. +He created Free Shakespeare in the Park. +And Free Shakespeare in the Park is based on a very simple idea, the idea that the best theater, the best art that we can produce, should go to everybody and belong to everybody, and to this day, every summer night in Central Park, 2,000 people are lining up to see the best theater we can provide for free. +It's not a commercial transaction. +In 1967, 13 years after he figured that out, he figured out something else, which is that the democratic circle was not complete by just giving the people the classics. +We had to actually let the people create their own classics and take the stage. +And so in 1967, Joe opened the Public Theater downtown on Astor Place, and the first show he ever produced was the world premiere of "Hair." That's the first thing he ever did that wasn't Shakespeare. +Clive Barnes in The Times said that it was as if Mr. Papp took a broom and swept up all the refuse from the East Village streets onto the stage at the Public. +(Laughter) +He didn't mean it complimentarily, but Joe put it up in the lobby, he was so proud of it. +(Laughter) (Applause) +And what the Public Theater did over the next years with amazing shows like "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf," "A Chorus Line," and — here's the most extraordinary example I can think of: Larry Kramer's savage cry of rage about the AIDS crisis, "The Normal Heart." Because when Joe produced that play in 1985, there was more information about AIDS in Frank Rich's review in the New York Times than the New York Times had published in the previous four years. +Larry was actually changing the dialogue about AIDS through writing this play, and Joe was by producing it. +I was blessed to commission and work on Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," and when doing that play and along with "Normal Heart," we could see that the culture was actually shifting, and it wasn't caused by the theater, but the theater was doing its part to change what it meant to be gay in the United States. +And I'm incredibly proud of that. +(Applause) +When I took over Joe's old job at the Public in 2005, I realized one of the problems we had was a victim of our own success, which is: Shakespeare in the Park had been founded as a program for access, and it was now the hardest ticket to get in New York City. +People slept out for two nights to get those tickets. +What was that doing? +That was eliminating 98 percent of the population from even considering going to it. +So we refounded the mobile unit and took Shakespeare to prisons, to homeless shelters, to community centers in all five boroughs and even in New Jersey and Westchester County. +And that program proved something to us that we knew intuitively: people's need for theater is as powerful as their desire for food or for drink. +It's been an extraordinary success, and we've continued it. +And then there was yet another barrier that we realized we weren't crossing, which is a barrier of participation. +And the idea, we said, is: How can we turn theater from being a commodity, an object, back into what it really is — a set of relationships among people? +And under the guidance of the amazing Lear deBessonet, we started the Public Works program, which now every summer produces these immense Shakespearean musical pageants, where Tony Award-winning actors and musicians are side by side with nannies and domestic workers and military veterans and recently incarcerated prisoners, amateurs and professionals, performing together on the same stage. +And it's not just a great social program, it's the best art that we do. +And the thesis of it is that artistry is not something that is the possession of a few. Artistry is inherent in being a human being. +Some of us just get to spend a lot more of our lives practicing it. And then occasionally — +(Applause) +you get a miracle like "Hamilton," Lin-Manuel's extraordinary retelling of the foundational story of this country through the eyes of the only Founding Father who was a bastard immigrant orphan from the West Indies. +And what Lin was doing is exactly what Shakespeare was doing. +He was taking the voice of the people, the language of the people, elevating it into verse, and by doing so, ennobling the language and ennobling the people who spoke the language. +And by casting that show entirely with a cast of black and brown people, what Lin was saying to us, he was reviving in us our greatest aspirations for the United States, our better angels of America, our sense of what this country could be, the inclusion that was at the heart of the American Dream. +And it unleashed a wave of patriotism in me and in our audience, the appetite for which is proving to be insatiable. +But there was another side to that, and it's where I want to end, and it's the last story I want to talk about. +Some of you may have heard that Vice President-elect Pence came to see "Hamilton" in New York. +And when he came in, some of my fellow New Yorkers booed him. +And beautifully, he said, "That's what freedom sounds like." +And at the end of the show, we read what I feel was a very respectful statement from the stage, and Vice President-elect Pence listened to it, but it sparked a certain amount of outrage, a tweetstorm, and also an internet boycott of "Hamilton" from outraged people who had felt we had treated him with disrespect. +I looked at that boycott and I said, we're getting something wrong here. +All of these people who have signed this boycott petition, they were never going to see "Hamilton" anyway. +It was never going to come to a city near them. +If it could come, they couldn't afford a ticket, and if they could afford a ticket, they didn't have the connections to get that ticket. +They weren't boycotting us; we had boycotted them. +And if you look at the red and blue electoral map of the United States, and if I were to tell you, "Oh, the blue is what designates all of the major nonprofit cultural institutions," I'd be telling you the truth. You'd believe me. +We in the culture have done exactly what the economy, what the educational system, what technology has done, which is turn our back on a large part of the country. +So this idea of inclusion, it has to keep going. +Next fall, we are sending out on tour a production of Lynn Nottage's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Sweat." Years of research in Redding, Pennsylvania led her to write this play about the deindustrialization of Pennsylvania: what happened when steel left, the rage that was unleashed, the tensions that were unleashed, the racism that was unleashed by the loss of jobs. +We're taking that play and we're touring it to rural counties in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. +We're partnering with community organizations there to try and make sure not only that we reach the people that we're trying to reach, but that we find ways to listen to them back and say, "The culture is here for you, too." Because — +(Applause) +we in the culture industry, we in the theater, have no right to say that we don't know what our job is. +It's in the DNA of our art form. +Our job "... is to hold up, as' twere, a mirror to nature; to show scorn her image, to show virtue her appearance, and the very age its form and pressure." Our job is to try to hold up a vision to America that shows not only who all of us are individually, but that welds us back into the commonality that we need to be, the sense of unity, the sense of whole, the sense of who we are as a country. +That's what the theater is supposed to do, and that's what we need to try to do as well as we can. +Thank you very much. +(Applause) + + +talks, AI, future, technology, humanity, machine learning, innovation, intelligence, society, computers +Max Tegmark +17851 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Many artificial intelligence researchers expect AI to outsmart humans at all tasks and jobs within decades, enabling a future where we're restricted only by the laws of physics, not the limits of our intelligence. MIT physicist and AI researcher Max Tegmark separates the real opportunities and threats from the myths, describing the concrete steps we should take today to ensure that AI ends up being the best -- rather than worst -- thing to ever happen to humanity. +Max Tegmark: How to get empowered, not overpowered, by AI +After 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, our universe has woken up and become aware of itself. +From a small blue planet, tiny, conscious parts of our universe have begun gazing out into the cosmos with telescopes, discovering something humbling. +We've discovered that our universe is vastly grander than our ancestors imagined and that life seems to be an almost imperceptibly small perturbation on an otherwise dead universe. +But we've also discovered something inspiring, which is that the technology we're developing has the potential to help life flourish like never before, not just for centuries but for billions of years, and not just on earth but throughout much of this amazing cosmos. +I think of the earliest life as "Life 1.0" because it was really dumb, like bacteria, unable to learn anything during its lifetime. +I think of us humans as "Life 2.0" because we can learn, which we in nerdy, geek speak, might think of as installing new software into our brains, like languages and job skills. "Life 3.0," which can design not only its software but also its hardware of course doesn't exist yet. +But perhaps our technology has already made us "Life 2.1," with our artificial knees, pacemakers and cochlear implants. +So let's take a closer look at our relationship with technology, OK? As an example, the Apollo 11 moon mission was both successful and inspiring, showing that when we humans use technology wisely, we can accomplish things that our ancestors could only dream of. +But there's an even more inspiring journey propelled by something more powerful than rocket engines, where the passengers aren't just three astronauts but all of humanity. +Let's talk about our collective journey into the future with artificial intelligence. +My friend Jaan Tallinn likes to point out that just as with rocketry, it's not enough to make our technology powerful. +We also have to figure out, if we're going to be really ambitious, how to steer it and where we want to go with it. +So let's talk about all three for artificial intelligence: the power, the steering and the destination. +Let's start with the power. +I define intelligence very inclusively — simply as our ability to accomplish complex goals, because I want to include both biological and artificial intelligence. +And I want to avoid the silly carbon-chauvinism idea that you can only be smart if you're made of meat. +It's really amazing how the power of AI has grown recently. +Just think about it. +Not long ago, robots couldn't walk. +Now, they can do backflips. +Not long ago, we didn't have self-driving cars. +Now, we have self-flying rockets. +Not long ago, AI couldn't do face recognition. +Now, AI can generate fake faces and simulate your face saying stuff that you never said. +Not long ago, AI couldn't beat us at the game of Go. +Then, Google DeepMind's AlphaZero AI took 3,000 years of human Go games and Go wisdom, ignored it all and became the world's best player by just playing against itself. +And the most impressive feat here wasn't that it crushed human gamers, but that it crushed human AI researchers who had spent decades handcrafting game-playing software. +And AlphaZero crushed human AI researchers not just in Go but even at chess, which we have been working on since 1950. +So all this amazing recent progress in AI really begs the question: How far will it go? +I like to think about this question in terms of this abstract landscape of tasks, where the elevation represents how hard it is for AI to do each task at human level, and the sea level represents what AI can do today. +The sea level is rising as AI improves, so there's a kind of global warming going on here in the task landscape. +And the obvious takeaway is to avoid careers at the waterfront — +(Laughter) +which will soon be automated and disrupted. +But there's a much bigger question as well. +How high will the water end up rising? +Will it eventually rise to flood everything, matching human intelligence at all tasks. +This is the definition of artificial general intelligence — AGI, which has been the holy grail of AI research since its inception. +By this definition, people who say, "Ah, there will always be jobs that humans can do better than machines," are simply saying that we'll never get AGI. +Sure, we might still choose to have some human jobs or to give humans income and purpose with our jobs, but AGI will in any case transform life as we know it with humans no longer being the most intelligent. +Now, if the water level does reach AGI, then further AI progress will be driven mainly not by humans but by AI, which means that there's a possibility that further AI progress could be way faster than the typical human research and development timescale of years, raising the controversial possibility of an intelligence explosion where recursively self-improving AI rapidly leaves human intelligence far behind, creating what's known as superintelligence. +Alright, reality check: Are we going to get AGI any time soon? +Some famous AI researchers, like Rodney Brooks, think it won't happen for hundreds of years. +But others, like Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, are more optimistic and are working to try to make it happen much sooner. +And recent surveys have shown that most AI researchers actually share Demis's optimism, expecting that we will get AGI within decades, so within the lifetime of many of us, which begs the question — and then what? +What do we want the role of humans to be if machines can do everything better and cheaper than us? +The way I see it, we face a choice. +One option is to be complacent. We can say, "Oh, let's just build machines that can do everything we can do and not worry about the consequences. +Come on, if we build technology that makes all humans obsolete, what could possibly go wrong? " +(Laughter) +But I think that would be embarrassingly lame. +I think we should be more ambitious — in the spirit of TED. +Let's envision a truly inspiring high-tech future and try to steer towards it. +This brings us to the second part of our rocket metaphor: the steering. +We're making AI more powerful, but how can we steer towards a future where AI helps humanity flourish rather than flounder? +To help with this, I cofounded the Future of Life Institute. +It's a small nonprofit promoting beneficial technology use, and our goal is simply for the future of life to exist and to be as inspiring as possible. +You know, I love technology. +Technology is why today is better than the Stone Age. +And I'm optimistic that we can create a really inspiring high-tech future... if — and this is a big if — if we win the wisdom race — the race between the growing power of our technology and the growing wisdom with which we manage it. +But this is going to require a change of strategy because our old strategy has been learning from mistakes. +We invented fire, screwed up a bunch of times — invented the fire extinguisher. +(Laughter) +We invented the car, screwed up a bunch of times — invented the traffic light, the seat belt and the airbag, but with more powerful technology like nuclear weapons and AGI, learning from mistakes is a lousy strategy, don't you think? +(Laughter) +It's much better to be proactive rather than reactive; plan ahead and get things right the first time because that might be the only time we'll get. +But it is funny because sometimes people tell me, "Max, shhh, don't talk like that. +That's Luddite scaremongering. "But it's not scaremongering. +It's what we at MIT call safety engineering. +Think about it: before NASA launched the Apollo 11 mission, they systematically thought through everything that could go wrong when you put people on top of explosive fuel tanks and launch them somewhere where no one could help them. +And there was a lot that could go wrong. Was that scaremongering? No. That's was precisely the safety engineering that ensured the success of the mission, and that is precisely the strategy I think we should take with AGI. +Think through what can go wrong to make sure it goes right. +So in this spirit, we've organized conferences, bringing together leading AI researchers and other thinkers to discuss how to grow this wisdom we need to keep AI beneficial. +Our last conference was in Asilomar, California last year and produced this list of 23 principles which have since been signed by over 1,000 AI researchers and key industry leaders, and I want to tell you about three of these principles. +One is that we should avoid an arms race and lethal autonomous weapons. +The idea here is that any science can be used for new ways of helping people or new ways of harming people. +For example, biology and chemistry are much more likely to be used for new medicines or new cures than for new ways of killing people, because biologists and chemists pushed hard — and successfully — for bans on biological and chemical weapons. +And in the same spirit, most AI researchers want to stigmatize and ban lethal autonomous weapons. +Another Asilomar AI principle is that we should mitigate AI-fueled income inequality. +I think that if we can grow the economic pie dramatically with AI and we still can't figure out how to divide this pie so that everyone is better off, then shame on us. +(Applause) +Alright, now raise your hand if your computer has ever crashed. +(Laughter) +Wow, that's a lot of hands. +Well, then you'll appreciate this principle that we should invest much more in AI safety research, because as we put AI in charge of even more decisions and infrastructure, we need to figure out how to transform today's buggy and hackable computers into robust AI systems that we can really trust, because otherwise, all this awesome new technology can malfunction and harm us, or get hacked and be turned against us. +And this AI safety work has to include work on AI value alignment, because the real threat from AGI isn't malice, like in silly Hollywood movies, but competence — AGI accomplishing goals that just aren't aligned with ours. +For example, when we humans drove the West African black rhino extinct, we didn't do it because we were a bunch of evil rhinoceros haters, did we? +We did it because we were smarter than them and our goals weren't aligned with theirs. +But AGI is by definition smarter than us, so to make sure that we don't put ourselves in the position of those rhinos if we create AGI, we need to figure out how to make machines understand our goals, adopt our goals and retain our goals. +And whose goals should these be, anyway? +Which goals should they be? +This brings us to the third part of our rocket metaphor: the destination. +We're making AI more powerful, trying to figure out how to steer it, but where do we want to go with it? +This is the elephant in the room that almost nobody talks about — not even here at TED — because we're so fixated on short-term AI challenges. +Look, our species is trying to build AGI, motivated by curiosity and economics, but what sort of future society are we hoping for if we succeed? +We did an opinion poll on this recently, and I was struck to see that most people actually want us to build superintelligence: AI that's vastly smarter than us in all ways. +What there was the greatest agreement on was that we should be ambitious and help life spread into the cosmos, but there was much less agreement about who or what should be in charge. +And I was actually quite amused to see that there's some some people who want it to be just machines. +(Laughter) +And there was total disagreement about what the role of humans should be, even at the most basic level, so let's take a closer look at possible futures that we might choose to steer toward, alright? +So don't get me wrong here. +I'm not talking about space travel, merely about humanity's metaphorical journey into the future. +So one option that some of my AI colleagues like is to build superintelligence and keep it under human control, like an enslaved god, disconnected from the internet and used to create unimaginable technology and wealth for whoever controls it. +But Lord Acton warned us that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so you might worry that maybe we humans just aren't smart enough, or wise enough rather, to handle this much power. +Also, aside from any moral qualms you might have about enslaving superior minds, you might worry that maybe the superintelligence could outsmart us, break out and take over. +But I also have colleagues who are fine with AI taking over and even causing human extinction, as long as we feel the the AIs are our worthy descendants, like our children. +But how would we know that the AIs have adopted our best values and aren't just unconscious zombies tricking us into anthropomorphizing them? +Also, shouldn't those people who don't want human extinction have a say in the matter, too? +Now, if you didn't like either of those two high-tech options, it's important to remember that low-tech is suicide from a cosmic perspective, because if we don't go far beyond today's technology, the question isn't whether humanity is going to go extinct, merely whether we're going to get taken out by the next killer asteroid, supervolcano or some other problem that better technology could have solved. +So, how about having our cake and eating it... with AGI that's not enslaved but treats us well because its values are aligned with ours? +This is the gist of what Eliezer Yudkowsky has called "friendly AI," and if we can do this, it could be awesome. +It could not only eliminate negative experiences like disease, poverty, crime and other suffering, but it could also give us the freedom to choose from a fantastic new diversity of positive experiences — basically making us the masters of our own destiny. +So in summary, our situation with technology is complicated, but the big picture is rather simple. +Most AI researchers expect AGI within decades, and if we just bumble into this unprepared, it will probably be the biggest mistake in human history — let's face it. +It could enable brutal, global dictatorship with unprecedented inequality, surveillance and suffering, and maybe even human extinction. +But if we steer carefully, we could end up in a fantastic future where everybody's better off: the poor are richer, the rich are richer, everybody is healthy and free to live out their dreams. +Now, hang on. Do you folks want the future that's politically right or left? +Do you want the pious society with strict moral rules, or do you an hedonistic free-for-all, more like Burning Man 24 / 7? +Do you want beautiful beaches, forests and lakes, or would you prefer to rearrange some of those atoms with the computers, enabling virtual experiences? +With friendly AI, we could simply build all of these societies and give people the freedom to choose which one they want to live in because we would no longer be limited by our intelligence, merely by the laws of physics. +So the resources and space for this would be astronomical — literally. +So here's our choice. +We can either be complacent about our future, taking as an article of blind faith that any new technology is guaranteed to be beneficial, and just repeat that to ourselves as a mantra over and over and over again as we drift like a rudderless ship towards our own obsolescence. +Or we can be ambitious — thinking hard about how to steer our technology and where we want to go with it to create the age of amazement. +We're all here to celebrate the age of amazement, and I feel that its essence should lie in becoming not overpowered but empowered by our technology. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, music, live music, performance, entertainment, art, creativity, culture, cities, TEDx +Elizabeth Cawein +17909 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: How does a city become known as a "music city"? Publicist Elizabeth Cawein explains how thriving music scenes make cities healthier and happier and shares ideas for bolstering your local music scene -- and showing off your city's talent to the world. +Elizabeth Cawein: How to build a thriving music scene in your city +Each of these songs represents a scene, a movement, in some cases, a sonic revolution that completely altered the course of popular music. +They're all also calling cards, almost, for those cities, songs totally linked with their city's identity, and it might be why you probably consider them to be music cities. +Now, the magical mythical thing, the thing we kind of all love about stories like these is that those cities weren't doing anything in particular to make those moments happen. +There's no formula for capturing lightning in a bottle. +A formula didn't give us grunge music or introduce Tupac to Dr. Dre, and there's definitely no blueprint for how to open your record business in a South Memphis neighborhood that, turns out, is home to Booker T. Jones, William Bell and Albert King. +So this is just something that happens, then, right? +When the stars perfectly align, great music just happens. +And in the meantime, New York and Nashville can churn out the hits that come through our radios, define our generations and soundtrack our weddings and our funerals and everything in between. +Well, I don't know about you, but the very idea of that is just deadly boring to me. +There are musicians all around you, making powerful, important music, and thanks to the internet and its limitless possibilities for creators to create music and fans to discover that music, those zeitgeist songs don't have to be handed down to us from some conference room full of songwriters in a corporate high-rise. +But also, and more importantly, we can't decide that it's just something that happens, because music is about so much more than hits, those big, iconic moments that change everything. +It's more than just entertainment. +For so many of us, music is truly a way to navigate life. +A means of self-expression, sure, but it also helps us find our self-worth and figure out who we are. +It connects us with other people as almost nothing else can, across language barriers, across social and cultural and economic divides. +Music makes us smarter and healthier and happier. +Music is necessary. What if you lived in a city that believed that, that said, "We're not waiting for that hit song to define us. +We're a music city because music is necessary. " +By seeing music as necessary, a city can build two things: first, an ecosystem to support the development of professional musicians and music business; and second, a receptive and engaged audience to sustain them. +And those are the two critical elements of a music city, a city whose leaders recognize the importance of music for our development as individuals, our connection as a community and our viability as a vibrant place to live. +See, smart cities, music cities, know that thriving nightlife, a creative class, culture is what attracts young, talented people to cities. +It's what brings that lightning. +And no, we can't predict the next egg that will hatch, but we can create a city that acts like an incubator. +To do that, first, we've got to know what we've got. +That means identifying and quantifying our assets. +We need to know them backward and forward, from who and what and where they are to what their impact is on the economy. +Let's count our recording studios and our record labels, our historic landmarks and our hard-core punk clubs. +We should count monthly free jazz nights and weekly folk jams, music schools, artist development, instrument shops, every lathe and every luthier, music museums open year round and music festivals open just one weekend a year. +Now, ideally through this process, we'll create an actual asset map, dropping a pin for each one, allowing us to see exactly what we've got and where organic momentum is already happening. +Because it's not enough to paint in broad strokes here. +When it comes to specific support for music locally and a broad understanding of a music brand nationally, you've got to have the receipts. +Next, we'll need to identify our challenges. +Now, it's important to know that, for the most part, this won't be just the opposite of step one. +We won't gain a whole lot by simply thinking about what's missing from our map. +Instead, we need to approach this more holistically. +There are lots of music venues on our map. Awesome. But are they struggling? +Do we have a venue ladder, which just means, can an artist starting out at a coffee house open mic see a clear path for how they'll grow from that 25-seat room to a hundred-seat room and so on? +Or are we expecting them to go from a coffeehouse to a coliseum? +Maybe our challenges lie in city infrastructure: public transportation, affordable housing. +Maybe, like in London, where the number of music venues went from 400 in 2010 to 100 in 2015, we need to think about protections against gentrification. +The mayor of London, in December of last year, actually added something called the "Agent of Change" principle to the city's comprehensive plan. +And the name says it all. If a real-estate developer wants to build condos next to an existing music venue, the developer is the agent of change. They have to take the necessary steps for noise mitigation. +Next, and this is a very big one, we need leadership, and we need a strategy. +Now we know there's a lot of magic in this mix: a lot of right people, right place, right time. +And that will never stop being an important element of the way music is made, the way some of the best, most enduring music is made. +But there cannot be a leadership vacuum. +In 2018, thriving music cities don't often happen and don't have to happen accidentally. +We need elected officials who recognize the power of music and elevate the voices of creatives, and they're ready to put a strategy in place. +In music cities, from Berlin to Paris to Bogotá, music advisory councils ensure that musicians have a seat at the table. +They're volunteer councils, and they work directly with a designated advocate inside of city hall or even the chamber of commerce. +The strongest strategies will build music community supports like this one inward while also exporting music outward. They go hand in hand. +When we look inward, we create that place that musicians want to live. And when we look outward, we build opportunities for them to advance their career while also driving attention back to our city and leveraging music as a talent-attraction tool. +And here's something else that will help with that: we've got to figure out who we are. +Now, when I say Austin, you probably think "live music capital." And why? +Because in 1991, leadership in Austin saw something percolating with an existing asset, and they chose to own it. +By recognizing that momentum, naming it and claiming it, they inevitably caused more live music venues to open, existing spaces to add live music to their repertoire, and they created a swell of civic buy-in around the idea, which meant that it wasn't just a slogan in some tourism pamphlet. +It was something that locals really started to believe and take pride in. +Now, generally speaking, what Austin created is just an assets-based narrative. +And when we think back to step one, we know that every city will not tick every box. +Many cities won't have recording studios like Memphis or a songwriter and publishing scene like Nashville, and that's not a dealbreaker. +We simply have to find the momentum happening in our city. +What are our unique assets in comparison to no other place? +So, if all of that sounds like something you'd like to happen where you live, here are three things you can do to move the needle. +First, you can use your feet, your ears and your dollars. Show up. Be that receptive and engaged audience that is so necessary for a music city to thrive. +Pay a cover charge. Buy a record. Discover new music, and please, take your friends. +Two, you can use your voice. +Buy into the assets-based narrative. Talk about and celebrate what your city has. +And three, you can use your vote. +Seek out leadership that doesn't just pay lip service to your city's music, but recognizes its power and is prepared to put a strategy in place to elevate it, grow it and build collaboration. +There really is no telling what city could be defined by a certain scene or a certain song in the next decade, but as much as we absolutely cannot predict that, what we absolutely can predict is what happens when we treat music as necessary and we work to build a music city. +And that is a place where I want to live. +Thank you. (Applause) + + +talks, success, business, leadership, goal-setting, motivation, work, future, potential, collaboration, personal growth +John Doerr +17922 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Our leaders and institutions are failing us, but it's not always because they're bad or unethical, says venture capitalist John Doerr -- often, it's simply because they're leading us toward the wrong objectives. In this practical talk, Doerr shows us how we can get back on track with "Objectives and Key Results," or OKRs -- a goal-setting system that's been employed by the likes of Google, Intel and Bono to set and execute on audacious goals. Learn more about how setting the right goals can mean the difference between success and failure -- and how we can use OKRs to hold our leaders and ourselves accountable. +John Doerr: Why the secret to success is setting the right goals +We're at a critical moment. +Our leaders, some of our great institutions are failing us. Why? In some cases, it's because they're bad or unethical, but often, they've taken us to the wrong objectives. +And this is unacceptable. This has to stop. How are we going to correct these wrongs? +How are we going to choose the right course? +It's not going to be easy. +For years, I've worked with talented teams and they've chosen the right objectives and the wrong objectives. +Many have succeeded, others of them have failed. +And today I'm going to share with you what really makes a difference — that's what's crucial, how and why they set meaningful and audacious goals, the right goals for the right reasons. +Let's go back to 1975. +Yep, this is me. +I've got a lot to learn, I'm a computer engineer, I've got long hair, but I'm working under Andy Grove, who's been called the greatest manager of his or any other era. +Andy was a superb leader and also a teacher, and he said to me, "John, it almost doesn't matter what you know. +Execution is what matters the most. "And so Andy invented a system called" Objectives and Key Results. "It kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? +And it's all about excellent execution. +So here's a classic video from the 1970s of professor Andy Grove. +(Video) Andy Grove: The two key phrases of the management by objective systems are the objectives and the key results, and they match the two purposes. +The objective is the direction. +The key results have to be measured, but at the end you can look and without any argument say, "Did I do that, or did I not do that?" Yes. No. Simple. +John Doerr: That's Andy. Yes. No. Simple. Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, are a simple goal-setting system and they work for organizations, they work for teams, they even work for individuals. +The objectives are what you want to have accomplished. +The key results are how I'm going to get that done. Objectives. Key results. What and how. But here's the truth: many of us are setting goals wrong, and most of us are not setting goals at all. +A lot of organizations set objectives and meet them. +They ship their sales, they introduce their new products, they make their numbers, but they lack a sense of purpose to inspire their teams. +So how do you set these goals the right way? +First, you must answer the question, "Why?" Why? Because truly transformational teams combine their ambitions to their passion and to their purpose, and they develop a clear and compelling sense of why. +I want to tell you a story. +I work with a remarkable entrepreneur. Her name is Jini Kim. +She runs a company called Nuna. +Nuna is a health care data company. +And when Nuna was founded, they used data to serve the health needs of lots of workers at large companies. +And then two years into the company's life, the federal government issued a proposal to build the first ever cloud database for Medicaid. +Now, you'll remember that Medicaid is that program that serves 70 million Americans, our poor, our children and people with disabilities. +Nuna at the time was just 15 people and this database had to be built in one year, and they had a whole set of commitments that they had to honor, and frankly, they weren't going to make very much money on the project. +This was a bet-your-company moment, and Jini seized it. +She jumped at the opportunity. +She did not flinch. Why? Well, it's a personal why. +Jini's younger brother Kimong has autism. +And when he was seven, he had his first grand mal seizure at Disneyland. +He fell to the ground. He stopped breathing. Jini's parents are Korean immigrants. +They came to the country with limited resources speaking little English, so it was up to Jini to enroll her family in Medicaid. +She was nine years old. +That moment defined her mission, and that mission became her company, and that company bid on, won and delivered on that contract. +Here's Jini to tell you why. +(Video) Jini Kim: Medicaid saved my family from bankruptcy, and today it provides for Kimong's health and for millions of others. +Nuna is my love letter to Medicaid. +Every row of data is a life whose story deserves to be told with dignity. +JD: And Jini's story tells us that a compelling sense of why can be the launchpad for our objectives. +Remember, that's what we want to have accomplished. +And objectives are significant, they're action-oriented, they are inspiring, and they're a kind of vaccine against fuzzy thinking. +You think a rockstar would be an unlikely user of Objectives and Key Results, but for years, Bono has used OKRs to wage a global war against poverty and disease, and his ONE organization has focused on two really gorgeous, audacious objectives. +The first is debt relief for the poorest countries in the world. +The next is universal access to anti-HIV drugs. +Now, why are these good objectives? +Let's go back to our checklist. Significant? Check. Concrete? Yes. Action-oriented? Yes. Inspirational? Well, let's just listen to Bono. +(Video) Bono: So you're passionate? How passionate? What actions does your passion lead you to do? +If the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head, then your passion means nothing. +The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside it. +It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where failing is not a fireable offense. +And when you have that sort of structure and environment and the right people, magic is around the corner. +JD: I love that. +OKRs cultivate the madness, and magic is right around the corner. This is perfect. +So with Jini we've covered the whys, with Bono the whats of goal-setting. +Let's turn our attention to the hows. +Remember, the hows are the key results. That's how we meet our objectives. +And good results are specific and time-bound. +They're aggressive but realistic. +They're measurable, and they're verifiable. +Those are good key results. +In 1999, I introduced OKRs to Google's cofounders, Larry and Sergey. +Here they are, 24 years old in their garage. +And Sergey enthusiastically said he'd adopt them. +Well, not quite. +What he really said was, "We don't have any other way to manage this company, so we'll give it a go." +(Laughter) +And I took that as a kind of endorsement. +But every quarter since then, every Googler has written down her objectives and her key results. +They've graded them, and they've published them for everyone to see. +And these are not used for bonuses or for promotions. +They're set aside. +They're used for a higher purpose, and that's to get collective commitment to truly stretch goals. +In 2008, a Googler, Sundar Pichai, took on an objective which was to build the next generation client platform for the future of web applications — in other words, build the best browser. +He was very thoughtful about how he chose his key results. +How do you measure the best browser? +It could be ad clicks or engagement. No. He said: numbers of users, because users are going to decide if Chrome is a great browser or not. +So he had this one three-year-long objective: build the best browser. +And then every year he stuck to the same key results, numbers of users, but he upped the ante. +In the first year, his goal was 20 million users and he missed it. He got less than 10. Second year, he raised the bar to 50 million. +He got to 37 million users. Somewhat better. In the third year, he upped the ante once more to a hundred million. +He launched an aggressive marketing campaign, broader distribution, improved the technology, and kaboom! +He got 111 million users. +Here's why I like this story, not so much for the happy ending, but it shows someone carefully choosing the right objective and then sticking to it year after year after year. +It's a perfect story for a nerd like me. +Now, I think of OKRs as transparent vessels that are made from the whats and hows of our ambitions. +What really matters is the why that we pour into those vessels. +That's why we do our work. +OKRs are not a silver bullet. +They're not going to be a substitute for a strong culture or for stronger leadership, but when those fundamentals are in place, they can take you to the mountaintop. +I want you to think about your life for a moment. +Do you have the right metrics? +Take time to write down your values, your objectives and your key results. Do it today. If you'd like some feedback on them, you can send them to me. +I'm john @ whatmatters.com. +If we think of the world-changing goals of an Intel, of a Nuna, of Bono, of Google, they're remarkable: ubiquitous computing, affordable health care, high-quality for everyone, ending global poverty, access to all the world's information. +Here's the deal: every one of those goals is powered today by OKRs. +Now, I've been called the Johnny Appleseed of OKRs for spreading the good gospel according to Andy Grove, but I want you to join me in this movement. +Let's fight for what it is that really matters, because we can take OKRs beyond our businesses. +We can take them to our families, to our schools, even to our governments. +We can hold those governments accountable. +We can transform those informations. +We can get back on the right track if we can and do measure what really matters. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, conservation, nature, animals, science, beauty, adventure, biodiversity, environment, humanity, TED Fellows, Africa +Steve Boyes +19330 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Navigating territorial hippos and active minefields, TED Fellow Steve Boyes and a team of scientists have been traveling through the Okavango Delta, Africa's largest remaining wetland wilderness, to explore and protect this near-pristine habitat against the rising threat of development. In this awe-inspiring talk packed with images, he shares his work doing detailed scientific surveys in the hopes of protecting this enormous, fragile wilderness. +Steve Boyes: How we're saving one of Earth's last wild places +Visible from space, the Okavango Delta is Africa's largest remaining intact wetland wilderness. +This shining delta in landlocked Botswana is the jewel of the Kalahari, more valuable than diamonds to the world's largest diamond producer and celebrated in 2014 as our planet's 1000th UNESCO World Heritage Site. +Now, what you see here are the two major tributaries, the Cuito and the Cubango, disappearing up north into the little-known Angolan highlands. +This is the largest undeveloped river basin on the planet, spanning an area larger than California. +These vast, undeveloped Angolan watersheds were frozen in time by 27 years of civil war. +In fact, Africa's largest tank battle since World War II was fought over a bridge crossing the Okavango's Cuito River. There on the right, disappearing off into the unknown, into the "Terra do fim do mundo" — the land at the end of the earth, as it was known by the first Portuguese explorers. +In 2001, at the age of 22, I took a job as head of housekeeping at Vundumtiki Camp in the Okavango Delta... a patchwork mosaic of channels, floodplains, lagoons and thousands upon thousands of islands to explore. +Home to the largest remaining population of elephants on the planet. +Rhinos are airlifted in C130s to find sanctuary in this wilderness. +Lion, leopard, hyena, wild dog, cheetah, ancient baobab trees that stand like cathedrals under the Milky Way. +Here, I discovered something obvious: wilderness is our natural habitat, too. +We need these last wild places to reconnect with who we really are. +We — all seven billion of us — must never forget we are a biological species forever bound to this particular biological world. +Like the waves connected to the ocean, we cannot exist apart from it — a constant flow of atoms and energy between individuals and species around the world in a day and out into the cosmos. +Our fates are forever connected to the millions of species we rely on directly and indirectly every day. +Four years ago, it was declared that 50 percent of all wildlife around the world had disappeared in just 40 years. +This is a mass drowning of 15,000 wildebeests that I witnessed in the Maasai Mara two years ago. +This is definitely our fault. +By 2020, global wildlife populations are projected to have fallen by a staggering two-thirds. +We are the sixth extinction because we left no safe space for millions of species to sustainably coexist. +Now, since 2010, I have poled myself eight times across the Okavango Delta to conduct detailed scientific surveys along a 200-mile, 18-day research transect. +Now, why am I doing this? +Why am I risking my life each year? +I'm doing this because we need this information to benchmark this near-pristine wilderness before upstream development happens. +These are the Wayeyi river bushmen, the people of the Okavango Delta. +They have taught me all I know about the Mother Okavango — about presence in the wild. +Our shared pilgrimage across the Okavango Delta each year in our mokoros or dugout canoes — remembers millenia living in the wild. +Ten thousand years ago, our entire world was wilderness. +Today, wilderness is all that remains of that world, now gone. +Ten thousand years ago, we were as we are today: a modern, dreaming intelligence unlike anything seen before. +Living in the wilderness is what taught us to speak, to seek technologies like fire and stone, bow and arrow, medicine and poison, to domesticate plants and animals and rely on each other and all living things around us. +We are these last wildernesses — every one of us. +Over 80 percent of our planet's land surface is now experiencing measurable human impact: habitat destruction and illegal wildlife trade are decimating global wildlife populations. +We urgently need to create safe space for these wild animals. +So in late 2014, we launched an ambitious project to do just that: explore and protect. +By mid-May 2015, we had pioneered access through active minefields to the undocumented source lake of the Cuito River — this otherworldly place; an ancient, untouched wilderness. +By the 21st of May, we had launched the Okavango megatransect... in seven dugout canoes; 1,500 miles, 121 days later, all of the poling, paddling and intensive research got us across the entire river basin to Lake Xau in the Kalahari Desert, 480 kilometers past the Okavango Delta. +My entire world became the water: every ripple, eddy, lily pad and current... any sign of danger, every sign of life. +Now imagine millions of sweat bees choking the air around you, flesh-eating bacteria, the constant threat of a landmine going off or an unseen hippo capsizing your mokoro. +These are the scenes moments after a hippo did just that — thrusting its tusks through the hull of my boat. +You can see the two holes — puncture wounds in the base of the hull — absolutely terrifying and completely my fault. +Many, many portages, tree blockages and capsizes in rocky rapids. +You're living on rice and beans, bathing in a bucket of cold water and paddling a marathon six to eight hours every single day. +After 121 days of this, I'd forgotten the PIN numbers to my bank accounts and logins for social media — a complete systems reboot. +You ask me now if I miss it, and I will tell you I am still there. +Now why do we need to save places we hardly ever go? +Why do we need to save places where you have to risk your life to be there? +Now, I'm not a religious or particularly spiritual person, but in the wild, I believe I've experienced the birthplace of religion. +Standing in front of an elephant far away from anywhere is the closest I will ever get to God. +Moses, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus, the Hindu teachers, prophets and mystics, all went into the wilderness — up into the mountains, into the desert, to sit quietly and listen for those secrets that were to guide their societies for millennia. +I go into the Okavango on my mokoro. +You must join me one day. +Over 50 percent of the remaining wilderness is unprotected. +A huge opportunity — a chance for us all. +We need to act with great urgency. +Since the 2015 megatransect, we have explored all major rivers of the Okavango River basin, covering a life-changing 4,000 miles of detailed research transects on our dugout canoes and our fat-tire mountain bikes. +We now have 57 top scientists rediscovering what we call the Okavango-Zambezi water tower — this vast, post-war wilderness with undocumented source lakes, unnamed waterfalls in what is Africa's largest remaining Miombo woodland. +We've now discovered 24 new species to science and hundreds of species not known to be there. +This year, we start the process, with the Angolan government, to establish one of the largest systems of protected areas in the world to preserve the Okavango-Zambezi water tower we have been exploring. +Downstream, this represents water security for millions of people and more than half of the elephants remaining on this planet. +There is no doubt this is the biggest conservation opportunity in Africa in decades. +Over the next 10 to 15 years, we need to make an unprecedented investment in the preservation of wilderness around the world. +To me, preserving wilderness is far more than simply protecting ecosystems that clean the water we drink and create the air we breathe. +Preserving wilderness protects our basic human right to be wild — our basic human rights to explore. +Thank you. (Applause) + + +talks, astronomy, cosmos, universe, science, space, physics, time, exploration, Planets +Stephen Webb +20101 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: The universe is incredibly old, astoundingly vast and populated by trillions of planets -- so where are all the aliens? Astronomer Stephen Webb has an explanation: we're alone in the universe. In a mind-expanding talk, he spells out the remarkable barriers a planet would need to clear in order to host an extraterrestrial civilization -- and makes a case for the beauty of our potential cosmic loneliness. "The silence of the universe is shouting, 'We're the creatures who got lucky,'" Webb says. +Stephen Webb: Where are all the aliens? +I saw a UFO once. +I was eight or nine, playing in the street with a friend who was a couple of years older, and we saw a featureless silver disc hovering over the houses. +We watched it for a few seconds, and then it shot away incredibly quickly. +Even as a kid, I got angry it was ignoring the laws of physics. +We ran inside to tell the grown-ups, and they were skeptical — you'd be skeptical too, right? +I got my own back a few years later: one of those grown-ups told me, "Last night I saw a flying saucer. +I was coming out of the pub after a few drinks. "I stopped him there. I said," I can explain that sighting. " +(Laughter) +Psychologists have shown we can't trust our brains to tell the truth. +It's easy to fool ourselves. +I saw something, but what's more likely — that I saw an alien spacecraft, or that my brain misinterpreted the data my eyes were giving it? +Ever since though I've wondered: Why don't we see flying saucers flitting around? +At the very least, why don't we see life out there in the cosmos? +It's a puzzle, and I've discussed it with dozens of experts from different disciplines over the past three decades. +And there's no consensus. +Frank Drake began searching for alien signals back in 1960 — so far, nothing. +And with each passing year, this nonobservation, this lack of evidence for any alien activity gets more puzzling because we should see them, shouldn't we? +The universe is 13.8 billion years old, give or take. +If we represent the age of the universe by one year, then our species came into being about 12 minutes before midnight, 31st December. +Western civilization has existed for a few seconds. +Extraterrestrial civilizations could have started in the summer months. +Imagine a summer civilization developing a level of technology more advanced than ours, but tech based on accepted physics though, I'm not talking wormholes or warp drives — whatever — just an extrapolation of the sort of tech that TED celebrates. +That civilization could program self-replicating probes to visit every planetary system in the galaxy. +If they launched the first probes just after midnight one August day, then before breakfast same day, they could have colonized the galaxy. +Intergalactic colonization isn't much more difficult, it just takes longer. +A civilization from any one of millions of galaxies could have colonized our galaxy. +Seems far-fetched? Maybe it is, but wouldn't aliens engage in some recognizable activity — put worldlets around a star to capture free sunlight, collaborate on a Wikipedia Galactica, or just shout out to the universe, "We're here"? +So where is everybody? It's a puzzle because we do expect these civilizations to exist, don't we? +After all, there could be a trillion planets in the galaxy — maybe more. +You don't need any special knowledge to consider this question, and I've explored it with lots of people over the years. +And I've found they often frame their thinking in terms of the barriers that would need to be cleared if a planet is to host a communicative civilization. +And they usually identify four key barriers. +Habitability — that's the first barrier. +We need a terrestrial planet in that just right "Goldilocks zone," where water flows as a liquid. +They're out there. +In 2016, astronomers confirmed there's a planet in the habitable zone of the closest star, Proxima Centauri — so close that Breakthrough Starshot project plans to send probes there. +We'd become a starfaring species. +But not all worlds are habitable. +Some will be too close to a star and they'll fry, some will be too far away and they'll freeze. +Abiogenesis — the creation of life from nonlife — that's the second barrier. +The basic building blocks of life aren't unique to Earth: amino acids have been found in comets, complex organic molecules in interstellar dust clouds, water in exoplanetary systems. +The ingredients are there, we just don't know how they combine to create life, and presumably there will be worlds on which life doesn't start. +The development of technological civilization is a third barrier. +Some say we already share our planet with alien intelligences. +A 2011 study showed that elephants can cooperate to solve problems. +A 2010 study showed that an octopus in captivity can recognize different humans. +2017 studies show that ravens can plan for future events — wonderful, clever creatures — but they can't contemplate the Breakthrough Starshot project, and if we vanished today, they wouldn't go on to implement Breakthrough Starshot — why should they? +Evolution doesn't have space travel as an end goal. +There will be worlds where life doesn't give rise to advanced technology. +Communication across space — that's a fourth barrier. +Maybe advanced civilizations choose to explore inner space rather than outer space, or engineer at small distances rather than large. +Or maybe they just don't want to risk an encounter with a potentially more advanced and hostile neighbor. +There'll be worlds where, for whatever reason, civilizations either stay silent or don't spend long trying to communicate. +As for the height of the barriers, your guess is as good as anyone's. +In my experience, when people sit down and do the math, they typically conclude there are thousands of civilizations in the galaxy. +But then we're back to the puzzle: Where is everybody? +By definition, UFOs — including the one I saw — are unidentified. +We can't simply infer they're spacecraft. +You can still have some fun playing with the idea aliens are here. +Some say a summer civilization did colonize the galaxy and seeded Earth with life... others, that we're living in a cosmic wilderness preserve — a zoo. +Yet others — that we're living in a simulation. +Programmers just haven't revealed the aliens yet. +Most of my colleagues though argue that E.T. is out there, we just need to keep looking, and this makes sense. Space is vast. Identifying a signal is hard, and we haven't been looking that long. +Without doubt, we should spend more on the search. +It's about understanding our place in the universe. +It's too important a question to ignore. +But there's an obvious answer: we're alone. +It's just us. +There could be a trillion planets in the galaxy. +Is it plausible we're the only creatures capable of contemplating this question? +Well, yes, because in this context, we don't know whether a trillion is a big number. +In 2000, Peter Ward and Don Brownlee proposed the Rare Earth idea. +Remember those four barriers that people use to estimate the number of civilizations? +Ward and Brownlee said there might be more. +Let's look at one possible barrier. +It's a recent suggestion by David Waltham, a geophysicist. +This is my very simplified version of Dave's much more sophisticated argument. +We are able to be here now because Earth's previous inhabitants enjoyed four billion years of good weather — ups and downs but more or less clement. +But long-term climate stability is strange, if only because astronomical influences can push a planet towards freezing or frying. +There's a hint our moon has helped, and that's interesting because the prevailing theory is that the moon came into being when Theia, a body the size of Mars, crashed into a newly formed Earth. +The outcome of that crash could have been a quite different Earth-Moon system. +We ended up with a large moon and that permitted Earth to have both a stable axial tilt and a slow rotation rate. +Both factors influence climate and the suggestion is that they've helped moderate climate change. +Great for us, right? +But Waltham showed that if the moon were just a few miles bigger, things would be different. +Earth's spin axis would now wander chaotically. +There'd be episodes of rapid climate change — not good for complex life. +The moon is just the right size: big but not too big. +A "Goldilocks" moon around a "Goldilocks" planet — a barrier perhaps. +You can imagine more barriers. +For instance, simple cells came into being billions of years ago... but perhaps the development of complex life needed a series of unlikely events. +Once life on Earth had access to multicellularity and sophisticated genetic structures, and sex, new opportunities opened up: animals became possible. +But maybe it's the fate of many planets for life to settle at the level of simple cells. +Purely for the purposes of illustration, let me suggest four more barriers to add to the four that people said blocked the path to communicative civilization. +Again, purely for the purposes of illustration, suppose there's a one-in-a-thousand chance of making it across each of the barriers. +Of course there might be different ways of navigating the barriers, and some chances will be better than one in a thousand. +Equally, there might be more barriers and some chances might be one in a million. +Let's just see what happens in this picture. +If the galaxy contains a trillion planets, how many will host a civilization capable of contemplating like us projects such as Breakthrough Starshot? +Habitability — right sort of planet around the right sort of star — the trillion becomes a billion. +Stability — a climate that stays benign for eons — the billion becomes a million. +Life must start — the million becomes a thousand. +Complex life forms must arise — the thousand becomes one. +Sophisticated tool use must develop — that's one planet in a thousand galaxies. +To understand the universe, they'll have to develop the techniques of science and mathematics — that's one planet in a million galaxies. +To reach the stars, they'll have to be social creatures, capable of discussing abstract concepts with each other using complex grammar — one planet in a billion galaxies. +And they have to avoid disaster — not just self-inflicted but from the skies, too. +That planet around Proxima Centauri, last year it got blasted by a flare. +One planet in a trillion galaxies, just as in the visible universe. +I think we're alone. +Those colleagues of mine who agree we're alone often see a barrier ahead — bioterror, global warming, war. +A universe that's silent because technology itself forms the barrier to the development of a truly advanced civilization. Depressing, right? +I'm arguing the exact opposite. +I grew up watching "Star Trek" and "Forbidden Planet," and I saw a UFO once, so this idea of cosmic loneliness I certainly find slightly wistful. +But for me, the silence of the universe is shouting, "We're the creatures who got lucky." All barriers are behind us. +We're the only species that's cleared them — the only species capable of determining its own destiny. +And if we learn to appreciate how special our planet is, how important it is to look after our home and to find others, how incredibly fortunate we all are simply to be aware of the universe, humanity might survive for a while. +And all those amazing things we dreamed aliens might have done in the past, that could be our future. +Thank you very much. +(Applause) + + +talks, brain, cognitive science, science, TEDMED, biology, human body, communication +Sian Leah Beilock +20519 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: When the pressure is on, why do we sometimes fail to live up to our potential? Cognitive scientist and Barnard College president Sian Leah Beilock reveals what happens in your brain and body when you choke in stressful situations, sharing psychological tools that can help you perform at your best when it matters most. +Sian Leah Beilock: Why we choke under pressure -- and how to avoid it +One of the most humiliating things that you can say about someone is "they choked." And boy, do I know that feeling. +Growing up, I was an avid athlete. +My main sport was soccer, and I was a goalkeeper, which is both the best and the worst position on the field. +You see, when you're a goalie, you get this special uniform, you get all the glory for a great shot saved, but you also get the grief when you land a shot in the goal. +When you're a goalie, all eyes are on you, and with that comes the pressure. +I distinctly remember one game in high school. +I was playing for the California state team which is part of the Olympic Development Program. +I was having a great game... until I realized that the national coach was standing right behind me. That's when everything changed. In a matter of seconds, I went from playing at the top to the bottom of my ability. +Just knowing that I was being evaluated changed my performance and forever how I thought about the mental aspect of how we perform. +All of a sudden the ball seemed to go in slow motion, and I was fixated on my every move. +The next shot that came I bobbled, but thankfully it didn't land in the goal. +The shot after that, I wasn't so lucky: I tipped it right into the net. +My team lost; the national coach walked away. +I choked under the pressure of those evaluative eyes on me. +Just about everyone does it from time to time — there are so many opportunities, whether it's taking a test, giving a talk, pitching to a client or that special form of torture I like to call the job interview. +(Laughter) +But the question is why. +Why do we sometimes fail to perform up to our potential under pressure? +It's especially bewildering in the case of athletes who spend so much time physically honing their craft. +But what about their minds? Not as much. This is true off the playing field as well. +Whether we're taking a test of giving a talk, it's easy to feel like we're ready — at the top of our game — and then perform at our worst when it matters most. +It turns out that rarely do we practice under the types of conditions we're actually going to perform under, and as a result, when all eyes are on us, we sometimes flub our performance. +Of course, the question is, why is this the case? +And my experience on the playing field — and in other important facets of my life — really pushed me into the field of cognitive science. +I wanted to know how we could reach our limitless potential. +I wanted to understand how we could use our knowledge of the mind and the brain to come up with psychological tools that would help us perform at our best. +So why does it happen? Why do we sometimes fail to perform up to what we're capable of when the pressure is on? +It may not be so surprising to hear that in stressful situations, we worry. We worry about the situation, the consequences, what others will think of us. +But what is surprising is that we often get in our own way precisely because our worries prompt us to concentrate too much. +That's right — we pay too much attention to what we're doing. +When we're concerned about performing our best, we often try and control aspects of what we're doing that are best left on autopilot, outside conscious awareness, and as a result, we mess up. +Think about a situation where you're shuffling down the stairs. +What would happen if I asked you to think about what you're doing with your knee while you're doing that? +There's a good chance you'd fall on your face. +We as humans only have the ability to pay attention to so much at once, which is why, by the way, it's not a good idea to drive and talk on the cell phone. +And under pressure, when we're concerned about performing at our best, we can try and control aspects of what we're doing that should be left outside conscious control. +The end result is that we mess up. +My research team and I have studied this phenomenon of overattention, and we call it paralysis by analysis. +In one study, we asked college soccer players to dribble a soccer ball and to pay attention to an aspect of their performance that they would not otherwise attend to. +We asked them to pay attention to what side of the foot was contacting the ball. +We showed that performance was slower and more error-prone when we drew their attention to the step-by-step details of what they were doing. +When the pressure is on, we're often concerned with performing at our best, and as a result we try and control what we're doing to force the best performance. +The end result is that we actually screw up. +In basketball, the term "unconscious" is used to describe a shooter who can't miss. +And San Antonio Spurs star Tim Duncan has said, "When you have to stop and think, that's when you mess up." In dance, the great choreographer, George Balanchine, used to urge his dancers, "Don't think, just do." When the pressure's on, when we want to put our best foot forward, somewhat ironically, we often try and control what we're doing in a way that leads to worse performance. +So what do we do? +Knowing that we have this overactive attention, how do we ensure that we perform at our best? +A lot of it comes down to the prefrontal cortex, that front part of our brain that sits over our eyes and usually helps us focus in positive ways. +It often gets hooked on the wrong things. +So how do we unhook it? +Something as simple as singing a song, or paying attention to one's pinky toe, as pro golfer Jack Nicklaus was rumored to do, can help us take our mind off those pesky details. +It's also true that practicing under conditions that we're going to perform under — closing the gap between training and competition can help us get used to that feeling of all eyes on us. +This is true off the playing field as well. +Whether it's getting ready for an exam or preparing for a big talk — one that might have a little pressure associated with it — +(Laughter) +getting used to the types of situations you're going to perform under really matters. +When you're taking a test, close the book, practice retrieving the answer from memory under timed situations, and when you're giving a talk, practice in front of others. +And if you can't find anyone who will listen, practice in front of a video camera or even a mirror. +The ability to get used to what it will feel like can make the difference in whether we choke or thrive. +We've also figured out some ways to get rid of those pesky worries and self-doubts that tend to creep up in the stressful situations. +Researchers have shown that simply jotting down your thoughts and worries before a stressful event can help to download them from mind — make them less likely to pop up in the moment. +It's kind of like when you wake up in the middle of the night and you're really worried about what you have to do the next day, you're trying to think about everything you have to accomplish, and you write it down and then you can go back to sleep. +Journaling, or getting those thoughts down on paper, makes it less likely they'll pop up and distract you in the moment. +The end result is that you can perform your best when it matters most. +So up until now, I've talked about what happens when we put limits on ourselves and some tips we can use to help perform up to our potential. +But it's important to remember that it's not just our own individual being that can put limits and that can perform poorly; our environment has an effect on whether we choke or thrive. +Our parents, our teachers, our coaches, our bosses all influence whether or not we can put our best foot forward when it matters most. +Take math as an example. +That's right, I said it: math. +Lots of people profess to choke or are anxious about doing math, whether it's taking a test or even calculating the tip on a dinner bill as our smart friends look on. +And it's quite socially acceptable to talk about choking or performing poorly in math. +You don't hear highly educated people walking around talking about the fact or bragging about the fact that they're not good readers, but you hear people all the time bragging about how they're not math people. +And unfortunately, in the US, this tends to be more so among girls and women than boys and men. +My research team and I have tried to understand where this fear of math comes from, and we've actually peered inside the brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, of people who are worried about math. +We've shown that math phobia correlates with a concrete visceral sensation such as pain, of which we have every right to feel anxious. +In fact, when people who are worried about math are just getting ready to take a math test — they're not even taking it, they're just getting ready — areas of the brain known the be involved in our neural pain response are active. +When we say math is painful, there's some truth to it for some people. +But where does this math anxiety come from? +It turns out that math anxiety is contagious. +When adults are worried about math, the children around them start worrying, too. +As young as first grade, when kids are in classrooms with teachers who are anxious about their own math ability, these kids learn less across the school year. +And it turns out that this is more prevalent in girls than boys. +At this young age, kids tend to mimic same-sex adults, and at least in the US, over 90 percent of our elementary school teachers are women. +Of course, it's not just what happens in the classroom. +Social media plays a big role here, too. +It wasn't so long ago that you could purchase a Teen Talk Barbie that when the cord was pulled, it would say things like, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Math class is tough." And just a few years ago, major retailers were marketing T-shirts at our young girls that read things like, "I'm too pretty to do math," or, "I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother does it for me." And let's not forget about the parents. +Oh, the parents. +It turns out that when parents are worried about their own math ability and they help their kids a lot with math homework, their kids learn less math across the school year. +As one parent put it, "I judge my first grader's math homework by whether it's a one-glass assignment or a three-glass night." +(Laughter) +When adults are anxious about their own math ability, it rubs off on their kids and it affects whether they choke or thrive. +But just as we can put limits on others, we can take them off. +My research team and I have shown that when we help parents do fun math activities with their kids — rather than, say, just doing bedtime stories or bedtime reading, they do bedtime math, which are fun story problems to do with your kids at night, not only do children's attitudes about math improve, but their math performance across the school year improves as well. Our environment matters. From the classroom to parents to media, and it can really make a difference in terms of whether we choke or thrive. +Fast-forward from my high school soccer game to my freshman year in college. +I was in the chemistry sequence for science majors, and boy did I not belong. +Even though I studied for my first midterm exam — I thought I was ready to go — I bombed it. +I literally got the worst grade in a class of 400 students. +I was convinced I wasn't going to be a science major, that maybe I was dropping out of college altogether. +But then I changed how I studied. +Instead of studying alone, I started studying with a group of friends who at the end of the study session would close their book and compete for the right answer. +We learned to practice under stress. +If you could've looked inside my brain during that first midterm exam, you likely would've seen a neural pain response a lot like the math-anxious individuals I study. +It was probably there during the stressful study situation as well. +But when I walked into the final, my mind was quiet, and I actually got one of the highest grades in the entire class. +It wasn't just about learning the material; it was about learning how to overcome my limits when it mattered most. +What happens in our heads really matters, and knowing this, we can learn how to prepare ourselves and others for success, not just on the playing field but in the boardroom and in the classroom as well. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, business, collaboration, communication, success, personal growth +Tina Seelig +21017 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic -- it's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. Catching more of it is easy but not obvious. In this insightful talk, Stanford engineering school professor Tina Seelig shares three unexpected ways to increase your luck -- and your ability to see and seize opportunities. +Tina Seelig: The little risks you can take to increase your luck +I've spent nearly two decades observing what makes people luckier than others and trying to help people increase their luck. +You see, I teach entrepreneurship, and we all know that most new ventures fail, and innovators and entrepreneurs need all the luck they can get. +So what is luck? Luck is defined as success or failure apparently caused by chance. Apparently. That's the operative word. +It looks like it's chance because we rarely see all the levers that come into play to make people lucky. +But I've realized, by watching so long, that luck is rarely a lightning strike, isolated and dramatic. +It's much more like the wind, blowing constantly. +Sometimes it's calm, and sometimes it blows in gusts, and sometimes it comes from directions that you didn't even imagine. +So how do you catch the winds of luck? +It's easy, but it's not obvious. +So I'm going to share three things with you that you can do to build a sail to capture the winds of luck. +The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with yourself. +Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your comfort zone. +Now, when we're children, we do this all the time. +We have to do this if we're going to learn how to walk or talk or ride a bike or even quantum mechanics. Right? We need to go from someone one week who doesn't ride a bike to, next week, someone who does. +And this requires us to get out of our comfort zone and take some risks. +The problem is, as we get older, we rarely do this. +We sort of lock down the sense of who we are and don't stretch anymore. +Now, with my students, I spend a lot of time giving them encouragement to get out of their comfort zone and take some risks. +How do I do this? +Well, I start out by having them fill out a risk-o-meter. Now, it's basically a fun thing we developed in our class where they map out what risks they're willing to take. +And it becomes clear very quickly to them that risk-taking is not binary. +There are intellectual risks and physical risks and financial risks and emotional risks and social risks and ethical risks and political risks. +And once they do this, they compare their risk profiles with others, and they quickly realize that they're all really different. +I then encourage them to stretch, to take some risks that get them out of their comfort zone. +For example, I might ask them to do an intellectual risk and try to tackle a problem they haven't tried before; or a social risk, talking to someone sitting next to them on the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone they really care about how they feel. +I do this myself all the time. +About a dozen years ago, I was on an airplane, early, early morning flight on my way to Ecuador. +And normally, I would just put on my headphones and go to sleep, wake up, do some work, but I decided to take a little risk, and I started a conversation with the man sitting next to me. +I introduced myself, and I learned that he was a publisher. Interesting. We ended up having a fascinating conversation. +I learned all about the future of the publishing industry. +So about three quarters of the way through the flight, I decided to take another risk, and I opened up my laptop and I shared with him a book proposal I put together for something I was doing in my class. +And he was very polite, he read it, and he said, "You know what, Tina, this isn't right for us, but thank you so much for sharing." It's OK. +That risk didn't work out. +I shut my laptop. +At the end of the flight, we exchanged contact information. +A couple of months later, I reached out to him, and I said, "Mark, would you like to come to my class? +I'm doing a project on reinventing the book, the future of publishing. "And he said," Great. I'd love to come. "So he came to my class. We had a great experience. +A few months later, I wrote to him again. +This time, I sent him a bunch of video clips from another project my students had done. +He was so intrigued by one of the projects the students had done, he thought there might be a book in it, and he wanted to meet those students. +I have to tell you, I was a little bit hurt. +(Laughter) +I mean, he wanted to do a book with my students and not with me, but OK, it's all right. +So I invited him to come down, and he and his colleagues came to Stanford and met with the students, and afterwards, we had lunch together. +And one of his editors said to me, "Hey, have you ever considered writing a book?" +I said, "Funny you should ask." And I pulled out the exact same proposal that I had showed his boss a year earlier. +Within two weeks, I had a contract, and within two years, the book had sold over a million copies around the world. +(Applause) +Now, you might say, "Oh, you're so lucky." But of course I was lucky, but that luck resulted from a series of small risks I took, starting with saying hello. +And anyone can do this, no matter where you are in your life, no matter where you are in the world — even if you think you're the most unlucky person, you can do this by taking little risks that get you out of your comfort zone. +You start building a sail to capture luck. +The second thing you want to do is to change your relationship with other people. +You need to understand that everyone who helps you on your journey is playing a huge role in getting you to your goals. +And if you don't show appreciation, not only are you not closing the loop, but you're missing an opportunity. +When someone does something for you, they're taking that time that they could be spending on themselves or someone else, and you need to acknowledge what they're doing. +Now, I run three fellowship programs at Stanford, and they are very competitive to get into, and when I send out the letters to those students who don't get in, I always know there are going to be people who are disappointed. +Some of the people who are disappointed send me notes, complaining. +Some of them send notes saying what could I do to make myself more successful next time around? +And every once in a while, someone sends me a note thanking me for the opportunity. +This happened about seven years ago. +A young man named Brian sent me a beautiful note saying, "I know I've been rejected from this program twice, but I want to thank you for the opportunity. +I learned so much through the process of applying. " +I was so taken by the graciousness of his message that I invited him to come and meet me. +And we spent some time chatting and cooked up an idea for an independent study project together. +He was on the football team at Stanford, and he decided to do a project on looking at leadership in that context. +We got to know each other incredibly well through that quarter, and he took the project that he started working on in the independent study and turned it, ultimately, into a company called Play for Tomorrow, where he teaches kids from disadvantaged backgrounds how to, essentially, craft the lives they dream to live. +Now, the important thing about this story is that we both ended up catching the winds of luck as a result of his thank-you note. +But it was the winds that we didn't expect in the first place. +Over the course of the last couple of years, I've come up with some tactics for my own life to help me really foster appreciation. +My favorite is that at the end of every single day, I look at my calendar and I review all the people I met with, and I send thank-you notes to every single person. +It only takes a few minutes, but at the end of every day, I feel incredibly grateful and appreciative, and I promise you it has increased my luck. +So first, you need to take some risks and get out of your comfort zone. +Second, you need to show appreciation. +And third, you want to change your relationship with ideas. +Most people look at new ideas that come there way and they judge them. "That's a great idea" or "That's a terrible idea." But it's actually much more nuanced. +Ideas are neither good or bad. +And in fact, the seeds of terrible ideas are often something truly remarkable. +One of my favorite exercises in my classes on creativity is to help students foster an attitude of looking at terrible ideas through the lens of possibilities. +So I give them a challenge: to create an idea for a brand new restaurant. +They have to come up with the best ideas for a new restaurant and the worst ideas for a new restaurant. +So the best ideas are things like a restaurant on a mountaintop with a beautiful sunset, or a restaurant on a boat with a gorgeous view. +And the terrible ideas are things like a restaurant in a garbage dump, or a restaurant with terrible service that's really dirty, or a restaurant that serves cockroach sushi. +(Laughter) +So they hand all the ideas to me, I read the great ideas out loud, and then I rip them up and throw them away. +I then take the horrible ideas and redistribute them. +Each team now has an idea that another team thought was horrible, and their challenge is to turn it into something brilliant. +Here's what happens. Within about 10 seconds, someone says, "This is a fabulous idea." And they have about three minutes before they pitch the idea to the class. +So the restaurant in the garbage dump? What does that turn into? +Well, that turns into a restaurant that's a training ground for future restauranteurs to figure out how to avoid all the pitfalls. +And the restaurant with cockroach sushi? +It turns into a sushi bar with all sorts of really interesting and exotic ingredients. +If you look around at the companies, the ventures that are really innovative around you, the ones that we now take for granted that have changed our life, well, you know what? +They all started out as crazy ideas. +They started ideas that when they pitched to other people, most people said, "That's crazy, it will never work." +So, yes, sometimes people were born into terrible circumstances, and sometimes, luck is a lightning bolt that hits us with something wonderful or something terrible. +But the winds of luck are always there, and if you're willing to take some risks, if you're willing to really go out and show appreciation and willing to really look at ideas, even if they're crazy, through the lens of possibilities, you can build a bigger and bigger sail to catch the winds of luck. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, law, society, social change, justice system, activism, crime, Internet, criminal justice, women, TEDx +Darieth Chisolm +25727 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: What can you do if you're the victim of revenge porn or cyberbullying? Shockingly little, says journalist and activist Darieth Chisolm, who found herself living the nightmare scenario of having explicit photos taken without her knowledge or consent posted online. She describes how she's working to help victims and outlines the current state of legislation aimed at punishing perpetrators. +Darieth Chisolm: How revenge porn turns lives upside down +I had about five minutes before I was set to deliver a talk to a bunch of business owners about visibility and being on camera. +After all, I was the so-called expert there, the former 20-year television news anchor and life and business coach. +I happened to take a look down at my cell phone just to catch the time, and I noticed that I had a missed call from my ex-husband. +I can still hear his voice. "Darieth, what is going on? +I just got a call from some strange man who told me to go to this website, and now I'm looking at all of these photos of you naked. +Your private parts are all over this website. +Who's seen this? " +I couldn't think. I couldn't breathe. +I was so humiliated and so embarrassed and so ashamed. +I felt like my world was coming to an end. +And yet, this began for me months of pain and depression and anger and confusion and silence. +My manipulative, jealous, stalker ex-boyfriend did exactly what he said he would do: he put up a website with my name on it, and he posted this. And this. And several explicit photos that he had taken of me while I was asleep, living with him in Jamaica. +For months prior to that, he had been sending me threatening text messages like this. +He was trying to make me out to be some sleazy, low-life slut. +He had even threatened to kill me. +He told me that he would shoot me in my head and stab me in my heart, simply because I wanted to end the controlling relationship. +I couldn't believe this was happening to me. +I didn't even know what to call it. +You might know it as cyberharassment or cyberbullying. +The media calls it "revenge porn." I now call it "digital domestic violence." It typically stems from a relationship gone bad, where a controlling, jilted ex-lover can't handle rejection, so when they can't physically put their hands on you, they use different weapons: cell phones and laptops. The ammunition? Photos, videos, explicit information, content — all posted online, without your consent. +I mean, let's face it — we all live our lives online. +And the internet is a really small world. +We show off our baby photos, we start and grow our businesses, we make new relationships, we let the world in, one Facebook like at a time. +And you know what I found? +An even smaller world. +One in 25 women say they have been impacted by revenge porn. +For women under the age of 30, that number looks like one in 10. +And that leaves a few of you in this audience as potential victims. +You want to know what's even more alarming? +Lack of legislation and laws to adequately protect victims and punish perpetrators. +There's only one federal bill pending; it's called the ENOUGH Act, by Senator Kamala Harris. +It would criminalize revenge porn. +But that could take years to pass. +So what are we left with in the meantime? Flimsy civil misdemeanors. Currently, only 40 states and DC have some laws in place for revenge porn. +And those penalties vary — we're talking $500 fines. Five hundred dollars? Are you kidding me? +Women are losing their jobs. +They're suffering from damaged relationships and damaged reputations. +You're looking at a woman who spent 11 months in court, thirteen trips to the courthouse and thousands of dollars in legal fees, just to get two things: a protection from cyberstalking and cyberabuse, otherwise known as a PFA, and language from a judge that would force a third-party internet company to remove the content. +It's expensive, complicated and confusing. +And worse, legal loopholes and jurisdictional issues drag this out for months, while my private parts were on display for months. +How would you feel if your naked body was exposed for the world to see, and you waited helplessly for the content to be removed? +Eventually, I stumbled upon a private company to issue a DMCA notice to shut the website down. +DMCA — Digital Millennium Copyright Act. +It's a law that regulates digital material and content. +Broadly, the aim of the DMCA is to protect both copyright owners and consumers. +So get this: people who take and share nude photos own the rights to those selfies, so they should be able to issue a DMCA to have the content removed. +But not so fast — because the other fight we're dealing with is noncompliant and nonresponsive third-party internet companies. +And oh — by the way, even in consenting relationships, just because you get a nude photo or a naked pic, does not give you the right to share it, even [without] the intent to do harm. +Back to my case, which happens to be further complicated because he was stalking and harassing me from another country, making it nearly impossible to get help here. +But wait a minute — isn't the internet international? +Shouldn't we have some sort of policy in place that broadly protects us, regardless to borders or restrictions? +I just couldn ’ t give up; I had to keep fighting. +So I willingly, on three occasions, allowed for the invasion of both my cell phone and my laptop by the Department of Homeland Security and the Jamaican Embassy for thorough forensic investigation, because I had maintained all of the evidence. +I painstakingly shared my private parts with the all-male investigative team. +And it was an embarrassing, humiliating additional hoop to jump through. +But then something happened. Jamaican authorities actually arrested him. +He's now facing charges under their malicious communications act, and if found guilty, could face thousands of dollars in fines and up to 10 years in prison. +And I've also learned that my case is making history — it is the first international case under this new crime. +Wow, finally some justice. +But this got me to thinking. Nobody deserves this. Nobody deserves this level of humiliation and having to jump through all of these hoops. +Our cyber civil rights are at stake. +Here in the United States, we need to have clear, tough enforcement; we need to demand the accountability and responsiveness from online companies; we need to promote social responsibilities for posting, sharing and texting; and we need to restore dignity to victims. +And what about victims who neither have the time, money or resources to wage war, who are left disempowered, mislabeled and broken? +Two things: release the shame and end the silence. +Shame is at the core of all of this. +And for every silent prisoner of shame, it's the fear of judgment that's holding you hostage. +And the price to pay is the stripping away of your self-worth. +The day I ended my silence, I freed myself from shame. +And I freed myself from the fear of judgment from the one person who I thought would judge me the most — my son, who actually told me, "Mom, you are the strongest person that I know. +You can get through this. And besides, mom — he chose the wrong woman to mess with. " +(Laughter) +(Applause) +It was on that day that I decided to use my platform and my story and my voice. +And to get started, I asked myself this one simple question: Who do I need to become now? +That question, in the face of everything that I was challenged with, transformed my life and had me thinking about all kinds of possibilities. +I now own my story, I speak my truth, and I'm narrating a new chapter in my life. +It's called "50 Shades of Silence." It's a global social justice project, and we're working to film an upcoming documentary to give voice and dignity to victims. +If you are a victim or you know someone who is, know this: in order to be empowered, you have to take care of yourself, and you have to love yourself. +You have to turn your anger into action, your pain into power and your setback into a setup for what's next for your life. +This is a process, and it's a journey of self-discovery that might include forgiveness. +But it definitely requires bravery, confidence and conviction. +I call it: finding your everyday courage. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, robots, emotions, society, humanity, future, design, innovation, technology +Kate Darling +26073 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: We're far from developing robots that feel emotions, but we already have feelings towards them, says robot ethicist Kate Darling, and an instinct like that can have consequences. Learn more about how we're biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto machines -- and how it might help us better understand ourselves. +Kate Darling: Why we have an emotional connection to robots +There was a day, about 10 years ago, when I asked a friend to hold a baby dinosaur robot upside down. +It was this toy called a Pleo that I had ordered, and I was really excited about it because I've always loved robots. +And this one has really cool technical features. +It had motors and touch sensors and it had an infrared camera. +And one of the things it had was a tilt sensor, so it knew what direction it was facing. +And when you held it upside down, it would start to cry. +And I thought this was super cool, so I was showing it off to my friend, and I said, "Oh, hold it up by the tail. +See what it does. "So we're watching the theatrics of this robot struggle and cry out. +And after a few seconds, it starts to bother me a little, and I said, "OK, that's enough now. +Let's put him back down. "And then I pet the robot to make it stop crying. +And that was kind of a weird experience for me. +For one thing, I wasn't the most maternal person at the time. +Although since then I've become a mother, nine months ago, and I've learned that babies also squirm when you hold them upside down. (Laughter) But my response to this robot was also interesting because I knew exactly how this machine worked, and yet I still felt compelled to be kind to it. +And that observation sparked a curiosity that I've spent the past decade pursuing. +Why did I comfort this robot? +And one of the things I discovered was that my treatment of this machine was more than just an awkward moment in my living room, that in a world where we're increasingly integrating robots into our lives, an instinct like that might actually have consequences, because the first thing that I discovered is that it's not just me. +In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the United States military was testing this robot that defused land mines. +And the way it worked was it was shaped like a stick insect and it would walk around a minefield on its legs, and every time it stepped on a mine, one of the legs would blow up, and it would continue on the other legs to blow up more mines. +And the colonel who was in charge of this testing exercise ends up calling it off, because, he says, it's too inhumane to watch this damaged robot drag itself along the minefield. +Now, what would cause a hardened military officer and someone like myself to have this response to robots? +Well, of course, we're primed by science fiction and pop culture to really want to personify these things, but it goes a little bit deeper than that. +It turns out that we're biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto any movement in our physical space that seems autonomous to us. +So people will treat all sorts of robots like they're alive. +These bomb-disposal units get names. They get medals of honor. They've had funerals for them with gun salutes. +And research shows that we do this even with very simple household robots, like the Roomba vacuum cleaner. +(Laughter) +It's just a disc that roams around your floor to clean it, but just the fact it's moving around on its own will cause people to name the Roomba and feel bad for the Roomba when it gets stuck under the couch. +(Laughter) +And we can design robots specifically to evoke this response, using eyes and faces or movements that people automatically, subconsciously associate with states of mind. +And there's an entire body of research called human-robot interaction that really shows how well this works. +So for example, researchers at Stanford University found out that it makes people really uncomfortable when you ask them to touch a robot's private parts. +(Laughter) +So from this, but from many other studies, we know, we know that people respond to the cues given to them by these lifelike machines, even if they know that they're not real. +Now, we're headed towards a world where robots are everywhere. +Robotic technology is moving out from behind factory walls. It's entering workplaces, households. +And as these machines that can sense and make autonomous decisions and learn enter into these shared spaces, I think that maybe the best analogy we have for this is our relationship with animals. +Thousands of years ago, we started to domesticate animals, and we trained them for work and weaponry and companionship. +And throughout history, we've treated some animals like tools or like products, and other animals, we've treated with kindness and we've given a place in society as our companions. +I think it's plausible we might start to integrate robots in similar ways. +And sure, animals are alive. Robots are not. And I can tell you, from working with roboticists, that we're pretty far away from developing robots that can feel anything. +But we feel for them, and that matters, because if we're trying to integrate robots into these shared spaces, we need to understand that people will treat them differently than other devices, and that in some cases, for example, the case of a soldier who becomes emotionally attached to the robot that they work with, that can be anything from inefficient to dangerous. +But in other cases, it can actually be useful to foster this emotional connection to robots. +We're already seeing some great use cases, for example, robots working with autistic children to engage them in ways that we haven't seen previously, or robots working with teachers to engage kids in learning with new results. +And it's not just for kids. +Early studies show that robots can help doctors and patients in health care settings. +This is the PARO baby seal robot. +It's used in nursing homes and with dementia patients. +It's been around for a while. +And I remember, years ago, being at a party and telling someone about this robot, and her response was, "Oh my gosh. That's horrible. I can't believe we're giving people robots instead of human care." And this is a really common response, and I think it's absolutely correct, because that would be terrible. +But in this case, it's not what this robot replaces. +What this robot replaces is animal therapy in contexts where we can't use real animals but we can use robots, because people will consistently treat them more like an animal than a device. +Acknowledging this emotional connection to robots can also help us anticipate challenges as these devices move into more intimate areas of people's lives. +For example, is it OK if your child's teddy bear robot records private conversations? +Is it OK if your sex robot has compelling in-app purchases? +(Laughter) +Because robots plus capitalism equals questions around consumer protection and privacy. +And those aren't the only reasons that our behavior around these machines could matter. +A few years after that first initial experience I had with this baby dinosaur robot, I did a workshop with my friend Hannes Gassert. +And we took five of these baby dinosaur robots and we gave them to five teams of people. +And we had them name them and play with them and interact with them for about an hour. +And then we unveiled a hammer and a hatchet and we told them to torture and kill the robots. +(Laughter) +And this turned out to be a little more dramatic than we expected it to be, because none of the participants would even so much as strike these baby dinosaur robots, so we had to improvise a little, and at some point, we said, "OK, you can save your team's robot if you destroy another team's robot." +(Laughter) +And even that didn't work. +So finally, we said, "We're going to destroy all of the robots unless someone takes a hatchet to one of them." And this guy stood up, and he took the hatchet, and the whole room winced as he brought the hatchet down on the robot's neck, and there was this half-joking, half-serious moment of silence in the room for this fallen robot. +(Laughter) +So that was a really interesting experience. +Now, it wasn't a controlled study, obviously, but it did lead to some later research that I did at MIT with Palash Nandy and Cynthia Breazeal, where we had people come into the lab and smash these HEXBUGs that move around in a really lifelike way, like insects. +So instead of choosing something cute that people are drawn to, we chose something more basic, and what we found was that high-empathy people would hesitate more to hit the HEXBUGS. +Now this is just a little study, but it's part of a larger body of research that is starting to indicate that there may be a connection between people's tendencies for empathy and their behavior around robots. +But my question for the coming era of human-robot interaction is not: "Do we empathize with robots?" It's: "Can robots change people's empathy?" Is there reason to, for example, prevent your child from kicking a robotic dog, not just out of respect for property, but because the child might be more likely to kick a real dog? +And again, it's not just kids. +This is the violent video games question, but it's on a completely new level because of this visceral physicality that we respond more intensely to than to images on a screen. +When we behave violently towards robots, specifically robots that are designed to mimic life, is that a healthy outlet for violent behavior or is that training our cruelty muscles? +We don't know... But the answer to this question has the potential to impact human behavior, it has the potential to impact social norms, it has the potential to inspire rules around what we can and can't do with certain robots, similar to our animal cruelty laws. +Because even if robots can't feel, our behavior towards them might matter for us. +And regardless of whether we end up changing our rules, robots might be able to help us come to a new understanding of ourselves. +Most of what I've learned over the past 10 years has not been about technology at all. It's been about human psychology and empathy and how we relate to others. +Because when a child is kind to a Roomba, when a soldier tries to save a robot on the battlefield, or when a group of people refuses to harm a robotic baby dinosaur, those robots aren't just motors and gears and algorithms. +They're reflections of our own humanity. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, drones, oceans, alternative energy, exploration, science, nature, fish, biosphere, environment, TEDx, weather +Sebastien de Halleux +26257 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Our oceans are unexplored and undersampled -- today, we still know more about other planets than our own. How can we get to a better understanding of this vast, important ecosystem? Explorer Sebastien de Halleux shares how a new fleet of wind- and solar-powered drones is collecting data at sea in unprecedented detail, revealing insights into things like global weather and the health of fish stocks. Learn more about what a better grasp of the ocean could mean for us back on land. +Sebastien de Halleux: How a fleet of wind-powered drones is changing our understanding of the ocean +We know more about other planets than our own, and today, I want to show you a new type of robot designed to help us better understand our own planet. +It belongs to a category known in the oceanographic community as an unmanned surface vehicle, or USV. +And it uses no fuel. +Instead, it relies on wind power for propulsion. +And yet, it can sail around the globe for months at a time. +So I want to share with you why we built it, and what it means for you. +A few years ago, I was on a sailboat making its way across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii. +I had just spent the past 10 years working nonstop, developing video games for hundreds of millions of users, and I wanted to take a step back and look at the big picture and get some much-needed thinking time. +I was the navigator on board, and one evening, after a long session analyzing weather data and plotting our course, I came up on deck and saw this beautiful sunset. +And a thought occurred to me: How much do we really know about our oceans? +The Pacific was stretching all around me as far as the eye could see, and the waves were rocking our boat forcefully, a sort of constant reminder of its untold power. +How much do we really know about our oceans? +I decided to find out. +What I quickly learned is that we don't know very much. +The first reason is just how vast oceans are, covering 70 percent of the planet, and yet we know they drive complex planetary systems like global weather, which affect all of us on a daily basis, sometimes dramatically. +And yet, those activities are mostly invisible to us. +Ocean data is scarce by any standard. +Back on land, I had grown used to accessing lots of sensors — billions of them, actually. +But at sea, in situ data is scarce and expensive. Why? Because it relies on a small number of ships and buoys. +How small a number was actually a great surprise. +Our National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, better known as NOAA, only has 16 ships, and there are less than 200 buoys offshore globally. +It is easy to understand why: the oceans are an unforgiving place, and to collect in situ data, you need a big ship, capable of carrying a vast amount of fuel and large crews, costing hundreds of millions of dollars each, or, big buoys tethered to the ocean floor with a four-mile-long cable and weighted down by a set of train wheels, which is both dangerous to deploy and expensive to maintain. +What about satellites, you might ask? +Well, satellites are fantastic, and they have taught us so much about the big picture over the past few decades. +However, the problem with satellites is they can only see through one micron of the surface of the ocean. They have relatively poor spatial and temporal resolution, and their signal needs to be corrected for cloud cover and land effects and other factors. +So what is going on in the oceans? +And what are we trying to measure? +And how could a robot be of any use? +Let's zoom in on a small cube in the ocean. +One of the key things we want to understand is the surface, because the surface, if you think about it, is the nexus of all air-sea interaction. +It is the interface through which all energy and gases must flow. +Our sun radiates energy, which is absorbed by oceans as heat and then partially released into the atmosphere. +Gases in our atmosphere like CO2 get dissolved into our oceans. +Actually, about 30 percent of all global CO2 gets absorbed. +Plankton and microorganisms release oxygen into the atmosphere, so much so that every other breath you take comes from the ocean. +Some of that heat generates evaporation, which creates clouds and then eventually leads to precipitation. +And pressure gradients create surface wind, which moves the moisture through the atmosphere. +Some of the heat radiates down into the deep ocean and gets stored in different layers, the ocean acting as some kind of planetary-scale boiler to store all that energy, which later might be released in short-term events like hurricanes or long-term phenomena like El Niño. +These layers can get mixed up by vertical upwelling currents or horizontal currents, which are key in transporting heat from the tropics to the poles. +And of course, there is marine life, occupying the largest ecosystem in volume on the planet, from microorganisms to fish to marine mammals, like seals, dolphins and whales. +But all of these are mostly invisible to us. +The challenge in studying those ocean variables at scale is one of energy, the energy that it takes to deploy sensors into the deep ocean. +And of course, many solutions have been tried — from wave-actuated devices to surface drifters to sun-powered electrical drives — each with their own compromises. +Our team breakthrough came from an unlikely source — the pursuit of the world speed record in a wind-powered land yacht. +It took 10 years of research and development to come up with a novel wing concept that only uses three watts of power to control and yet can propel a vehicle all around the globe with seemingly unlimited autonomy. +By adapting this wing concept into a marine vehicle, we had the genesis of an ocean drone. +Now, these are larger than they appear. +They are about 15 feet high, 23 feet long, seven feet deep. +They're laden with an array of science-grade sensors that measure all key variables, both oceanographic and atmospheric, and a live satellite link transmits this high-resolution data back to shore in real time. +Our team has been hard at work over the past few years, conducting missions in some of the toughest ocean conditions on the planet, from the Arctic to the tropical Pacific. +We have sailed all the way to the polar ice shelf. +We have sailed into Atlantic hurricanes. +We have rounded Cape Horn, and we have slalomed between the oil rigs of the Gulf of Mexico. +This is one tough robot. +Let me share with you recent work that we did around the Pribilof Islands. +This is a small group of islands deep in the cold Bering Sea between the US and Russia. +Now, the Bering Sea is the home of the walleye pollock, which is a whitefish you might not recognize, but you might likely have tasted if you enjoy fish sticks or surimi. +Yes, surimi looks like crabmeat, but it's actually pollock. +And the pollock fishery is the largest fishery in the nation, both in terms of value and volume — about 3.1 billion pounds of fish caught every year. +So over the past few years, a fleet of ocean drones has been hard at work in the Bering Sea with the goal to help assess the size of the pollock fish stock. +This helps improve the quota system that's used to manage the fishery and help prevent a collapse of the fish stock and protects this fragile ecosystem. +Now, the drones survey the fishing ground using acoustics, i.e., a sonar. +This sends a sound wave downwards, and then the reflection, the echo from the sound wave from the seabed or schools of fish, gives us an idea of what's happening below the surface. +Our ocean drones are actually pretty good at this repetitive task, so they have been gridding the Bering Sea day in, day out. +Now, the Pribilof Islands are also the home of a large colony of fur seals. +In the 1950s, there were about two million individuals in that colony. +Sadly, these days, the population has rapidly declined. +There's less than 50 percent of that number left, and the population continues to fall rapidly. +So to understand why, our science partner at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory has fitted a GPS tag on some of the mother seals, glued to their furs. +And this tag measures location and depth and also has a really cool little camera that's triggered by sudden acceleration. +Here is a movie taken by an artistically inclined seal, giving us unprecedented insight into an underwater hunt deep in the Arctic, and the shot of this pollock prey just seconds before it gets devoured. +Now, doing work in the Arctic is very tough, even for a robot. +They had to survive a snowstorm in August and interferences from bystanders — that little spotted seal enjoying a ride. +(Laughter) +Now, the seal tags have recorded over 200,000 dives over the season, and upon a closer look, we get to see the individual seal tracks and the repetitive dives. +We are on our way to decode what is really happening over that foraging ground, and it's quite beautiful. +Once you superimpose the acoustic data collected by the drones, a picture starts to emerge. +As the seals leave the islands and swim from left to right, they are observed to dive at a relatively shallow depth of about 20 meters, which the drone identifies is populated by small young pollock with low calorific content. +The seals then swim much greater distance and start to dive deeper to a place where the drone identifies larger, more adult pollock, which are more nutritious as fish. +Unfortunately, the calories expended by the mother seals to swim this extra distance don't leave them with enough energy to lactate their pups back on the island, leading to the population decline. +Further, the drones identify that the water temperature around the island has significantly warmed. +It might be one of the driving forces that's pushing the pollock north, and to spread in search of colder regions. +So the data analysis is ongoing, but already we can see that some of the pieces of the puzzle from the fur seal mystery are coming into focus. +But if you look back at the big picture, we are mammals, too. +And actually, the oceans provide up to 20 kilos of fish per human per year. +As we deplete our fish stocks, what can we humans learn from the fur seal story? +And beyond fish, the oceans affect all of us daily as they drive global weather systems, which affect things like global agricultural output or can lead to devastating destruction of lives and property through hurricanes, extreme heat and floods. +Our oceans are pretty much unexplored and undersampled, and today, we still know more about other planets than our own. +But if you divide this vast ocean in six-by-six-degree squares, each about 400 miles long, you'd get about 1,000 such squares. +So little by little, working with our partners, we are deploying one ocean drone in each of those boxes, the hope being that achieving planetary coverage will give us better insights into those planetary systems that affect humanity. +We have been using robots to study distant worlds in our solar system for a while now. +Now it is time to quantify our own planet, because we cannot fix what we cannot measure, and we cannot prepare for what we don't know. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, global issues, policy, statistics, economics, global development, future, health, poverty, goal-setting, inequality, society, data +Michael Green +26946 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: "We are living in a world that is tantalizingly close to ensuring that no one need die of hunger or malaria or diarrhea," says economist Michael Green. To help spur progress, back in 2015 the United Nations drew up a set of 17 goals around important factors like health, education and equality. In this data-packed talk, Green shares his analysis on the steps each country has (or hasn't) made toward these Sustainable Development Goals -- and offers new ideas on what needs to change so we can achieve them. +Michael Green: The global goals we've made progress on -- and the ones we haven't +In 2015, the leaders of the world made a big promise. A promise that over the next 15 years, the lives of billions of people are going to get better with no one left behind. +That promise is the Sustainable Development Goals — the SDGs. +We're now three years in; a fifth of the way into the journey. The clock is ticking. If we offtrack now, it's going to get harder and harder to hit those goals. +So what I want to do for you today is give you a snapshot on where we are today, some projections on where we're heading and some ideas on things we might need to do differently. +Now, the SDGs are of course spectacularly complicated. +I would expect nothing less from the United Nations. +(Laughter) +How many goals? Maybe something tried and tested, like three, seven or 10. +No, let's pick a prime number higher than 10. Seventeen goals. I congratulate those of you who've memorized them already. +For the rest of us, here they are. +Seventeen goals ranging from ending poverty to inclusive cities to sustainable fisheries; all a comprehensive plan for the future of our world. +But sadly, a plan without the data to measure it. +So how are we going to track progress? +Well, I'm going to use today the Social Progress Index. +It's a measure of the quality of life of countries, ranging from the basic needs of survival — food, water, shelter, safety — through to the foundations of well-being — education, information, health and the environment — and opportunity — rights, freedom of choice, inclusiveness and access to higher education. +Now, the Social Progress Index doesn't look like the SDGs, but fundamentally, it's measuring the same concepts, and the Social Progress Index has the advantage that we have the data. +We have 51 indicators drawn from trusted sources to measure these concepts. +And also, what we can do because it's an index, is add together all those indicators to give us an aggregate score about how we're performing against the total package of the SDGs. +Now, one caveat. The Social Progress Index is a measure of quality of life. We're not looking at whether this can be achieved within the planet's environmental limits. +You will need other tools to do that. +So how are we doing on the SDGs? +Well, I'm going to put the SDGs on a scale of zero to 100. +And zero is the absolute worst score on each of those 51 indicators: absolute social progress, zero. +And then 100 is the minimum standard required to achieve those SDGs. +A hundred is where we want to get to by 2030. +So, where did we start on this journey? +Fortunately, not at zero. +In 2015, the world score against the SDGs was 69.1. +Some way on the way there but quite a long way to go. +Now let me also emphasize that this world forecast, which is based on data from 180 countries, is population weighted. +So China has more weight in than Comoros; India has more weight in than Iceland. +But we could unpack this and see how the countries are doing. +And the country today that is closest to achieving the SDGs is Denmark. +And the country with the furthest to go is Central African Republic. +And everyone else is somewhere in between. +So the challenge for the SDGs is to try and sweep all these dots across to the right, to 100 by 2030. +Can we get there? +Well, with the Social Progress Index, we've got some time series data. +So we have some idea of the trend that the countries are on, on which we can build some projections. +Let's start with our top-performing country, Denmark. +And yes, I'm pleased to say that Denmark is forecast to achieve the SDGs by 2030. +Maybe not surprising, but I'll take a win. +Let's look at some of the other richer countries of the world — the G7. +And we find that Germany and Japan will get there or thereabouts. +But Canada, France, the UK and Italy are all going to fall short. And the United States? Quite some way back. +Now, this is sort of worrying news. +But these are the richest countries in the world, not the most populous. +So let's take a look now at the biggest countries in the world, the ones that will most affect whether or not we achieve the SDGs. +And here they are — countries in the world with a population of higher than 100 million, ranging from China to Ethiopia. +Obviously, the US and Japan would be in that list, but we've looked at them already. +So here we are. The biggest countries in the world; the dealbreakers for the SDGs. +And the country that's going to make most progress towards the SDGs is Mexico. +Mexico is going to get to about 87, so just shy of where the US is going to get but quite some way off our SDG target. Russia comes next. Then China and Indonesia. +Then Brazil — might've expected Brazil to do a bit better. +Philippines, and then a step down to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, and then Ethiopia. +So none of these countries are going to hit the SDGs. +And we can then take these numbers in all the countries of the world to give ourselves a world forecast on achieving that total package of the SDGs. +So remember, in 2015 we started at 69.1. +I'm pleased to say that over the last three years, we have made some progress. +In 2018, we've hit 70.5, and if we project that rate of progress forward to 2030, that's going to get us to 75.2, which is obviously a long way short of our target. +Indeed, on current trends, we won't hit the 2030 targets until 2094. +Now, I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to wait that long. +So what can we do about this? Well, the first thing to do is we've got to call out the rich countries. +Here are the countries closest to the SDGs, with the greatest resources, and they're falling short. +Maybe they think that this is like the Old World where goals for the UN are just for poor countries and not for them. Well, you're wrong. +The SDGs are for every country, and it's shameful that these wealthy countries are falling short. +Every country needs a plan to implement the SDGs and deliver them for their citizens. +G7, other rich countries — get your act together. +The second thing we can do is look a bit further into the data and see where there are opportunities to accelerate progress or there are negative trends that we can reverse. +So I'm going to take you into three areas. +One where we're doing quite well, one where we really should be doing better and another where we've got some real problems. +Let's start with the good news, and I want to talk about what we call nutrition and basic medical care. +This covers SDG 2 on no hunger and the basic elements of SDG 3 on health, so maternal and child mortality, infectious diseases, etc... This is an area where most of the rich world has hit the SDGs. +And we also find, looking at our big countries, that the most advanced have got pretty close. +Here are our 11 big countries, and if you look at the top, Brazil and Russia are pretty close to the SDG target. +But at the bottom — Ethiopia, Pakistan — a long way to go. +That's where we are in 2018. +What's our trajectory? +On the current trajectory, how far are we going to get by 2030? Well, let's have a look. Well, what we see is a lot of progress. +See Bangladesh in the middle. +If Bangladesh maintains its current rate of progress, it could get very close to that SDG target. +And Ethiopia at the bottom is making a huge amount of progress at the moment. +If that can be maintained, Ethiopia could get a long way. +We add this all up for all the countries of the world and our projection is a score of 94.5 by 2030. +And if countries like the Philippines, which have grown more slowly, could accelerate progress, then we could get a lot closer. +So there are reasons to be optimistic about SDGs 2 and 3. +But there's another very basic area of the SDGs where we're doing less well, which is SDG 6, on water and sanitation. +Again, it's an SDG where most of the rich countries have already achieved the targets. +And again, for our big countries — our big 11 emerging countries, we see that some of the countries, like Russia and Mexico, are very close to the target, but Nigeria and other countries are a very long way back. +So how are we doing on this target? +What progress are we going to make over the next 12 years based on the current direction of travel? +Well, here we go... and yes, there is some progress. +Our top four countries are all hitting the SDG targets — some are moving forward quite quickly. +But it's not enough to really move us forward significantly. +What we see is that for the world as a whole, we're forecasting a score of around 85, 86 by 2030 — not fast enough. +Now, obviously this is not good news, but I think what this data also shows is that we could be doing a lot better. +Water and sanitation is a solved problem. +It's about scaling that solution everywhere. +So if we could accelerate progress in some of those countries who are improving more slowly — Nigeria, the Philippines, etc. — then we could get a lot closer to the goal. +Indeed, I think SDG 6 is probably the biggest opportunity of all the SDGs for a step change. +So that's an area we could do better. +Let's look finally at an area where we are struggling, which is what we call personal rights and inclusiveness. +This is covering concepts across a range of SDGs. SDG 1 on poverty, SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 10 on inequality, SDG 11 on inclusive cities and SDG 16 on peace and justice. +So across those SDGs there are themes around rights and inclusiveness, and those may seem less immediate or pressing than things like hunger and disease, but rights and inclusion are critical to an agenda of no one left behind. +So how are we doing on those issues? Let's start off with personal rights. +What I'm going to do first is show you our big countries in 2015. +So here they are, and I've put the USA and Japan back in, so it's our 13 biggest countries in the world. +And we see a wide range of scores. +The United States at the top with Japan hitting the goals; China a long way behind. +So what's been our direction of travel on the rights agenda over the last three years? Let's have a look. +Well, what we see is actually pretty ugly. +The majority of the countries are standing still or moving backwards, and big countries like Brazil, India, China, Bangladesh have all seen significant declines. This is worrying. +Let's have a look now at inclusiveness. And inclusiveness is looking at things like violence and discrimination against minorities, gender equity, LGBT inclusion, etc... And as a result, we see that the scores for our big countries are generally lower. +Every country, rich and poor alike, is struggling with building an inclusive society. +But what's our direction of travel? Are we building more inclusive countries? +Let's have a look — progress to 2018. +And again we see the world moving backwards: most countries static, a lot of countries going backwards — Bangladesh moving backwards — but also, two of the countries that were leading — Brazil and the United States — have gone backwards significantly over the last three years. +Let's sum this up now for the world as a whole. +And what we see on personal rights for the whole world is we're forecasting actually a decline in the score on personal rights to about 60, and then this decline in the score of inclusiveness to about 42. Now, obviously these things can change quite quickly with rights and with changes in law, changes in attitudes, but we have to accept that on current trends, this is probably the most worrying aspect of the SDGs. +How I've depressed you... +(Laughter) +I hope not because I think what we do see is that progress is happening in a lot of places and there are opportunities for accelerating progress. +We are living in a world that is tantalizingly close to ensuring that no one need die of hunger or malaria or diarrhea. +If we can focus our efforts, mobilize resources, galvanize the political will, that step change is possible. +But in focusing on those really basic, solvable SDGs, we mustn't forget the whole package. +The goals are an unwieldy set of indicators, goals and targets, but they also include the challenges our world faces. +The fact that the SDGs are focusing attention on the fact that we face a crisis in personal rights and inclusiveness is a positive. If we forget that, if we choose to double down on the SDGs that we can solve, if we go for SDG à la carte and pick the most easy SDGs, then we will have missed the point of the SDGs, we will miss the goals and we will have failed on the promise of the SDGs. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, biology, bacteria, science, microbiology, medical research, pharmaceuticals, disease, medicine, health, virus, illness, innovation, biotech +Alexander Belcredi +27105 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Viruses have a bad reputation -- but some of them could one day save your life, says biotech entrepreneur Alexander Belcredi. In this fascinating talk, he introduces us to phages, naturally-occurring viruses that hunt and kill harmful bacteria with deadly precision, and shows how these once-forgotten organisms could provide new hope against the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs. +Alexander Belcredi: How a long-forgotten virus could help us solve the antibiotics crisis +Take a moment and think about a virus. +What comes to your mind? An illness? A fear? Probably something really unpleasant. And yet, viruses are not all the same. +It's true, some of them cause devastating disease. +But others can do the exact opposite — they can cure disease. +These viruses are called "phages." +Now, the first time I heard about phages was back in 2013. +My father-in-law, who's a surgeon, was telling me about a woman he was treating. +The woman had a knee injury, required multiple surgeries, and over the course of these, developed a chronic bacterial infection in her leg. +Unfortunately for her, the bacteria causing the infection also did not respond to any antibiotic that was available. +So at this point, typically, the only option left is to amputate the leg to stop the infection from spreading further. +Now, my father-in-law was desperate for a different kind of solution, and he applied for an experimental, last-resort treatment using phages. And guess what? It worked. Within three weeks of applying the phages, the chronic infection had healed up, where before, no antibiotic was working. +I was fascinated by this weird conception: viruses curing an infection. +To this day, I am fascinated by the medical potential of phages. +And I actually quit my job last year to build a company in this space. +Now, what is a phage? The image that you see here was taken by an electron microscope. +And that means what we see on the screen is in reality extremely tiny. +The grainy thing in the middle with the head, the long body and a number of feet — this is the image of a prototypical phage. +It's kind of cute. +(Laughter) +Now, take a look at your hand. In our team, we've estimated that you have more than 10 billion phages on each of your hands. +What are they doing there? +(Laughter) +Well, viruses are good at infecting cells. +And phages are great at infecting bacteria. +And your hand, just like so much of our body, is a hotbed of bacterial activity, making it an ideal hunting ground for phages. +Because after all, phages hunt bacteria. +It's also important to know that phages are extremely selective hunters. +Typically, a phage will only infect a single bacterial species. +So in this rendering here, the phage that you see hunts for a bacterium called Staphylococcus aureus, which is known as MRSA in its drug-resistant form. +It causes skin or wound infections. +The way the phage hunts is with its feet. +The feet are actually extremely sensitive receptors, on the lookout for the right surface on a bacterial cell. +Once it finds it, the phage will latch on to the bacterial cell wall and then inject its DNA. +DNA sits in the head of the phage and travels into the bacteria through the long body. +At this point, the phage reprograms the bacteria into producing lots of new phages. +The bacteria, in effect, becomes a phage factory. +Once around 50-100 phages have accumulated within the bacteria cell, the phages are then able to release a protein that disrupts the bacteria cell wall. +As the bacteria bursts, the phages move out and go on the hunt again for a new bacteria to infect. +Now, I'm sorry, this probably sounded like a scary virus again. +But it's exactly this ability of phages — to multiply within the bacteria and then kill them — that make them so interesting from a medical point of view. +The other part that I find extremely interesting is the scale at which this is going on. +Now, just five years ago, I really had no clue about phages. +And yet, today I would tell you they are part of a natural principle. +Phages and bacteria go back to the earliest days of evolution. +They have always existed in tandem, keeping each other in check. +So this is really the story of yin and yang, of the hunter and the prey, at a microscopic level. +Some scientists have even estimated that phages are the most abundant organism on our planet. +So even before we continue talking about their medical potential, I think everybody should know about phages and their role on earth: they hunt, infect and kill bacteria. +Now, how come we have something that works so well in nature, every day, everywhere around us, and yet, in most parts of the world, we do not have a single drug on the market that uses this principle to combat bacterial infections? +The simple answer is: no one has developed this kind of a drug yet, at least not one that conforms to the Western regulatory standards that set the norm for so much of the world. +To understand why, we need to move back in time. +This is a picture of Félix d'Herelle. +He is one of the two scientists credited with discovering phages. +Except, when he discovered them back in 1917, he had no clue what he had discovered. +He was interested in a disease called bacillary dysentery, which is a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea, and back then, was actually killing a lot of people, because after all, no cure for bacterial infections had been invented. +He was looking at samples from patients who had survived this illness. +And he found that something weird was going on. +Something in the sample was killing the bacteria that were supposed to cause the disease. +To find out what was going on, he did an ingenious experiment. +He took the sample, filtered it until he was sure that only something very small could have remained, and then took a tiny drop and added it to freshly cultivated bacteria. +And he observed that within a number of hours, the bacteria had been killed. +He then repeated this, again filtering, taking a tiny drop, adding it to the next batch of fresh bacteria. +He did this in sequence 50 times, always observing the same effect. +And at this point, he made two conclusions. +First of all, the obvious one: yes, something was killing the bacteria, and it was in that liquid. +The other one: it had to be biologic in nature, because a tiny drop was sufficient to have a huge impact. +He called the agent he had found an "invisible microbe" and gave it the name "bacteriophage," which, literally translated, means "bacteria eater." And by the way, this is one of the most fundamental discoveries of modern microbiology. +So many modern techniques go back to our understanding of how phages work — in genomic editing, but also in other fields. +And just today, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced for two scientists who work with phages and develop drugs based on that. +Now, back in the 1920s and 1930s, people also immediately saw the medical potential of phages. +After all, albeit invisible, you had something that reliably was killing bacteria. +Companies that still exist today, such as Abbott, Squibb or Lilly, sold phage preparations. +But the reality is, if you're starting with an invisible microbe, it's very difficult to get to a reliable drug. +Just imagine going to the FDA today and telling them all about that invisible virus you want to give to patients. +So when chemical antibiotics emerged in the 1940s, they completely changed the game. +And this guy played a major role. +This is Alexander Fleming. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work contributing to the development of the first antibiotic, penicillin. +And antibiotics really work very differently than phages. +For the most part, they inhibit the growth of the bacteria, and they don't care so much which kind of bacteria are present. +The ones that we call broad-spectrum will even work against a whole bunch of bacteria out there. +Compare that to phages, which work extremely narrowly against one bacterial species, and you can see the obvious advantage. +Now, back then, this must have felt like a dream come true. +You had a patient with a suspected bacterial infection, you gave him the antibiotic, and without really needing to know anything else about the bacteria causing the disease, many of the patients recovered. +And so as we developed more and more antibiotics, they, rightly so, became the first-line therapy for bacterial infections. +And by the way, they have contributed tremendously to our life expectancy. +We are only able to do complex medical interventions and medical surgeries today because we have antibiotics, and we don't risk the patient dying the very next day from the bacterial infection that he might contract during the operation. +So we started to forget about phages, especially in Western medicine. +And to a certain extent, even when I was growing up, the notion was: we have solved bacterial infections; we have antibiotics. +Of course, today, we know that this is wrong. +Today, most of you will have heard about superbugs. +Those are bacteria that have become resistant to many, if not all, of the antibiotics that we have developed to treat this infection. +How did we get here? +Well, we weren't as smart as we thought we were. +As we started using antibiotics everywhere — in hospitals, to treat and prevent; at home, for simple colds; on farms, to keep animals healthy — the bacteria evolved. +In the onslaught of antibiotics that were all around them, those bacteria survived that were best able to adapt. +Today, we call these "multidrug-resistant bacteria." And let me put a scary number out there. +In a recent study commissioned by the UK government, it was estimated that by 2050, ten million people could die every year from multidrug-resistant infections. +Compare that to eight million deaths from cancer per year today, and you can see that this is a scary number. +But the good news is, phages have stuck around. +And let me tell you, they are not impressed by multidrug resistance. +(Laughter) +They are just as happily killing and hunting bacteria all around us. +And they've also stayed selective, which today is really a good thing. +Today, we are able to reliably identify a bacterial pathogen that's causing an infection in many settings. +And their selectivity will help us avoid some of the side effects that are commonly associated with broad-spectrum antibiotics. +But maybe the best news of all is: they are no longer an invisible microbe. +We can look at them. +And we did so together before. +We can sequence their DNA. +We understand how they replicate. And we understand the limitations. +We are in a great place to now develop strong and reliable phage-based pharmaceuticals. +And that's what's happening around the globe. +More than 10 biotech companies, including our own company, are developing human-phage applications to treat bacterial infections. +A number of clinical trials are getting underway in Europe and the US. +So I'm convinced that we're standing on the verge of a renaissance of phage therapy. +And to me, the correct way to depict the phage is something like this. +(Laughter) +To me, phages are the superheroes that we have been waiting for in our fight against multidrug-resistant infections. +So the next time you think about a virus, keep this image in mind. +After all, a phage might one day save your life. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, collaboration, business, personal growth, communication, social change, politics, society +Julia Dhar +27383 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Some days, it feels like the only thing we can agree on is that we can't agree -- on anything. Drawing on her background as a world debate champion, Julia Dhar offers three techniques to reshape the way we talk to each other so we can start disagreeing productively and finding common ground -- over family dinners, during work meetings and in our national conversations. +Julia Dhar: How to disagree productively and find common ground +Some days, it feels like the only thing we can agree on is that we can't agree on anything. +Public discourse is broken. +And we feel that everywhere — panelists on TV are screaming at each other, we go online to find community and connection, and we end up leaving feeling angry and alienated. +In everyday life, probably because everyone else is yelling, we are so scared to get into an argument that we're willing not to engage at all. +Contempt has replaced conversation. +My mission in life is to help us disagree productively. To find ways to bring truth to light, to bring new ideas to life. +I think — I hope — that there is a model for structured disagreement that's kind of mutually respectful and assumes a genuine desire to persuade and be persuaded. +And to uncover it, let me take you back a little bit. +So, when I was 10 years old, I loved arguing. This, like, tantalizing possibility that you could convince someone of your point of view, just with the power of your words. +And perhaps unsurprisingly, my parents and teachers loved this somewhat less. +(Laughter) +And in much the same way as they decided that four-year-old Julia might benefit from gymnastics to burn off some energy, they decided that I might benefit from joining a debate team. +That is, kind of, go somewhere to argue where they were not. +(Laughter) +For the uninitiated, the premises of formal debate are really straightforward: there's a big idea on the table — that we support civil disobedience, that we favor free trade — and one group of people who speaks in favor of that idea, and one against. +My first debate in the cavernous auditorium of Canberra Girls Grammar School was kind of a bundle of all of the worst mistakes that you see on cable news. +It felt easier to me to attack the person making the argument rather than the substance of the ideas themselves. +When that same person challenged my ideas, it felt terrible, I felt humiliated and ashamed. +And it felt to me like the sophisticated response to that was to be as extreme as possible. +And despite this very shaky entry into the world of debate, I loved it. +I saw the possibility, and over many years worked really hard at it, became really skilled at the technical craft of debate. +I went on to win the World Schools Debating Championships three times. +I know, you're just finding out that this is a thing. (Laughter) But it wasn't until I started coaching debaters, persuaders who are really at the top of their game, that I actually got it. +The way that you reach people is by finding common ground. It's by separating ideas from identity and being genuinely open to persuasion. +Debate is a way to organize conversations about how the world is, could, should be. +Or to put it another way, I would love to offer you my experience-backed, evidence-tested guide to talking to your cousin about politics at your next family dinner; reorganizing the way in which your team debates new proposals; thinking about how we change our public conversation. +And so, as an entry point into that: debate requires that we engage with the conflicting idea, directly, respectfully, face to face. +The foundation of debate is rebuttal. The idea that you make a claim and I provide a response, and you respond to my response. +Without rebuttal, it's not debate, it's just pontificating. +And I had originally imagined that the most successful debaters, really excellent persuaders, must be great at going to extremes. They must have some magical ability to make the polarizing palatable. +And it took me a really long time to figure out that the opposite is actually true. +People who disagree the most productively start by finding common ground, no matter how narrow it is. +They identify the thing that we can all agree on and go from there: the right to an education, equality between all people, the importance of safer communities. +What they're doing is inviting us into what psychologists call shared reality. +And shared reality is the antidote to alternative facts. +The conflict, of course, is still there. +That's why it's a debate. +Shared reality just gives us a platform to start to talk about it. +But the trick of debate is that you end up doing it directly, face to face, across the table. +And research backs up that that really matters. +Professor Juliana Schroeder at UC Berkeley and her colleagues have research that suggests that listening to someone's voice as they make a controversial argument is literally humanizing. +It makes it easier to engage with what that person has to say. +So, step away from the keyboards, start conversing. And if we are to expand that notion a little bit, nothing is stopping us from pressing pause on a parade of keynote speeches, the sequence of very polite panel discussions, and replacing some of that with a structured debate. +All of our conferences could have, at their centerpiece, a debate over the biggest, most controversial ideas in the field. +Each of our weekly team meetings could devote 10 minutes to a debate about a proposal to change the way in which that team works. +And as innovative ideas go, this one is both easy and free. +You could start tomorrow. (Laughter) And once we're inside this shared reality, debate also requires that we separate ideas from the identity of the person discussing them. +So in formal debate, nothing is a topic unless it is controversial: that we should raise the voting age, outlaw gambling. +But the debaters don't choose their sides. +So that's why it makes no sense to do what 10-year-old Julia did. Attacking the identity of the person making the argument is irrelevant, because they didn't choose it. +Your only winning strategy is to engage with the best, clearest, least personal version of the idea. +And it might sound impossible or naive to imagine that you could ever take that notion outside the high school auditorium. +We spend so much time dismissing ideas as democrat or republican. Rejecting proposals because they came from headquarters, or from a region that we think is not like ours. +But it is possible. When I work with teams, trying to come up with the next big idea, or solve a really complex problem, I start by asking them, all of them, to submit ideas anonymously. +So by way of illustration, two years ago, I was working with multiple government agencies to generate new solutions to reduce long-term unemployment. Which is one of those really wicked, sticky, well-studied public policy problems. +So exactly as I described, right at the beginning, potential solutions were captured from everywhere. +We aggregated them, each of them was produced on an identical template. +At this point, they all look the same, they have no separate identity. +And then, of course, they are discussed, picked over, refined, finalized. +And at the end of that process, more than 20 of those new ideas are presented to the cabinet ministers responsible for consideration. +But more than half of those, the originator of those ideas was someone who might have a hard time getting the ear of a policy advisor. Or who, because of their identity, might not be taken entirely seriously if they did. Folks who answer the phones, assistants who manage calendars, representatives from agencies who weren't always trusted. +Imagine if our news media did the same thing. +You can kind of see it now — a weekly cable news segment with a big policy proposal on the table that doesn't call it liberal or conservative. +Or a series of op-eds for and against a big idea that don't tell you where the writers worked. +Our public conversations, even our private disagreements, can be transformed by debating ideas, rather than discussing identity. +And then, the thing that debate allows us to do as human beings is open ourselves, really open ourselves up to the possibility that we might be wrong. +The humility of uncertainty. +One of the reasons it is so hard to disagree productively is because we become attached to our ideas. +We start to believe that we own them and that by extension, they own us. +But eventually, if you debate long enough, you will switch sides, you'll argue for and against the expansion of the welfare state. +For and against compulsory voting. +And that exercise flips a kind of cognitive switch. +The suspicions that you hold about people who espouse beliefs that you don't have, starts to evaporate. Because you can imagine yourself stepping into those shoes. +And as you're stepping into those, you're embracing the humility of uncertainty. The possibility of being wrong. +And it's that exact humility that makes us better decision-makers. +Neuroscientist and psychologist Mark Leary at Duke University and his colleagues have found that people who are able to practice — and it is a skill — what those researchers call intellectual humility are more capable of evaluating a broad range of evidence, are more objective when they do so, and become less defensive when confronted with conflicting evidence. +All attributes that we want in our bosses, colleagues, discussion partners, decision-makers, all virtues that we would like to claim for ourselves. +And so, as we're embracing that humility of uncertainty, we should be asking each other, all of us, a question. +Our debate moderators, our news anchors should be asking it of our elective representatives and candidates for office, too. "What is it that you have changed your mind about and why?" "What uncertainty are you humble about?" And this by the way, isn't some fantasy about how public life and public conversations could work. It has precedent. +So, in 1969, beloved American children's television presenter Mister Rogers sits impaneled before the United States congressional subcommittee on communications, chaired by the seemingly very curmudgeonly John Pastore. +And Mister Rogers is there to make a kind of classic debate case, a really bold proposal: an increase in federal funding for public broadcasting. +And at the outset, committee disciplinarian Senator Pastore is not having it. +This is about to end really poorly for Mister Rogers. +But patiently, very reasonably, Mister Rogers makes the case why good quality children's broadcasting, the kinds of television programs that talk about the drama that arises in the most ordinary of families, matters to all of us. Even while it costs us. +He invites us into a shared reality. +And on the other side of that table, Senator Pastore listens, engages and opens his mind. Out loud, in public, on the record. +And Senator Pastore says to Mister Rogers, "You know, I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I've had goosebumps in two days." And then, later, "It looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars." We need many more Mister Rogers. People with the technical skills of debate and persuasion. +But on the other side of that table, we need many, many, many more Senator Pastores. +And the magic of debate is that it lets you, it empowers you to be both Mister Rogers and Senator Pastore simultaneously. +When I work with those same teams that we talked about before, I ask them at the outset to pre-commit to the possibility of being wrong. +To explain to me and to each other what it would take to change their minds. +And that's all about the attitude, not the exercise. +Once you start thinking about what it would take to change your mind, you start to wonder why you were quite so sure in the first place. +There is so much that the practice of debate has to offer us for how to disagree productively. +And we should bring it to our workplaces, our conferences, our city council meetings. +And the principles of debate can transform the way that we talk to one another, to empower us to stop talking and to start listening. +To stop dismissing and to start persuading. +To stop shutting down and to start opening our minds. +Thank you so much. (Applause) + + +talks, climate change, Anthropocene, nature, biosphere, science, social change, energy, sustainability, pollution, education, potential, electricity, global issues, food, policy +Chad Frischmann +27793 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: What if we took out more greenhouse gases than we put into the atmosphere? This hypothetical scenario, known as "drawdown," is our only hope of averting climate disaster, says strategist Chad Frischmann. In a forward-thinking talk, he shares solutions to climate change that exist today -- conventional tactics like the use of renewable energy and better land management as well as some lesser-known approaches, like changes to food production, better family planning and the education of girls. Learn more about how we can reverse global warming and create a world where regeneration, not destruction, is the rule. +Chad Frischmann: 100 solutions to reverse global warming +Hello. I'd like to introduce you to a word you may never have heard before, but you ought to know: drawdown. +Drawdown is a new way of thinking about and acting on global warming. +It's a goal for a future that we want, a future where reversing global warming is possible. +Drawdown is that point in time when atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases begin to decline on a year-to-year basis. +More simply, it's that point when we take out more greenhouse gases than we put into Earth's atmosphere. +Now, I know we're all concerned about climate change, but climate change is not the problem. +Climate change is the expression of the problem. +It's the feedback of the system of the planet telling us what's going on. +The problem is global warming, provoked by the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases caused by human activity. +So how do we solve the problem? +How do we begin the process of reversing global warming? +The only way we know how is to draw down, to avoid putting greenhouse gases up and to pull down what's already there. I know. Given the current situation, it sounds impossible, but humanity already knows what to do. +We have real, workable technologies and practices that can achieve drawdown. +And it's already happening. +What we need is to accelerate implementation and to change the discourse from one of fear and confusion, which only leads to apathy, to one of understanding and possibility, and, therefore, opportunity. +I work for an organization called Project Drawdown. +And for the last four years, together with a team of researchers and writers from all over the world, we have mapped, measured and detailed 100 solutions to reversing global warming. +Eighty already exist today, and when taken together, those 80 can achieve drawdown. +And 20 are coming attractions, solutions on the pipeline, and when they come online, will speed up our progress. +These are solutions that are viable, scalable and financially feasible. +And they do one or more of three things: replace existing fossil fuel-based energy generation with clean, renewable sources; reduce consumption through technological efficiency and behavior change; and to biosequester carbon in our plants' biomass and soil through a process we all learn in grade school, the magic of photosynthesis. +It's through a combination of these three mechanisms that drawdown becomes possible. +So how do we get there? +Well, here's the short answer. +This is a list of the top 20 solutions to reversing global warming. +Now, I'll go into some detail, but take a few seconds to look over the list. +It's eclectic, I know, from onshore wind turbines to educating girls, from plant-rich diets to rooftop solar technology. +So let's break it down a little bit. +To the right of the slide, you'll see figures in gigatons, or billions of tons. +That represents the total equivalent carbon dioxide reduced from the atmosphere when the solution is implemented globally over a 30-year period. +Now, when we think about climate solutions, we often think about electricity generation. +We think of renewable energy as the most important set of solutions, and they are incredibly important. +But the first thing to notice about this list is that only five of the top 20 solutions relate to electricity. +What surprised us, honestly, was that eight of the top 20 relate to the food system. +The climate impact of food may come as a surprise to many people, but what these results show is that the decisions we make every day about the food we produce, purchase and consume are perhaps the most important contributions every individual can make to reversing global warming. +And how we manage land is also very important. +Protecting forests and wetlands safeguards, expands and creates new carbon sinks that directly draw down carbon. +This is how drawdown can happen. +And when we take food and land management together, 12 of the top 20 solutions relate to how and why we use land. +This fundamentally shifts traditional thinking on climate solutions. +But let's go to the top of the list, because I think what's there may also surprise you. +The single most impactful solution, according to this analysis, would be refrigeration management, or properly managing and disposing of hydrofluorocarbons, also known as HFCs, which are used by refrigerators and air conditioners to cool the air. +We did a great job with the Montreal Protocol to limit the production of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, because of their effect on the ozone layer. +But they were replaced by HFCs, which are hundreds to thousands of times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. +And that 90 gigatons reduced is a conservative figure. +If we were to account for the impact of the Kigali agreement of 2016, which calls for the phaseout of hydrofluorocarbons and replace them with natural refrigerants, which exist today, this number could increase to 120, to nearly 200 gigatons of avoided greenhouse gases. +Maybe you're surprised, as we were. +Now, before going into some details of specific solutions, you may be wondering how we came to these calculations. +Well, first of all, we collected a lot of data, and we used statistical analysis to create ranges that allow us to choose reasonable choices for every input used throughout the models. +And we chose a conservative approach, which underlies the entire project. +All that data is entered in the model, ambitiously but plausibly projected into the future, and compared against what we would have to do anyway. +The 84 gigatons reduced from onshore wind turbines, for example, results from the electricity generated from wind farms that would otherwise be produced from coal or gas-fired plants. +We calculate all the costs to build and to operate the plants and all the emissions generated. +The same process is used to compare recycling versus landfilling, regenerative versus industrial agriculture, protecting versus cutting down our forests. +The results are then integrated within and across systems to avoid double-counting and add it up to see if we actually get to drawdown. +OK, let's go into some specific solutions. +Rooftop solar comes in ranked number 10. +When we picture rooftop solar in our minds we often envision a warehouse in Miami covered in solar panels. +But these are solutions that are relevant in urban and rural settings, high and low-income countries, and they have cascading benefits. +This is a family on a straw island in Lake Titicaca receiving their first solar panel. +Before, kerosene was used for cooking and lighting, kerosene on a straw island. +So by installing solar, this family is not only helping to reduce emissions, but providing safety and security for their household. +And tropical forests tell their own story. +Protecting currently degraded land in the tropics and allowing natural regeneration to occur is the number five solution to reversing global warming. +We can think of trees as giant sticks of carbon. +This is drawdown in action every year, as carbon is removed from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, which converts carbon dioxide to plants' biomass and soil organic carbon. +And we need to rethink how we produce our food to make it more regenerative. +There are many ways to do this, and we researched over 13 of them, but these aren't new ways of producing food. +They have been practiced for centuries, for generations. +But they are increasingly displaced by modern agriculture, which promotes tillage, monocropping and the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides which degrade the land and turn it into a net emitter of greenhouse gases. +Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, restores soil health and productivity, increases yield, improves water retention, benefits smallholder farmers and large farming operations alike and brings carbon back to the land. +It's a win-win-win-win-win. +(Laughter) +And it's not just how we produce food, but what we consume that has a massive impact on global warming. +A plant-rich diet is not a vegan or a vegetarian diet, though I applaud any who make those choices. +It's a healthy diet in terms of how much we consume, and particularly how much meat is consumed. +In the richer parts of the world, we overconsume. +However, low-income countries show an insufficient caloric and protein intake. +That needs rebalancing, and it's in the rebalancing that a plant-rich diet becomes the number four solution to reversing global warming. +Moreover, approximately a third of all food produced is not eaten, and wasted food emits an astounding eight percent of global greenhouse gases. +We need to look where across the supply chain these losses and wastage occurs. +In low-income countries, after food leaves the farm, most food is wasted early in the supply chain due to infrastructure and storage challenges. +Food is not wasted by consumers in low-income countries which struggle to feed their population. +In the developed world, instead, after food leaves the farm, most food is wasted at the end of the supply chain by markets and consumers, and wasted food ends up in the landfill where it emits methane as it decomposes. +This is a consumer choice problem. +It's not a technology issue. +Preventing food waste from the beginning is the number three solution. But here's the interesting thing. +When we look at the food system as a whole and we implement all the production solutions like regenerative agriculture, and we adopt a plant-rich diet, and we reduce food waste, our research shows that we would produce enough food on current farmland to feed the world's growing population a healthy, nutrient-rich diet now until 2050 and beyond. +That means we don't need to cut down forests for food production. +The solutions to reversing global warming are the same solutions to food insecurity. +Now, a solution that often does not get talked enough about, family planning. +By providing men and women the right to choose when, how and if to raise a family through reproductive health clinics and education, access to contraception and freedom devoid of persecution can reduce the estimated global population by 2050. +That reduced population means reduced demand for electricity, food, travel, buildings and all other resources. +All the energy and emissions that are used to produce that higher demand is reduced by providing the basic human right to choose when, how and if to raise a family. +But family planning cannot happen without equal quality of education to girls currently being denied access. +Now, we've taken a small liberty here, because the impact of universal education and family planning resources are so inextricably intertwined that we chose to cut it right down the middle. +But taken together, educating girls and family planning is the number one solution to reversing global warming, reducing approximately 120 billion tons of greenhouse gases. +So is drawdown possible? The answer is yes, it is possible, but we need all 80 solutions. +There are no silver bullets or a subset of solutions that are going to get us there. +The top solutions would take us far along the pathway, but there's no such thing as a small solution. +We need all 80. But here's the great thing. We would want to implement these solutions whether or not global warming was even a problem, because they have cascading benefits to human and planetary well-being. +Renewable electricity results in clean, abundant access to energy for all. +A plant-rich diet, reduced food waste results in a healthy global population with enough food and sustenance. +Family planning and educating girls? +This is about human rights, about gender equality. +This is about economic improvement and the freedom of choice. +It's about justice. +Regenerative agriculture, managed grazing, agroforestry, silvopasture restores soil health, benefits farmers and brings carbon back to the land. +Protecting our ecosystems also protects biodiversity and safeguards planetary health and the oxygen that we breathe. +Its tangible benefits to all species are incalculable. +But one last point, because I know it's probably on everybody's mind; how much is this going to cost? +Well, we estimate that to implement all 80 solutions would cost about 29 trillion dollars over 30 years. +That's just about a trillion a year. +Now, I know that sounds like a lot, but we have to remember that global GDP is over 80 trillion every year, and the estimated savings from implementing these solutions is 74 trillion dollars, over double the costs. +That's a net savings of 44 trillion dollars. +So drawdown is possible. We can do it if we want to. +It's not going to cost that much, and the return on that investment is huge. +Here's the welcome surprise. When we implement these solutions, we shift the way we do business from a system that is inherently exploitative and extractive to a new normal that is by nature restorative and regenerative. +We need to rethink our global goals, to move beyond sustainability towards regeneration, and along the way reverse global warming. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +talks, climate change, environment, sustainability, politics, education, society, social change, pollution, Anthropocene +Greta Thunberg +32560 +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In this passionate call to action, 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg explains why, in August 2018, she walked out of school and organized a strike to raise awareness of global warming, protesting outside the Swedish parliament and grabbing the world's attention. "The climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions," Thunberg says. "All we have to do is to wake up and change." +Greta Thunberg: The disarming case to act right now on climate change +When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change or global warming. +Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. +I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and to recycle paper to save resources. +I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the Earth's climate. +Because if we were, and if it was really happening, we wouldn't be talking about anything else. +As soon as you'd turn on the TV, everything would be about that. +Headlines, radio, newspapers, you would never read or hear about anything else, as if there was a world war going on. +But no one ever talked about it. +If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? +Why were there no restrictions? +Why wasn't it made illegal? +To me, that did not add up. +It was too unreal. +So when I was 11, I became ill. I fell into depression, I stopped talking, and I stopped eating. +In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. +Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. +That basically means I only speak when I think it's necessary - now is one of those moments. +(Applause) +For those of us who are on the spectrum, almost everything is black or white. +We aren't very good at lying, and we usually don't enjoy participating in this social game that the rest of you seem so fond of. +(Laughter) +I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones, and the rest of the people are pretty strange, +(Laughter) +especially when it comes to the sustainability crisis, where everyone keeps saying climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on like before. +I don't understand that, because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. +To me that is black or white. +There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. +Either we go on as a civilization or we don't. +We have to change. +Rich countries like Sweden need to start reducing emissions by at least 15 percent every year. +And that is so that we can stay below a two-degree warming target. +Yet, as the IPCC have recently demonstrated, aiming instead for 1.5 degrees Celsius would significantly reduce the climate impacts. +But we can only imagine what that means for reducing emissions. +You would think the media and every one of our leaders would be talking about nothing else, but they never even mention it. +Nor does anyone ever mention the greenhouse gases already locked in the system. +Nor that air pollution is hiding a warming so that when we stop burning fossil fuels, we already have an extra level of warming perhaps as high as 0.5 to 1.1 degrees Celsius. +Furthermore does hardly anyone speak about the fact that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with up to 200 species going extinct every single day, that the extinction rate today is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than what is seen as normal. +Nor does hardly anyone ever speak about the aspect of equity or climate justice, clearly stated everywhere in the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. +That means that rich countries need to get down to zero emissions within 6 to 12 years, with today's emission speed. +And that is so that people in poorer countries can have a chance to heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built, such as roads, schools, hospitals, clean drinking water, electricity, and so on. +Because how can we expect countries like India or Nigeria to care about the climate crisis if we who already have everything don't care even a second about it or our actual commitments to the Paris Agreement? +So, why are we not reducing our emissions? +Why are they in fact still increasing? +Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? Are we evil? No, of course not. +People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn't have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life, and they don't know that rapid change is required. +We all think we know, and we all think everybody knows, but we don't. +Because how could we? +If there really was a crisis, and if this crisis was caused by our emissions, you would at least see some signs. +Not just flooded cities, tens of thousands of dead people, and whole nations leveled to piles of torn down buildings. +You would see some restrictions. But no. And no one talks about it. +There are no emergency meetings, no headlines, no breaking news. +No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. +Even most climate scientists or green politicians keep on flying around the world, eating meat and dairy. +If I live to be 100, I will be alive in the year 2103. +When you think about the future today, you don't think beyond the year 2050. +By then, I will, in the best case, not even have lived half of my life. +What happens next? The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. +If I have children or grandchildren, maybe they will spend that day with me. +Maybe they will ask me about you, the people who were around, back in 2018. +Maybe they will ask why you didn't do anything while there still was time to act. +What we do or don't do right now will affect my entire life and the lives of my children and grandchildren. +What we do or don't do right now, me and my generation can't undo in the future. +So when school started in August of this year, I decided that this was enough. +I set myself down on the ground outside the Swedish parliament. +I school striked for the climate. +Some people say that I should be in school instead. +Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can "solve the climate crisis." But the climate crisis has already been solved. +We already have all the facts and solutions. +All we have to do is to wake up and change. +And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? +And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society. +Some people say that Sweden is just a small country, and that it doesn't matter what we do, but I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not coming to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could all do together if you wanted to. +(Applause) +Now we're almost at the end of my talk, and this is where people usually start talking about hope, solar panels, wind power, circular economy, and so on, but I'm not going to do that. +We've had 30 years of pep-talking and selling positive ideas. +And I'm sorry, but it doesn't work. +Because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now. They haven't. And yes, we do need hope, of course we do. +But the one thing we need more than hope is action. +Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. +So instead of looking for hope, look for action. +Then, and only then, hope will come. +Today, we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. +There are no politics to change that. +There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. +So we can't save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed. +Everything needs to change — and it has to start today. +Thank you. +(Applause) + + +