diff --git "a/data/en-de/tst2010/IWSLT.TED.tst2010.en-de.en.xml" "b/data/en-de/tst2010/IWSLT.TED.tst2010.en-de.en.xml" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data/en-de/tst2010/IWSLT.TED.tst2010.en-de.en.xml" @@ -0,0 +1,1672 @@ + + + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Tom Wujec presents some surprisingly deep research into the "marshmallow problem" -- a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Who can build the tallest tower with these ingredients? And why does a surprising group always beat the average? +talks, business, collaboration, culture, design, entertainment, psychology +837 +Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team + + + Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. + And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. + The marshmallow has to be on top. + And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. + And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. + And it was a huge success. + And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you. + So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. + They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. + Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. + They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. + And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and -- ta-da! -- they admire their work. + But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "ta-da" turns into an "uh-oh," because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. + So there are a number of people who have a lot more "uh-oh" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. + They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. + And of course there are teams that have a lot more "ta-da" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. + And it's pretty amazing. + As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all. + So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? + And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? + They don't spend time jockeying for power. + But there's another reason as well. + And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? + And then they execute on it. + And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? + It's a crisis. + Sound familiar? Right. + What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. + Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. + And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. + So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. + So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. + Who does the very best? + Architects and engineers, thankfully. + Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. + And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. + So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. + If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. + It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, "Oh, that team's going to win." + You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? + Because they have special skills of facilitation. + They manage the process, they understand the process. + And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. + Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. + If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures. + And I tried something interesting. + I thought, let's up the ante, once. + So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. + So what do you think happened to these design students? + What was the result? + Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. + If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. + So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. + We did the exercise again with the same students. + What do you think happened then? + So now they understand the value of prototyping. + So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. + They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. + So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success. + So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? + And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. + And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. + Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? + The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. + And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise. + And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. + It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. + There's step-by-step instructions on this. + There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. + There's world records that are on this as well. + And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. + It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. + And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an "uh-oh" moment to a "ta-da" moment. + And that can make a big difference. + Thank you very much. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_specter_the_danger_of_science_denial +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress. +talks, global issues, medicine, religion, science, writing +824 +Michael Specter: The danger of science denial + + + Let's pretend right here we have a machine. + A big machine, a cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. + And everyone in this room has to get into it. + And you can go backwards, you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. + And I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back. + I don't know. They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or "American Idol." + I don't know. + I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking. + And I understand that. + I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. + I don't want to go back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. + It's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward. + So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go forward. + This is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease ... + There's never been a time like this. + My great-grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60. + My grandparents pushed that number to 70. + My parents are closing in on 80. + So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number. + But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that. + A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. + Think about that, it's an incredible fact. + And why is it true? + Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. + It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has. + It's gone. It's vanished. + We vanquished it. Puff. + In the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist, hardly. + Diphtheria, rubella, polio ... + does anyone even know what those things are? + Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. + And to my mind, the scientific method -- trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't -- is one of the great accomplishments of humanity. + So that's the good news. + Unfortunately, that's all the good news because there are some other problems, and they've been mentioned many times. + And one of them is that despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day. + That number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. + And not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. + Potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away, and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too. + So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. + I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on. + I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it. + I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. + But here's the thing that keeps me up at night -- one of the things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now. Never. + And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today. + We're on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress, when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more fronts, than we do now. + People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free. + Not even the truth will set them free. + And, listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress. + But you know what you're not entitled to? + You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. + And this took me awhile to figure out. + About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The New Yorker. A little story. + And I was amazed to find opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective public health measure in human history. + I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on. + And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food. + Same thing, only bigger. + People were going crazy. + So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was "Frankenfoods," why they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground. + But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on. + I mean, I'm a journalist. + We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine. + But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. + And that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. + They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. + They were exactly like the people in this room. + And it just disturbed me so much. + But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. + We're at a point in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to. + We talk about it ambivalently. + We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it: "progress." + Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. + We've lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. + You can just say a few names and people will understand. + Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, hanging chads. + You know, you can choose your list. + There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. + Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. + Don't take anything for granted. + But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good at doing that. + And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and hope never to see again. + About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine shot. + Very scary. + Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. + Tons of studies should have been done; it's a serious issue. + The data came back. + The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no correlation, no connection, none at all. + It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real. + We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all do. + But you know what? + The result of that has been disastrous. + Disastrous because here's a fact: The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down. + That is disgraceful, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. + It's horrible. + What kind of a thing happened that we could do that? + Now, I understand it. I do understand it. + Because, did anyone have measles here? + Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? + Doesn't happen very much. + Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. + That's a lot of death of measles -- 20 an hour. + But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." + And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. + They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. + And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon. + This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. + He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us. + No fear, no agony. Polio -- puff, gone. + That guy in the middle, not so much. + His name is Paul Offit. + He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people. + It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year. + Pretty good, right? + Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining. + And he actually says it that way. + So, Paul's a terrorist. + When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. + He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school. + And why? Because Paul made a vaccine. + I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. + You take them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's happening. + We have measles in this country now. + And it's getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it's just a numbers game. + And they're not just going to die of measles. + What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? + A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. + No one's ever said that before. + She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio, no way. + Fine. + Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? + We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. + Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right now he's over Ohio. + And he's going to land in a couple of hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight. + And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's the way the world works. + That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't. + Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. + Everyone take their vitamins this morning? + Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. + I know you did because half of Americans do every day. + They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're useless. + The data says it all the time. + They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. + It's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? + I'm totally with you. + Dark urine. Dark. + Why do we do that? Why do we do that? + Well, I think I understand, we hate Big Pharma. + We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man. + And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. + It's cruel to millions of people. + It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. + So we run away from it, and where do we run? + We leap into the arms of Big Placebo. + That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo. + But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. + And I have all sorts of little props here. + None of it ... ginkgo, fraud; echinacea, fraud; acai -- I don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it -- it's fraud. + And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, "What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. + It makes them feel good." + And you know what? You're wrong. + Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, "Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms," or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. + When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. + You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. + He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. + Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease. + Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. + There are. There always are. + Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. + It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. + It's a debate about words, about metaphors. + It's ideology, it's not science. + Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has been modified by man. + You know, there weren't tangerines in the garden of Eden. + There wasn't any cantaloupe. There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. + We made it over the last 11,000 years. + And some of it worked, and some of it didn't. + We got rid of the stuff that didn't. + Now we can do it in a more precise way -- and there are risks, absolutely -- but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. + You don't want to do that? + I have to say, I don't understand it. + We object to genetically engineered food. + Why do we do that? + Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields of the same thing, that's wrong. + We don't companies patenting life. + We don't want companies owning seeds. + And you know what my response to all of that is? + Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. + It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but this isn't science. + This has nothing to do with science. + It's law, it's morality, it's patent stuff. + You know science isn't a company. + It's not a country. + It's not even an idea; it's a process. + It's a process, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from prospering. + You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. + This investment in Africa over the last 30 years. + Disgraceful. Disgraceful. + They need it, and we're not giving it to them. + And why? Genetically engineered food. + We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for instance. + Cassava's something that half a billion people eat. + It's kind of like a potato. + It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks. + It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. + And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. + They wouldn't starve, and you know what? + That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice. + And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? + I mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? + Because we don't want to move genes around? + This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals. + It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food. + This isn't about Rice Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about time we started to understand what that meant. + Because, you know something? + If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. + There's no other way to describe what's going on here. + It's selfish, it's ugly, it's beneath us, and we really have to stop it. + So after this amazingly fun conversation, you might want to say, "So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward?" + Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. + It's stuck in the present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. + We can set that time machine on anything we want. + We can move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it where we want to move it. + We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we do. + I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's something the world needs right now. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_gupta +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talks about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician -- and what he learned. Called back onstage later, Gupta plays his own transcription of the prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1. +talks, TED Fellows, brain, education, entertainment, live music, mental health, music, performance, violin +805 +Robert Gupta: Music is medicine, music is sanity + + + One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. + And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings. + And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. + Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. + I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental -- if you'll pardon the pun -- in helping Nathaniel get off the streets. + I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. + He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. + He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. + And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me. + Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. + But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him. + And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall -- he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. + And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep. + And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. + So, I just started playing. + And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. + And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. + It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. + And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. + And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete -- Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. + And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen. + And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. + He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. + And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician. + Music is medicine. Music changes us. + And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. + Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. + And that is an escape from his tormented state. + And I understood that this was the very essence of art. + This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. + And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us. + And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. + The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. + And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. + Thank you. + Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. + Robert Gupta. + Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. + So, please forgive me. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how. +talks, computers, design, entertainment, gaming, global issues, play +799 +Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world + + + I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer. + I've been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. + Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games. + Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. + Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. + Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." + But actually, according to my research at the Institute for the Future, actually the opposite is true. + Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems. + In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. + I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. + So, that's probably a bit of a counter-intuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. + No. I'm serious. I am. + Here's why. + This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species. Truly. + This is a portrait by photographer Phil Toledano. + He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. + And this is a classic gaming emotion. + Now, if you're not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo. + You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem. + If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. + This is a gamer who's on the verge of something called an "epic win." + Oh, you've heard of that. + OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. + An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive, you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. + It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination, and when you get there, you're shocked to discover what you're truly capable of. + That's an epic win. + This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. + And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century -- the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win. + Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. + This is what I call the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. + This is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. + This is me making the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. + This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. + And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. + We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games. + I don't mean just good as in successful, although that's part of it. + We do achieve more in game worlds. + But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters -- inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. + And when we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves -- the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. + And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. + We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. + We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games. + So that's what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student. + What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? + How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? + So I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. + And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds. + The first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. + But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. + Right? So you can do it. + They never give you a challenge you can't achieve. + But it is on the verge of what you're capable of, so you have to try hard. + But there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft; no sitting around, wringing your hands -- there's always something specific and important to be done. + There are also tons of collaborators. + Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission. + That's not something we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators. + And there's this epic story, this inspiring story of why we're there, and what we're doing, and we get all this positive feedback. + You guys have heard of leveling up, +1 strength, +1 intelligence. + We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life. + When I get off this stage, I'm not going to have +1 speaking, and +1 crazy idea, +20 crazy idea. + I don't get that feedback in real life. + Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time, we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. + It's just better than reality. + So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. + Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. + It might sound like it's a bad thing. + But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. + That was the first upright primate. + So when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. + But it's also apt, because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. + We're evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. + This is true. I believe this. + So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. + Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. + First of all, for children in the United States, 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school, from fifth grade to high school graduation, if you have perfect attendance. + So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on, where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they're learning about everything else in school. + Some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers," so you would have heard of his theory of success, the "10,000 hours" theory of success. + It's based on this great cognitive-science research that says if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. + We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. + And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. + So, the big question is, "What exactly are gamers getting so good at?" + Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. + This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. + These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. + And in the next decade, we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. + If you don't know it already, this is coming. + The game industry is developing consoles that are low-energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet, so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. + They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. + It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers. + So I've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. + Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. + OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. + Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. + Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it's always worth trying, and trying now. + Gamers don't sit around. + Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. + There's a lot of interesting research that shows we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly. + And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. + We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until it's over. + And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. + And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. + Blissful productivity. I love it. + You know, there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week -- kind of a half-time job. + It's because we know, when we're playing a game, that we're actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. + We know that we are optimized as human beings, to do hard and meaningful work. + And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work. + Finally: epic meaning. + Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. + So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. + Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. + Five million people use it every month. + They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. + They are building an epic story. + They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft. + Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. + These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. + And the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. + That's the problem that I'm trying to solve. + There's an economist named Edward Castronova. + His work is brilliant. + He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. + And he says, "We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments." + And he's an economist, so he's rational. + And he says -- Not like me, I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. + But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. + They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. + So he says, for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. + Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. + But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. + We have to start making the real world work more like a game. + I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. + These are ancient dice, made out of sheep's knuckles. + Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep's knuckles. + And these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings, and if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. + Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia, during a time of famine. + Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided they had to do something crazy. + People were suffering. People were fighting. + It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. + So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games, and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games. + And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games, because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying, blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. + And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat. + And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famine, by eating on one day, and playing games on the next. + Now, this is exactly, I think, how we're using games today. + We're using games to escape real-world suffering -- we're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment, everything that's not satisfying about real life, and we're getting what we need from games. + But it doesn't have to end there. + This is really exciting. + According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. + They divided the entire kingdom in half. + They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. + They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilization somewhere else where they could thrive. + Now, this sounds crazy, right? + But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. + And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true. + And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years, that could have explained the famine. + So this crazy story might be true. + They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way. + Okay, we can do that. + We've been playing Warcraft since 1994. + That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. + That was 16 years ago. + They played dice games for 18 years, we've been playing Warcraft for 16 years. + I say we are ready for our own epic game. + Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that's where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. + Let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems. + Now, I know you're asking, "How are we going to solve real-world problems in games?" + Well, that's what I've devoted my work to over the past few years, at the Institute for the Future. + We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. + We do not want to try to predict the future. + What we want to do is make the future. + We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. + We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win. + I'm just going to very briefly show you three games that I've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. + This is World Without Oil. + We made this game in 2007. + This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. + The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real, and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what's not available, how food supply is being affected, + how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there's rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. + We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've tracked them for the three years since. + And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. + Nobody wants to change how they live, just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to. + But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, "We've run out of oil. + This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. + Challenge yourself to see how you would survive," most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game. + So for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher -- bigger problem than just peak oil. + We did a game called Superstruct at the Institute for the Future. + And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. + This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. + We asked people to come online -- almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. + You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team -- you've got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. + But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, "Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net." + We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. + They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, Google "Superstruct," and see. + So, finally, the last game, we're launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. + If you complete the game, you will be certified by the World Bank Institute as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. + Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. + We've got a graphic novel, we've got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. + I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world. + So, I'm going to wrap up now. + I want to ask a question. + What do you think happens next? + We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. + Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. + We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. + I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. + That's my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. + When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want, so I say: Let the world-changing games begin. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_mead_the_magic_of_the_placebo +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Sugar pills, injections of nothing -- studies show that, more often than you'd expect, placebos really work. At TEDMED, magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that, even when you know something's not real, you can still react as powerfully as if it is. +talks, entertainment, illusion, magic, medicine, science +792 +Eric Mead: The magic of the placebo + + + For some time I have been interested in the placebo effect, which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in, unless you think of it in the terms that I do, which is, "Something fake is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real." + In other words, sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a -- for pain management, for example, if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect. + Something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it. + In order for us to understand each other, I want to start by showing you a rudimentary, very simple magic trick. + And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the 1950s. + I learned it myself from Cub Scout Magic in the 1970s. + I'll do it for you, and then I'll explain it. + And then I'll explain why I explained it. + So, here's what happens. + The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you could examine. + I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this. + I'll get my sleeve back. + And to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here. + That way you can see that at no time can anything travel, as long as I'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve. + And the object of this is quite simple. + I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if all is well, my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife. + In fact it's held so tightly in place that I can shake it, and the knife does not come off. + Nothing goes up or down my sleeve, no trickery. And you can examine everything. + Ta-da! + So, this is a trick that I often teach to young children that are interested in magic, because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very -- even though it's a very simple trick methodologically. + Probably many of you in the room know this trick. + What happens is this. + I hold the knife in my hand. + I say I'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve, that is a lie. + The reason I'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret of the illusion. + In a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you, this finger right here, my index finger is just going to shift from where it is, to a position pointing out like this. + Nice one. + Someone who didn't have a childhood is out there. + So, it goes like this, from here, right. + And as I move around my finger shifts. + And we could talk about why this is deceptive, why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here, because the mind, and the way it processes information, it doesn't count, one, two, three. It groups them. + But that's not really what this is about. Right? And then I open my hand up. + Obviously it's clinging there, not by animal magnetism, but by chicanery, my index finger being there. + And then when I close my finger, same thing, as I move back, this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger. + I take this hand away. You give the knife out. + There is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors. Thanks. + Now, what does that have to do with the placebo effect? + I read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open. + I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an astonishing thing. + It turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill, that's like aspirin shaped -- it's just a round white pill -- it has some certain measurable effect. + But if you change the form that you give the placebo in, like you make a smaller pill, and color it blue, and stamp a letter into it, it is actually measurably more effective. + Even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical -- they're sugar pills. + But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill. + What? That really flipped me out. + Turns out though, that that's not even where it stops. + If you have capsules, they're more effective than tablets in any form. + A colored capsule, that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule. + Dosage has something to do with this. + One pill twice a day is not as good at three pills -- I don't remember the statistic now. Sorry. + But the point is ... + ... these dosages have something to do with it. + And the form has something to do with it. + And if you want the ultimate in placebo, you've go to the needle. + Right? A syringe with some inert -- a couple CCs of some inert something, and you inject this into a patient ... + Well this is such a powerful image in their mind, it's so much stronger than the white pill. + It's a really, this graph, well I'll show it to you some other time when we have slides. + The point is the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle. + And none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality, it's only your belief that makes it real in your body and makes a stronger effect. + I wanted to see if I could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick. + And take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real. + And we know from that study that when you want reality, you go to the needle. + This is a seven-inch hatpin. It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit. + This is really my flesh. This is not Damian's special-grown flesh. + That's my skin right there. This is not a Hollywood special effect. + I'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side. + If you're queasy -- if you faint easily -- I was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night, and some people that I didn't know, and one woman almost passed out. + So, I suggest if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next 30 -- in fact, you know what, I'll do the first bad part behind it. + You'll get to see, you can look away too if you'd like to. + So, here is what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm I just make a little pierce. + I'm sorry, man. Am I freaking you out? + OK, and then just through my skin a tiny bit, and then out the other side like this. + Now, essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick. + Sort of. + But you can't count my fingers right now can you? + So, let me show them to you. That's one, two three, four, five. + Yes, well... + I know what people think when they see this. + They go, "Well, he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes. + So, let me give you a little peek. + How's that look out there? Pretty good. + Yeah, I know. And the people in the back go, "OK, I didn't really see that." + People in the satellite room are starting to move in now. + Let me give you good close look at this. + That really is my skin. That is not a Hollywood special effect. + That's my flesh, and I can twist that around. + I'm sorry. If you're getting queasy, look away, don't look at the thing. + People in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go, "Well yeah, that looks kind of neat in some sort of effect there, but if it were real he would be -- see there's a hole there and a hole there, if it were real he would be bleeding. + Well let me work up some blood for you. + Yes, there it is. + Normally now, I would take the needle out. + I would clean off my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds. + But I think in this context and with the idea of taking something fake and making it into something real, I'm just going to leave it there, and walk off the stage. + I will be seeing you several times over the next few days. + I hope you're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain. +talks, agriculture, biology, environment, food, health +790 +Dan Barber: How I fell in love with a fish + + + So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. + I've loved only two. + That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. + It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. + What a fish. + Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. + So you could feel good about selling it. + I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. + One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. + "Absolutely," I said. + Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus? + For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. + It's hard to overstate the destruction. + Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love -- the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish -- they've collapsed. + There's almost nothing left. + So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. + A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute -- most of them do anyway -- and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. + It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. + That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. + Not very sustainable. + It doesn't taste very good either. + So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. + I wanted to support them. + The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. + Let's call him Don. + "Don," I said, "just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute." + "That's right," he said. "We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated." + And then he added, "We're basically a world unto ourselves. + That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one," he said. + "Best in the business." + 2.5 to one, great. + "2.5 what? What are you feeding?" + "Sustainable proteins," he said. + "Great," I said. Got off the phone. + And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? + So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. + I said, "Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" + He said he didn't know. He would ask around. + Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. + Let's call him Don too. + "Don," I said, "what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" + Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. + I said, "Chicken pellets?" + He said, "Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed." + I said, "What percentage of your feed is chicken?" + Thinking, you know, two percent. + "Well, it's about 30 percent," he said. + I said, "Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?" + There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "There's just too much chicken in the world." + I fell out of love with this fish. + No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. + I actually am. + No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. + This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. + It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. + I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. + A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. + She kind of set us up. + It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. + The chef had overcooked it. + Like twice over. + Amazingly, it was still delicious. + Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? + I can't, but this guy can. + Let's call him Miguel -- actually his name is Miguel. + And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. + He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. + It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. + It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river. + Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. + They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. + They did it by draining the land. + They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. + Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. + And ecologically, it was a disaster. + It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. + And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land. + What did they do? + They reversed the flow of water. + They literally flipped the switch. + Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. + They flooded the canals. + They created a 27,000-acre fish farm -- bass, mullet, shrimp, eel -- and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. + The farm's incredible. + I mean, you've never seen anything like this. + You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland. + I was there not long ago with Miguel. + He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. + Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. + Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. + Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. + And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe. + It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. + I asked him how he became such an expert on fish. + He said, "Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. + I'm an expert in relationships." + And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants. + And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. + It's great, but I was in love. + And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. + So I interrupted him. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?" + He pointed at the algae. + "I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. + But what are your fish eating? + What's the feed conversion ratio?" + Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. + The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. + The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. + There is no feed. + Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals? + Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success?" + At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. + And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see. + "That's success," he said. + "Look at their bellies, pink. + They're feasting." + Feasting? I was totally confused. + I said, "Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish?" + "Yes," he said. + "We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. + Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. + It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe." + I said, "Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?" + He shook his head, no. + He said, "We farm extensively, not intensively. + This is an ecological network. + The flamingos eat the shrimp. + The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. + So the pinker the belly, the better the system." + Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. + A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. + Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. + They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. + Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. + And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. + They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. + No kidding. + I was imagining a "March of the Penguins" thing, so I looked at Miguel. + I said, "Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? + Do they do that for the children?" + He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. + He said, "No; they do it because the food's better." + I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious -- and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. + It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. + I almost never cook with it. + Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. + It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. + I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. + He said, "The skin acts like a sponge. + It's the last defense before anything enters the body. + It evolved to soak up impurities." + And then he added, "But our water has no impurities." + OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. + And then I realized when he says, "A farm that has no impurities," he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. + It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. + And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. + The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. + So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant -- and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. + Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. + A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. + You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle. + What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. + But for a lot people, that's a bit too radical. + We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. + We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. + And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, "Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?" + How are you going to feed the world? + Can I be honest? + I don't love that question. + No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. + One billion people will go hungry today. + One billion -- that's more than ever before -- because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. + Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years. + Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, "If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?" + That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. + We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. + That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture. + Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. + Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea. + Want to feed the world? + Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? + Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? + To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. + It's really old, and it's tired. + It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. + Instead, let's look to the ecological model. + That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience. + Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. + Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. + Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. + And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. + You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. + Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/james_cameron_before_avatar_a_curious_boy +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: James Cameron's big-budget films create unreal worlds all their own. In this personal talk, he reveals his childhood fascination with the fantastic -- from reading science fiction to deep-sea diving -- and how it ultimately drove the success of his blockbuster hits "Aliens," "The Terminator," "Titanic" and "Avatar." +talks, adventure, entertainment, film, nature, oceans, storytelling, submarine, technology, writing +785 +James Cameron: Before Avatar ... a curious boy + + + I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. + In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. + And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had. + And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "samples" -- frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water -- and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. + You know, I was a real science geek. + But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility. + And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. + Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. + So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it. + And I was an artist. + I could draw. I could paint. + And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. + You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. + And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. + I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. + That was -- the creativity had to find its outlet somehow. + And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. + I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday -- that seemed pretty darn unlikely. + But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books. + So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. + And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. + But I didn't let that daunt me. + I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. + And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. + And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California. + Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. + And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. + Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. + I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. + And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was. + But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. + And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. + And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. + So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. + And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: "Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss." + And with "The Abyss," I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. + So, you know, merging the two passions. + Something interesting came out of "The Abyss," which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. + And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. + And even though the film didn't make any money -- barely broke even, I should say -- I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic. + You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. + They were seeing something magical. + And so that got me very excited. + And I thought, "Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art." + So, with "Terminator 2," which was my next film, we took that much farther. + Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. + And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience -- although we did make a little more money on that one. + So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, "This is going to be a whole new world," this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. + So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. + And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. + And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while. + But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. + So, I wrote this piece called "Avatar," which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. + And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while. + So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. + You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film." + Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "Titanic." + And that's why I made the movie. + And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. + But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. + We'll be using it in the opening of the film. + It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook." + And I talked them into funding an expedition. + Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. + Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. + Not a movie, not HD -- for real. + Now, that blew my mind. + And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. + But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. + You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. + You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. + And I thought like, "Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. + This is really cool." + And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. + Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it -- it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. + And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. + Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. + As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them. + So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. + And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. + After the success of "Titanic," I said, "OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while." + And so, we started planning these expeditions. + And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. + We went back to the Titanic wreck. + We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. + And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. + Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it. + So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. + And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. + When I say, "I'm operating it," but my mind is in the vehicle. + I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. + And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. + And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship. + So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. + And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience -- that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. + It was really, really quite profound. + And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan. + So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals -- they're basically aliens right here on Earth. + They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. + They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. + And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to water plumes. + You think they can't possibly exist. + At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well -- again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. + And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. + And this was fascinating. + But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. + And taking them down so that they had access -- astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments -- taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on. + So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. + I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. + And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. + I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. + Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing. + I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. + Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "What am I doing out here? + Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?" + We don't make money at these damn shows. + We barely break even. There is no fame in it. + People sort of think I went away between "Titanic" and "Avatar" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. + Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience. + No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? + You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge -- and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is -- for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. + Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time. + And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. + When you come back to the shore and you say, "We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea," you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. + Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect. + So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. + And it really changed the dynamic. + So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "Avatar," coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. + Tremendously exciting. + Tremendously challenging. + And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. + And it completely changed how I do movies. + So, people have commented on how, "Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora." + To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that. + So, what can we synthesize out of all this? + You know, what are the lessons learned? + Well, I think number one is curiosity. + It's the most powerful thing you own. + Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. + And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. + I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "Give me some advice for doing this." + And I say, "Don't put limitations on yourself. + Other people will do that for you -- don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks." + NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." + But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. + And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. + You have to be willing to take those risks. + So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing. +talks, data, demo, interface design, technology, web +783 +Gary Flake: Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? + + + If I can leave you with one big idea today, it's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts, and instead of thinking about information overload, what I'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible. + So what we're looking at right here is a typical mortality chart organized by age. + This tool that I'm using here is a little experiment. + It's called Pivot, and with Pivot what I can do is I can choose to filter in one particular cause of deaths -- say, accidents. + And, right away, I see there's a different pattern that emerges. + This is because, in the mid-area here, people are at their most active, and over here they're at their most frail. + We can step back out again and then reorganize the data by cause of death, seeing that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects, but not for everyone. + If we go ahead and we filter by age -- say 40 years or less -- we see that accidents are actually the greatest cause that people have to be worried about. + And if you drill into that, it's especially the case for men. + So you get the idea that viewing information, viewing data in this way, is a lot like swimming in a living information info-graphic. + And if we can do this for raw data, why not do it for content as well? + So what we have right here is the cover of every single Sports Illustrated ever produced. + It's all here; it's all on the web. + You can go back to your rooms and try this after my talk. + With Pivot, you can drill into a decade. + You can drill into a particular year. + You can jump right into a specific issue. + So I'm looking at this; I see the athletes that have appeared in this issue, the sports. + I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, so I'll go ahead and I'll click on that, which reveals, for me, all the issues in which Lance Armstrong's been a part of. + Now, if I want to just kind of take a peek at these, I might think, "Well, what about taking a look at all of cycling?" + So I can step back, and expand on that. + And I see Greg LeMond now. + And so you get the idea that when you navigate over information this way -- going narrower, broader, backing in, backing out -- you're not searching, you're not browsing. + You're doing something that's actually a little bit different. + It's in between, and we think it changes the way information can be used. + So I want to extrapolate on this idea a bit with something that's a little bit crazy. + What we're done here is we've taken every single Wikipedia page and we reduced it down to a little summary. + So the summary consists of just a little synopsis and an icon to indicate the topical area that it comes from. + I'm only showing the top 500 most popular Wikipedia pages right here. + But even in this limited view, we can do a lot of things. + Right away, we get a sense of what are the topical domains that are most popular on Wikipedia. + I'm going to go ahead and select government. + Now, having selected government, I can now see that the Wikipedia categories that most frequently correspond to that are Time magazine People of the Year. + So this is really important because this is an insight that was not contained within any one Wikipedia page. + It's only possible to see that insight when you step back and look at all of them. + Looking at one of these particular summaries, I can then drill into the concept of Time magazine Person of the Year, bringing up all of them. + So looking at these people, I can see that the majority come from government; some have come from natural sciences; some, fewer still, have come from business -- there's my boss -- and one has come from music. + And interestingly enough, Bono is also a TED Prize winner. + So we can go, jump, and take a look at all the TED Prize winners. + So you see, we're navigating the web for the first time as if it's actually a web, not from page-to-page, but at a higher level of abstraction. + And so I want to show you one other thing that may catch you a little bit by surprise. + I'm just showing the New York Times website here. + So Pivot, this application -- I don't want to call it a browser; it's really not a browser, but you can view web pages with it -- and we bring that zoomable technology to every single web page like this. + So I can step back, pop right back into a specific section. + Now the reason why this is important is because, by virtue of just viewing web pages in this way, I can look at my entire browsing history in the exact same way. + So I can drill into what I've done over specific time frames. + Here, in fact, is the state of all the demo that I just gave. + And I can sort of replay some stuff that I was looking at earlier today. + And, if I want to step back and look at everything, I can slice and dice my history, perhaps by my search history -- here, I was doing some nepotistic searching, looking for Bing, over here for Live Labs Pivot. + And from these, I can drill into the web page and just launch them again. + It's one metaphor repurposed multiple times, and in each case it makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts with the data. + So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. + We talk about the curse of information overload. + We talk about drowning in data. + What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? + If we can do that, then instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. + And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. + And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there's wisdom to be found. + So with that, I thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness. +talks, brain, culture, economics, happiness, mind, philosophy, psychology, science +779 +Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory + + + Everybody talks about happiness these days. + I had somebody count the number of books with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. + There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. + There is a lot of happiness coaching. + Everybody would like to make people happier. + But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. + And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. + This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. + The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. + It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. + I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. + The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. + And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. + And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. + I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. + There's just no way of getting it right. + Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story -- He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. + And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. + But it hadn't. + What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. + He had had the experience. + He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. + They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. + What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. + There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. + It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" + And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" + or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that. + Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness. + Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. + And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. + We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. + Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. + And let me begin with one example. + This is an old study. + Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. + I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. + They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. + Here are two patients, those are their recordings. + And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" + And it's a very easy question. + Clearly, Patient B suffered more -- his colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and more. + But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" + And here is a surprise. + The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. + The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. + And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. + And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. + How do we know that? + Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" + And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory. + Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. + From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. + Now, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work -- you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. + That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. + And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. + What defines a story? + And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. + What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. + Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated. + Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. + It has moments of experience, one after the other. + And you can ask: What happens to these moments? + And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. + I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 -- most of them don't leave a trace. + Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. + And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. + It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. + And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us. + So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. + The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. + From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. + That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. + For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. + You have not changed the story. + And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story. + Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. + It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. + The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. + We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. + And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. + We think of our future as anticipated memories. + And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need. + I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. + And this is a bit hard to justify I think. + I mean, how much do we consume our memories? + That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. + And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. + And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. + Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. + Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. + There seems to be a discrepancy. + Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences? + So I want you to think about a thought experiment. + Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. + Now, would you choose the same vacation? And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. + Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves. + Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. + There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. + So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? + And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? + And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. + What are the emotions that can be measured? + And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. + If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. + This is not about how happily a person lives. + It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. + Very different notion. + Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. + The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. + The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. + So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. + And the main lesson I think that we have learned is they are really different. + You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. + Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. + What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall," how much would you know about his height? + Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. + You have that much uncertainty. + If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. + So the correlation is low. + We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. + We know that money is very important, goals are very important. + We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. + There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. + So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. + The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. + It is a completely different notion. + Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. + So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. + When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio. + And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. + Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. + But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up -- some people may end up moving to California. + And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. + Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. + We know that. + But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision. + It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is. + Thank you. + Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. + Thank you so much. + Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. + Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now? + Daniel Kahneman: Sure. + I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. + We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. + When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. + And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans -- and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample -- below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... + CA: 60,000. + DK: 60,000. + 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. + Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. + I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. + Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. + In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. + The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. + That does not hold for emotions. + CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. + If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. + Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it? + DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. + The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. + People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. + It's going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. + How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. + This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. + In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. + This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics. + CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will -- or at least should be -- the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. + Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. + Thank you, Danny Kahneman. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050. +talks, TED Brain Trust, business, energy, global issues, invention, science, technology +767 +Bill Gates: Innovating to zero! + + + I'm going to talk today about energy and climate. + And that might seem a bit surprising because my full-time work at the Foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. + But energy and climate are extremely important to these people -- in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. + The climate getting worse means that many years, their crops won't grow: There will be too much rain, not enough rain, things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can't support. + And that leads to starvation, it leads to uncertainty, it leads to unrest. + So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. + Also, the price of energy is very important to them. + In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. + Now, the price of energy has come down over time. + Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. + The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning, we can make modern materials and do so many things. + And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. + But, as we make it cheaper -- and let's go for making it twice as cheap -- we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. + CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. + If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. + Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be and where the positive feedbacks are, there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. + And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. + I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? + Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? + And the answer is that until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. + And so that's a big challenge. + It's very different than saying "We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under." + This is something that has to get to zero. + Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. + For each American, it's about 20 tons; for people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. + It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. + And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. + It's been constantly going up. + It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. + This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication: So, you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. + So, let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero. + Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. + Now that's back from high school algebra, but let's take a look. + First, we've got population. + The world today has 6.8 billion people. + That's headed up to about nine billion. + Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3. + The second factor is the services we use. + This encompasses everything: the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. + These are very good things: getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. + And it's a great thing for this number to go up. + In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, over all, that will more than double the services delivered per person. + Here we have a very basic service: Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework? + And, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their school work under the street lamps. + Now, efficiency, E, the energy for each service, here finally we have some good news. + We have something that's not going up. + Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings -- there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. + Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. + There are other services like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. + And so, overall here, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. + But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. + So let's look at this fourth factor -- this is going to be a key one -- and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. + And so the question is: Can you actually get that to zero? + If you burn coal, no. + If you burn natural gas, no. + Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. + And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. + And so, we need energy miracles. + Now, when I use the term "miracle," I don't mean something that's impossible. + The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. + The Internet and its services are a miracle. + So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. + Usually, we don't have a deadline, where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. + Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. + This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline. + Now, I thought, "How could I really capture this? + Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here?" + I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitos, and somehow people enjoyed that. + It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitos. + So, with energy, all I could come up with is this. + I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. + So here we have some natural fireflies. + I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. + Now, there's all sorts of gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much. + We need solutions -- either one or several -- that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability, and, although there's many directions people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. + I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. + Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better, but my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. + Let's look first at the burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. + What you need to do there, seems like it might be simple, but it's not, and that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. + Now we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level, but getting up to that full percentage, that will be very tricky, and agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue. + Who's going to be sure? + Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? + This is a lot of volume. + So that's a tough one. + Next would be nuclear. + It also has three big problems: Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, that the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. + And then what do you do with the waste? + And, although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. + People need to feel good about it. + So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. + The last three of the five, I've grouped together. + These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. + And they actually -- although it's great they don't require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. + One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. + This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. + Also, these are intermittent sources. + The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and, likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. + And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. + So, we've got big cost challenges here, we have transmission challenges: for example, say this energy source is outside your country; you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. + And, finally, this storage problem. + And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries that get made -- for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything -- and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses, and what I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. + And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. + It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. + Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. + If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. + Now, how we're going to go forward on this -- what's the right approach? + Is it a Manhattan Project? What's the thing that can get us there? + Well, we need lots of companies working on this, hundreds. + In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. + And a lot of them, you'll look at and say, "They're crazy." That's good. + And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. + Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. + Vinod Khosla's investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. + Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. + There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. + And innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. + The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium -- the one percent, which is the U235 -- we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." + It is kind of a crazy idea. + In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material's approach, this looks like it would work. + And, because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. + You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. + So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It's a great thing. + It breathes this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. + You can see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. + In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. + I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. + This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. + That would power the U.S. for hundreds of years. + And, simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. + So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. + So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? + What should our report card look like? + Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. + For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. + That really is very important, that we get there. + And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture, hopefully we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. + So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. + So, the other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we're in the process of getting it elsewhere? + That's super important. + That's a key element of making that report card. + So, backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? + Well, again, it should have the two elements. + We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. + But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. + These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. + There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. + The Al Gore book, "Our Choice" and the David McKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." + They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. + There's a lot that has to come together. + So this is a wish. + It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. + If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years -- I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented -- this is the wish I would pick. + This is the one with the greatest impact. + If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the U.S. and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse. + So, what do we have to do? + What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? + We need to go for more research funding. + When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. + They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. + We do need the market incentives -- CO2 tax, cap and trade -- something that gets that price signal out there. + We need to get the message out. + We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. + This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. + Thank you. + Thank you. + Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. + Thank you. So to understand more about TerraPower, right -- I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? + Bil Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions, and even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure that our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. + The tough thing is building the pilot reactor; finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. + Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. + CA: And so, to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind of column of nuclear fuel, of this sort of spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down? + BG: That's right. Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong: that thing where you're opening it up and moving things in and out, that's not good. + So, if you have very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have those same complexities. + And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done. + CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution. + BG: Yeah. Well, what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there's a lot less waste under this approach -- then you can actually take that, and put it into another one and burn that. + And we start off actually by taking the waste that exists today, that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactors -- that's our fuel to begin with. + So, the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process. + CA: I mean, you're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here. + Where is there most interest in actually doing something with this? + BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called "nuclear," so we've got a lot of interest, that people from the company have been in Russia, India, China -- I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. + So I'm optimistic. You know, the French and Japanese have done some work. + This is a variant on something that has been done. + It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. + CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? + BG: Well, we need -- for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. + That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. + And, you know, TerraPower, if things go well -- which is wishing for a lot -- could easily meet that. + And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies -- we need it to be hundreds -- who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. + And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. + We certainly need one to succeed. + CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changes, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there? + BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. + It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. + In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. + You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. + There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. + And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal, and so -- if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation -- the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. + CA: If this doesn't work, then what? + Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? + BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been over-eating, and you're about to have a heart attack: Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. + There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. + Now, that's just an insurance policy. + You hope you don't need to do that. + Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. + I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about -- should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect? + CA: Climate skeptics: If you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong? + BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps. + The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. + Are they saying that there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? + There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. + The main problem we have here, it's kind of like AIDS. + You make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. + And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later, and a somewhat uncertain pain thing -- in fact, the IPCC report, that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, "OK, that isn't that big of a deal." + The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. + But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, "OK, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2, but I guess I'll accept it because it's cheaper than what's come before." + CA: And so, that would be your response to the Bjorn Lomborg argument, that basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. + BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece -- say the U.S. should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now -- it's not that dramatic. + It shouldn't take away from other things. + The thing you get into big money on, and this, reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that -- that, to me, mostly is a waste. + Unless you're very close and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap, I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. + If the trade-off you get into is, "Let's make energy super expensive," then the rich can afford that. + I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. + The disaster is for that two billion. + And even Lomborg has changed. + His shtick now is, "Why isn't the R&D getting more discussed?" + He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. + And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. + The R&D piece, it's crazy how little it's funded. + CA: Well Bill, I suspect I speak on the behalf of most people here to say I really hope your wish comes true. Thank you so much. + BG: Thank you. + + +http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_the_opportunity_of_adversity +TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: The thesaurus might equate "disabled" with synonyms like "useless" and "mutilated," but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she shows how adversity -- in her case, being born without shinbones -- actually opens the door for human potential. +talks, activism, happiness, health, prosthetics, social change, society +769 +Aimee Mullins: The opportunity of adversity + + + I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. + I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what I'd find. + Let me read you the entry. + "Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. + Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." + I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed. + You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? + But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. + And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. + I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured. + So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. + Here's the updated version of this entry. + Unfortunately, it's not much better. + I find the last two words under "Near Antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome." + So, it's not just about the words. + It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. + It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. + Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. + In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. + So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? + By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. + Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead? + One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. + His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. + And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children. + I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. + I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything -- I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. + And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. + And, one day, he came in to my session -- exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and he said to me, "Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. + When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks." + Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. + And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future. + This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. + But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. + Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. + Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, + so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. + So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. + The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phrase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. + Implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. + But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. + And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. + Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. + It's part of our life. + And I tend to think of it like my shadow. + Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. + And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle. + There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. + So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. + And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. + There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. + And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions. + In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. + Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself. + By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. + We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. + So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. + And, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. + So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. + So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. + And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it. + This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. + To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. + Conflict is the genesis of creation. + From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. + So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. + And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. + Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. + So, we can give ourselves a gift. + We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. + Maybe we can see it as change. + Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet. + I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. + Now, who's normal? + There's no normal. + There's common, there's typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? + I don't think so. + If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community. + Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. + There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. + They didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable. + A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. + It was summertime: I had shorts on. + I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins." + And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is. + And I said, "I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you." + He said, "Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. + I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb." + Oh, that guy. + And, but of course, actually, it did click. + This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. + And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. + And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer -- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news. + He said to me, "I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." + The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. + And he called this part of the course the X Factor, the potential of the human will. + No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. + And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." + See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. + He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. + And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. + I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. + But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. + And it's because of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. + And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me. + See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. + If you can hand somebody the key to their own power -- the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. + You're teaching them to open doors for themselves. + In fact, the exact meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." + It means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." + So again, which potential do we want to bring out? + There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. + It's called the streaming trials. We call it "tracking" here in the States. + It's separating students from A, B, C, D and so on. + And the "A students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. + Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were "A's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level. + And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "A students" and told them they were "D's." + And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. + Those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. + A crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. + The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. + They were simply told, "These are the 'A-students,' these are the 'D-students.'" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them. + So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. + If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. + When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being. + I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called "The God Who Only Knows Four Words": "Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. + Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me.'" Thank you. + + +