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I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. Not little green humanoids arriving in shiny UFOs, although that would be nice. But it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away.
Every star in our sky is a sun. And if our sun has planets -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., surely those other stars should have planets also, and they do. And in the last two decades, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets.
Our night sky is literally teeming with exoplanets. We know, statistically speaking, that every star has at least one planet. And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. Why are we here? Why does our universe exist? How did Earth form and evolve? How and why did life originate and populate our planet? The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? Is there life out there? Who is out there? You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. But I'm here to tell you just how close we're getting to finding out the answer to this question. It's the first time in human history that this really is within reach for us.
Now when I think about the possibilities for life out there, I think of the fact that our sun is but one of many stars. This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. It's a collection of bound stars. But our [sun] is one of hundreds of billions of stars and our galaxy is one of upwards of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet.
Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. And the highlighted stars are those with known exoplanets. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. And you can see the constellations overlaid and again, so many stars with planets. There's a special patch of the sky where we have thousands of planets.
This is where the Kepler Space Telescope focused for many years. Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. This star is called Kepler-186f. It's a system of about five planets. And by the way, most of these exoplanets, we don't know too much about. We know their size, and their orbit and things like that. But there's a very special planet here called Kepler-186f. This planet is in a zone that is not too far from the star, so that the temperature may be just right for life. Here, the artist's conception is just zooming in and showing you what that planet might be like.
So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. But actually, we just work on our computers like everyone else, and we get our data by email or downloading from a database. So instead of coming here to tell you about the somewhat tedious nature of the data and data analysis and the complex computer models we make, I have a different way to try to explain to you some of the things that we're thinking about exoplanets.
Here's a travel poster: "Kepler-186f: Where the grass is always redder on the other side." That's because Kepler-186f orbits a red star, and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there, if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis, it has different pigments and looks red. "Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth." This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. "Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company." (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. If we could visit one of those planets, you literally would see two sunsets and have two shadows. So actually, science fiction got some things right. Tatooine from Star Wars. And I have a couple of other favorite exoplanets to tell you about. This one is Kepler-10b, it's a hot, hot planet. It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. And actually, it's so hot, we can't visit any of these planets, but if we could, we would melt long before we got there. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock and has liquid lava lakes.
Gliese 1214b. This planet, we know the mass and the size and it has a fairly low density. It's somewhat warm. We actually don't know really anything about this planet, but one possibility is that it's a water world, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons that might be 50 percent water by mass. And in this case, it would have a thick steam atmosphere overlaying an ocean, not of liquid water, but of an exotic form of water, a superfluid -- not quite a gas, not quite a liquid. And under that wouldn't be rock, but a form of high-pressure ice, like ice IX.
So out of all these planets out there, and the variety is just simply astonishing, we mostly want to find the planets that are Goldilocks planets, we call them. Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold -- but just right for life. But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat -- the greenhouse effect. We have to be able to assess the greenhouse gases on other planets. Well, science fiction got some things wrong. The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there.
Well, we don't need to travel at warp speeds to see other planet atmospheres, although I don't want to dissuade any budding engineers from figuring out how to do that. We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. This is a picture, a photograph of the Hubble Space Telescope taken by the shuttle Atlantis as it was departing after the last human space flight to Hubble. They installed a new camera, actually, that we use for exoplanet atmospheres. And so far, we've been able to study dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, about six of them in great detail. But those are not small planets like Earth. They're big, hot planets that are easy to see. We're not ready, we don't have the right technology yet to study small exoplanets. But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. And here's our sun, the white light of our sun split up, not by raindrops, but by a spectrograph. And you can see all these dark, vertical lines. Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. And this is actually how astronomers have studied objects in the heavens, literally, for over a century. So here, each different atom and molecule has a special set of lines, a fingerprint, if you will. And that's how we study exoplanet atmospheres. And I'll just never forget when I started working on exoplanet atmospheres 20 years ago, how many people told me, "This will never happen. We'll never be able to study them. Why are you bothering?" And that's why I'm pleased to tell you about all the atmospheres studied now, and this is really a field of its own. So when it comes to other planets, other Earths, in the future when we can observe them, what kind of gases would we be looking for? Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. That's a lot of oxygen. But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. So oxygen is here because of life. And our goal then is to look for gases in other planet atmospheres, gases that don't belong, that we might be able to attribute to life. But which molecules should we search for? I actually told you how diverse exoplanets are. We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths.
And that's one of the main things I'm working on now, I have a theory about this. It reminds me that nearly every day, I receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such. So, please don't email me one of your crazy theories. (Laughter) Well, I had my own crazy theory. But, who does the MIT professor go to? Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, "Sure, come and talk to me." So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. And that theory was that life produces all small molecules, so many molecules. Like, everything I could think of, but not being a chemist. Think about it: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, methane, methyl chloride -- so many gases. They also exist for other reasons, but just life even produces ozone. So we go to talk to him about this, and immediately, he shot down the theory. He found an example that didn't exist. So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field.
But back to exoplanets, the point is that life produces so many different types of gases, literally thousands of gases. And so what we're doing now is just trying to figure out on which types of exoplanets, which gases could be attributed to life. And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life.
So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. But a really big challenge ahead of us is: how? How are we going to find these planets? There are actually many ways to find planets, several different ways. But the one that I'm most focused on is how can we open a gateway so that in the future, we can find hundreds of Earths. We have a real shot at finding signs of life. And actually, I just finished leading a two-year project in this very special phase of a concept we call the starshade. And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. Here, you can see myself and two team members holding up one small part of the starshade. It's shaped like a giant flower, and this is one of the prototype petals. The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. Now, this has to be made very precisely, literally, the petals to microns and they have to deploy to millimeters. And this whole structure would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. It's about tens of meters in diameter. And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. Now this is a real project that we worked on, literally, you would not believe how hard. Just so you believe it's not just in movie format, here's a real photograph of a second-generation starshade deployment test bed in the lab. And in this case, I just wanted you to know that that central truss has heritage left over from large radio deployables in space.
So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? Well, in the best case, we will find an image of another exo-Earth. Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. And this is actually a real photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, four billion miles away. And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics.
But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth.
And I can guarantee
that in the next generation of space telescopes, and the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. And the capability to split up the starlight so that we can look for gases and assess the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, estimate the surface temperature, and look for signs of life.
But there's more. In this case of searching for other planets like Earth, we are making a new kind of map of the nearby stars and of the planets orbiting them, including stars that actually might be inhabitable by humans.
And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds.
Thank you.
(Applause)
June Cohen: And I give you, for a question, Rosetta Mission Manager Fred Jansen.
Fred Jansen: You mentioned halfway through that the technology to actually look at the spectrum of an exoplanet like Earth is not there yet. When do you expect this will be there, and what's needed?
Actually, what we expect is what we call our next-generation Hubble telescope. And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable.
JC: I'm going to ask you one follow-up question, too, Sara, as the generalist. So I am really struck by the notion in your career of the opposition you faced, that when you began thinking about exoplanets, there was extreme skepticism in the scientific community that they existed, and you proved them wrong. What did it take to take that on?
SS: Well, the thing is that as scientists, we're supposed to be skeptical, because our job to make sure that what the other person is saying actually makes sense or not. But being a scientist, I think you've seen it from this session, it's like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this sort of resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.
JC: I love that. Thank you, Sara.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 266.2
} |
Someone who looks like me walks past you in the street. Do you think they're a mother, a refugee or a victim of oppression? Or do you think they're a cardiologist, a barrister or maybe your local politician? Do you look me up and down, wondering how hot I must get or if my husband has forced me to wear this outfit? What if I wore my scarf like this?
I can walk down the street in the exact same outfit and what the world expects of me and the way I'm treated depends on the arrangement of this piece of cloth. But this isn't going to be another monologue about the hijab because Lord knows, Muslim women are so much more than the piece of cloth they choose, or not, to wrap their head in. This is about looking beyond your bias.
What if I walked past you and later on you'd found out that actually I was a race car engineer, and that I designed my own race car and I ran my university's race team, because it's true. What if I told you that I was actually trained as a boxer for five years, because that's true, too. Would it surprise you? Why?
Ladies and gentlemen, ultimately, that surprise and the behaviors associated with it are the product of something called unconscious bias, or implicit prejudice. And that results in the ridiculously detrimental lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in areas of influence. Hello, Australian Federal Cabinet. (Applause)
Let me just set something out from the outset: Unconscious bias is not the same as conscious discrimination. I'm not saying that in all of you, there's a secret sexist or racist or ageist lurking within, waiting to get out. That's not what I'm saying. We all have our biases. They're the filters through which we see the world around us. I'm not accusing anyone, bias is not an accusation. Rather, it's something that has to be identified, acknowledged and mitigated against. Bias can be about race, it can be about gender. It can also be about class, education, disability. The fact is, we all have biases against what's different, what's different to our social norms.
The thing is, if we want to live in a world where the circumstances of your birth do not dictate your future and where equal opportunity is ubiquitous, then each and every one of us has a role to play in making sure unconscious bias does not determine our lives.
There's this really famous experiment in the space of unconscious bias and that's in the space of gender in the 1970s and 1980s. So orchestras, back in the day, were made up mostly of dudes, up to only five percent were female. And apparently, that was because men played it differently, presumably better, presumably. But in 1952, The Boston Symphony Orchestra started an experiment. They started blind auditions. So rather than face-to-face auditions, you would have to play behind a screen. Now funnily enough, no immediate change was registered until they asked the audition-ers to take their shoes off before they entered the room. because the clickity-clack of the heels against the hardwood floors was enough to give the ladies away. Now get this, there results of the audition showed that there was a 50 percent increased chance a woman would progress past the preliminary stage. And it almost tripled their chances of getting in. What does that tell us? Well, unfortunately for the guys, men actually didn't play differently, but there was the perception that they did. And it was that bias that was determining their outcome.
So what we're doing here is identifying and acknowledging that a bias exists. And look, we all do it. Let me give you an example. A son and his father are in a horrible car accident. The father dies on impact and the son, who's severely injured, is rushed to hospital. The surgeon looks at the son when they arrive and is like, "I can't operate." Why? "The boy is my son." How can that be? Ladies and gentlemen, the surgeon is his mother. Now hands up -- and it's okay -- but hands up if you initially assumed the surgeon was a guy? There's evidence that that unconscious bias exists, but we all just have to acknowledge that it's there and then look at ways that we can move past it so that we can look at solutions.
Now one of the interesting things around the space of unconscious bias is the topic of quotas. And this something that's often brought up. And of of the criticisms is this idea of merit. Look, I don't want to be picked because I'm a chick, I want to be picked because I have merit, because I'm the best person for the job. It's a sentiment that's pretty common among female engineers that I work with and that I know. And yeah, I get it, I've been there. But, if the merit idea was true, why would identical resumes, in an experiment done in 2012 by Yale, identical resumes sent out for a lab technician, why would Jennifers be deemed less competent, be less likely to be offered the job, and be paid less than Johns. The unconscious bias is there, but we just have to look at how we can move past it.
And, you know, it's interesting, there's some research that talks about why this is the case and it's called the merit paradox. And in organizations -- and this is kind of ironic -- in organizations that talk about merit being their primary value-driver in terms of who they hire, they were more likely to hire dudes and more likely to pay the guys more because apparently merit is a masculine quality. But, hey.
So you guys think you've got a good read on me, you kinda think you know what's up. Can you imagine me running one of these? Can you imagine me walking in and being like, "Hey boys, this is what's up. This is how it's done." Well, I'm glad you can. (Applause) Because ladies and gentlemen, that's my day job. And the cool thing about it is that it's pretty entertaining. Actually, in places like Malaysia, Muslim women on rigs isn't even comment-worthy. There are that many of them. But, it is entertaining.
I remember, I was telling one of the guys, "Hey, mate, look, I really want to learn how to surf." And he's like, "Yassmin, I don't know how you can surf with all that gear you've got on, and I don't know any women-only beaches." And then, the guy came up with a brilliant idea, he was like, "I know, you run that organization Youth Without Borders, right? Why don't you start a clothing line for Muslim chicks in beaches. You can call it Youth Without Boardshorts." (Laughter) And I was like, "Thanks, guys." And I remember another bloke telling me that I should eat all the yogurt I could because that was the only culture I was going to get around there.
But, the problem is, it's kind of true because there's an intense lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in places of influence. Now, in 2010, The Australian National University did an experiment where they sent out 4,000 identical applications to entry level jobs, essentially. To get the same number of interviews as someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, if you were Chinese, you had to send out 68 percent more applications. If you were Middle Eastern -- Abdel-Magied -- you had to send out 64 percent, and if you're Italian, you're pretty lucky, you only have to send out 12 percent more. In places like Silicon Valley, it's not that much better. In Google, they put out some diversity results and 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian and nine, a bunch of blacks, Hispanics, all that kind of thing. And the rest of the tech world is not that much better and they've acknowledged it, but I'm not really sure what they're doing about it.
The thing is, it doesn't trickle up. In a study done by Green Park, who are a British senior exec supplier, they said that over half of the FTSE 100 companies don't have a nonwhite leader at their board level, executive or non-executive. And two out of every three don't have an executive who's from a minority. And most of the minorities that are at that sort of level are non-executive board directors. So their influence isn't that great.
I've told you a bunch of terrible things. You're like, "Oh my god, how bad is that? What can I do about it?" Well, fortunately, we've identified that there's a problem. There's a lack of opportunity, and that's due to unconscious bias. But you might be sitting there thinking, "I ain't brown. What's that got to do with me?" Let me offer you a solution. And as I've said before, we live in a world where we're looking for an ideal. And if we want to create a world where the circumstances of your birth don't matter, we all have to be part of the solution. And interestingly, the author of the lab resume experiment offered some sort of a solution. She said the one thing that brought the successful women together, the one thing that they had in common, was the fact that they had good mentors.
So mentoring, we've all kind of heard that before, it's in the vernacular. Here's another challenge for you. I challenge each and every one of you to mentor someone different. Think about it. Everyone wants to mentor someone who kind of is familiar, who looks like us, we have shared experiences. If I see a Muslim chick who's got a bit of attitude, I'm like, "What's up? We can hang out." You walk into a room and there's someone who went to the same school, you play the same sports, there's a high chance that you're going to want to help that person out. But for the person in the room who has no shared experiences with you it becomes extremely difficult to find that connection.
The idea of finding someone different to mentor, someone who doesn't come from the same background as you, whatever that background is, is about opening doors for people who couldn't even get to the damn hallway.
Because ladies and gentlemen, the world is not just. People are not born with equal opportunity. I was born in one of the poorest cities in the world, Khartoum. I was born brown, I was born female, and I was born Muslim in a world that is pretty suspicious of us for reasons I can't control. However, I also acknowledge the fact that I was born with privilege. I was born with amazing parents, I was given an education and had the blessing of migrating to Australia. But also, I've been blessed with amazing mentors who've opened doors for me that I didn't even know were there. A mentor who said to me, "Hey, your story's interesting. Let's write something about it so that I can share it with people." A mentor who said, "I know you're all those things that don't belong on an Australian rig, but come on anyway." And here I am, talking to you.
And I'm not the only one. There's all sorts of people in my communities that I see have been helped out by mentors. A young Muslim man in Sydney who ended up using his mentor's help to start up a poetry slam in Bankstown and now it's a huge thing. And he's able to change the lives of so many other young people. Or a lady here in Brisbane, an Afghan lady who's a refugee, who could barely speak English when she came to Australia, her mentors helped her become a doctor and she took our Young Queenslander of the Year Award in 2008. She's an inspiration. This is so not smooth.
This is me. But I'm also the woman in the rig clothes, and I'm also the woman who was in the abaya at the beginning. Would you have chosen to mentor me if you had seen me in one of those other versions of who I am? Because I'm that same person. We have to look past our unconscious bias, find someone to mentor who's at the opposite end of your spectrum because structural change takes time, and I don't have that level of patience. So if we're going to create a change, if we're going to create a world where we all have those kinds of opportunities, then choose to open doors for people. Because you might think that diversity has nothing to do with you, but we are all part of this system and we can all be part of that solution.
And if you don't know where to find someone different, go to the places you wouldn't usually go. If you enroll in private high school tutoring, go to your local state school or maybe just drop into your local refugee tutoring center. Or perhaps you work at an office. Take out that new grad who looks totally out of place -- 'cause that was me -- and open doors for them, not in a tokenistic way, because we're not victims, but show them the opportunities because opening up your world will make you realize that you have access to doors that they didn't even know existed and you didn't even know they didn't have.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is a problem in our community with lack of opportunity, especially due to unconscious bias. But each and every one one of you has the potential to change that. I know you've been given a lot of challenges today, but if you can take this one piece and think about it a little differently, because diversity is magic. And I encourage you to look past your initial perceptions because I bet you, they're probably wrong.
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 249.8
} |
I've learned some of my most important life lessons from drug dealers and gang members and prostitutes, and I've had some of my most profound theological conversations not in the hallowed halls of a seminary but on a street corner on a Friday night, at 1 a.m.
That's a little unusual, since I am a Baptist minister, seminary-trained, and pastored a church for over 20 years, but it's true. It came as a part of my participation in a public safety crime reduction strategy that saw a 79 percent reduction in violent crime over an eight-year period in a major city.
But I didn't start out wanting to be a part of somebody's crime reduction strategy. I was 25, had my first church. If you would have asked me what my ambition was, I would have told you I wanted to be a megachurch pastor. I wanted a 15-, 20,000-member church. I wanted my own television ministry. I wanted my own clothing line. (Laughter) I wanted to be your long distance carrier. You know, the whole nine yards. (Laughter)
After about a year of pastoring, my membership went up about 20 members. So megachurchdom was way down the road. But seriously, if you'd have said, "What is your ambition?" I would have said just to be a good pastor, to be able to be with people through all the passages of life, to preach messages that would have an everyday meaning for folks, and in the African-American tradition, to be able to represent the community that I serve.
But there was something else that was happening in my city and in the entire metro area, and in most metro areas in the United States, and that was the homicide rate started to rise precipitously. And there were young people who were killing each other for reasons that I thought were very trivial, like bumping into someone in a high school hallway, and then after school, shooting the person. Someone with the wrong color shirt on, on the wrong street corner at the wrong time. And something needed to be done about that. It got to the point where it started to change the character of the city. You could go to any housing project, for example, like the one that was down the street from my church, and you would walk in, and it would be like a ghost town, because the parents wouldn't allow their kids to come out and play, even in the summertime, because of the violence. You would listen in the neighborhoods on any given night, and to the untrained ear, it sounded like fireworks, but it was gunfire. You'd hear it almost every night, when you were cooking dinner, telling your child a bedtime story, or just watching TV. And you can go to any emergency room at any hospital, and you would see lying on gurneys young black and Latino men shot and dying. And I was doing funerals, but not of the venerated matriarchs and patriarchs who'd lived a long life and there's a lot to say. I was doing funerals of 18-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds, and I was standing in a church or at a funeral home struggling to say something that would make some meaningful impact. And so while my colleagues were building these cathedrals great and tall and buying property outside of the city and moving their congregations out so that they could create or recreate their cities of God, the social structures in the inner cities were sagging under the weight of all of this violence.
And so I stayed, because somebody needed to do something, and so I had looked at what I had and moved on that. I started to preach decrying the violence in the community. And I started to look at the programming in my church, and I started to build programs that would catch the at-risk youth, those who were on the fence to the violence. I even tried to be innovative in my preaching. You all have heard of rap music, right? Rap music? I even tried to rap sermon one time. It didn't work, but at least I tried it. I'll never forget the young person who came to me after that sermon. He waited until everybody was gone, and he said, "Rev, rap sermon, huh?" And I was like, "Yeah, what do you think?" And he said, "Don't do that again, Rev." (Laughter)
But I preached and I built these programs, and I thought maybe if my colleagues did the same that it would make a difference. But the violence just careened out of control, and people who were not involved in the violence were getting shot and killed: somebody going to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store, or someone who was sitting at a bus stop just waiting for a bus, or kids who were playing in the park, oblivious to the violence on the other side of the park, but it coming and visiting them. Things were out of control, and I didn't know what to do, and then something happened that changed everything for me. It was a kid by the name of Jesse McKie, walking home with his friend Rigoberto Carrion to the housing project down the street from my church. They met up with a group of youth who were from a gang in Dorchester, and they were killed. But as Jesse was running from the scene mortally wounded, he was running in the direction of my church, and he died some 100, 150 yards away. If he would have gotten to the church, it wouldn't have made a difference, because the lights were out; nobody was home. And I took that as a sign. When they caught some of the youth that had done this deed, to my surprise, they were around my age, but the gulf that was between us was vast. It was like we were in two completely different worlds.
And so as I contemplated all of this and looked at what was happening, I suddenly realized that there was a paradox that was emerging inside of me, and the paradox was this: in all of those sermons that I preached decrying the violence, I was also talking about building community, but I suddenly realized that there was a certain segment of the population that I was not including in my definition of community. And so the paradox was this: If I really wanted the community that I was preaching for, I needed to reach out and embrace this group that I had cut out of my definition. Which meant not about building programs to catch those who were on the fences of violence, but to reach out and to embrace those who were committing the acts of violence, the gang bangers, the drug dealers.
As soon as I came to that realization, a quick question came to my mind. Why me? I mean, isn't this a law enforcement issue? This is why we have the police, right? As soon as the question, "Why me?" came, the answer came just as quickly: Why me? Because I'm the one who can't sleep at night thinking about it. Because I'm the one looking around saying somebody needs to do something about this, and I'm starting to realize that that someone is me. I mean, isn't that how movements start anyway? They don't start with a grand convention and people coming together and then walking in lockstep with a statement. But it starts with just a few, or maybe just one.
It started with me that way, and so I decided to figure out the culture of violence in which these young people who were committing them existed, and I started to volunteer at the high school. After about two weeks of volunteering at the high school, I realized that the youth that I was trying to reach, they weren't going to high school. I started to walk in the community, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that they weren't out during the day. So I started to walk the streets at night, late at night, going into the parks where they were, building the relationship that was necessary.
A tragedy happened in Boston that brought a number of clergy together, and there was a small cadre of us who came to the realization that we had to come out of the four walls of our sanctuary and meet the youth where they were, and not try to figure out how to bring them in. And so we decided to walk together, and we would get together in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city on a Friday night and on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., and we would walk until 2 or 3 in the morning. I imagine we were quite the anomaly when we first started walking. I mean, we weren't drug dealers. We weren't drug customers. We weren't the police. Some of us would have collars on. It was probably a really odd thing. But they started speaking to us after a while, and what we found out is that while we were walking, they were watching us, and they wanted to make sure of a couple of things: that number one, we were going to be consistent in our behavior, that we would keep coming out there; and then secondly, they had wanted to make sure that we weren't out there to exploit them. Because there was always somebody who would say, "We're going to take back the streets," but they would always seem to have a television camera with them, or a reporter, and they would enhance their own reputation to the detriment of those on the streets. So when they saw that we had none of that, they decided to talk to us. And then we did an amazing thing for preachers. We decided to listen and not preach. Come on, give it up for me. (Laughter) (Applause) All right, come on, you're cutting into my time now, okay? (Laughter) But it was amazing. We said to them, "We don't know our own communities after 9 p.m. at night, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., but you do. You are the subject matter experts, if you will, of that period of time. So talk to us. Teach us. Help us to see what we're not seeing. Help us to understand what we're not understanding." And they were all too happy to do that, and we got an idea of what life on the streets was all about, very different than what you see on the 11 o'clock news, very different than what is portrayed in popular media and even social media.
And as we were talking with them, a number of myths were dispelled about them with us. And one of the biggest myths was that these kids were cold and heartless and uncharacteristically bold in their violence. What we found out was the exact opposite. Most of the young people who were out there on the streets are just trying to make it on the streets. And we also found out that some of the most intelligent and creative and magnificent and wise people that we've ever met were on the street, engaged in a struggle. And I know some of them call it survival, but I call them overcomers, because when you're in the conditions that they're in, to be able to live every day is an accomplishment of overcoming. And as a result of that, we said to them, "How do you see this church, how do you see this institution helping this situation?" And we developed a plan in conversation with these youths. We stopped looking at them as the problem to be solved, and we started looking at them as partners, as assets, as co-laborers in the struggle to reduce violence in the community. Imagine developing a plan, you have one minister at one table and a heroin dealer at the other table, coming up with a way in which the church can help the entire community.
The Boston Miracle was about bringing people together. We had other partners. We had law enforcement partners. We had police officers. It wasn't the entire force, because there were still some who still had that lock-'em-up mentality, but there were other cops who saw the honor in partnering with the community, who saw the responsibility from themselves to be able to work as partners with community leaders and faith leaders in order to reduce violence in the community. Same with probation officers, same with judges, same with folks who were up that law enforcement chain, because they realized, like we did, that we'll never arrest ourselves out of this situation, that there will not be enough prosecutions made, and you cannot fill these jails up enough in order to alleviate the problem. I helped to start an organization 20 years ago, a faith-based organization, to deal with this issue. I left it about four years ago and started working in cities across the United States, 19 in total, and what I found out was that in those cities, there was always this component of community leaders who put their heads down and their nose to the grindstone, who checked their egos at the door and saw the whole as greater than the sum of its parts, and came together and found ways to work with youth out on the streets, that the solution is not more cops, but the solution is mining the assets that are there in the community, to have a strong community component in the collaboration around violence reduction.
Now, there is a movement in the United States of young people who I am very proud of who are dealing with the structural issues that need to change if we're going to be a better society. But there is this political ploy to try to pit police brutality and police misconduct against black-on-black violence. But it's a fiction. It's all connected. When you think about decades of failed housing policies and poor educational structures, when you think about persistent unemployment and underemployment in a community, when you think about poor healthcare, and then you throw drugs into the mix and duffel bags full of guns, little wonder that you would see this culture of violence emerge. And then the response that comes from the state is more cops and more suppression of hot spots. It's all connected, and one of the wonderful things that we've been able to do is to be able to show the value of partnering together -- community, law enforcement, private sector, the city -- in order to reduce violence. You have to value that community component.
I believe that we can end the era of violence in our cities. I believe that it is possible and that people are doing it even now. But I need your help. It can't just come from folks who are burning themselves out in the community. They need support. They need help. Go back to your city. Find those people. "You need some help? I'll help you out." Find those people. They're there. Bring them together with law enforcement, the private sector, and the city, with the one aim of reducing violence, but make sure that that community component is strong. Because the old adage that comes from Burundi is right: that you do for me, without me, you do to me.
God bless you. Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 192.9
} |
So if I told you that this was the face of pure joy, would you call me crazy? I wouldn't blame you, because every time I look at this Arctic selfie, I shiver just a little bit. I want to tell you a little bit about this photograph.
I was swimming around in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle, and the water was hovering right at freezing. The air? A brisk -10 with windchill, and I could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands, feet and face, and rush to protect my vital organs. It was the coldest I've ever been. But even with swollen lips, sunken eyes, and cheeks flushed red, I have found that this place right here is somewhere I can find great joy.
Now, when it comes to pain, psychologist Brock Bastian probably said it best when he wrote, "Pain is a kind of shortcut to mindfulness. It makes us suddenly aware of everything in the environment. It brutally draws us in to a virtual sensory awareness of the world much like meditation."
If shivering is a form of meditation, then I would consider myself a monk. (Laughter)
Now, before we get into the why would anyone ever want to surf in freezing cold water? I would love to give you a little perspective on what a day in my life can look like.
(Music)
(Video) Man: I mean, I know we were hoping for good waves, but I don't think anybody thought that was going to happen. I can't stop shaking. I am so cold.
(Music)
(Applause)
Chris Burkard: So, surf photographer, right? I don't even know if it's a real job title, to be honest. My parents definitely didn't think so when I told them at 19 I was quitting my job to pursue this dream career: blue skies, warm tropical beaches, and a tan that lasts all year long. I mean, to me, this was it. Life could not get any better. Sweating it out, shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations. But there was just this one problem. You see, the more time I spent traveling to these exotic locations, the less gratifying it seemed to be. I set out seeking adventure, and what I was finding was only routine. It was things like wi-fi, TV, fine dining, and a constant cellular connection that to me were all the trappings of places heavily touristed in and out of the water, and it didn't take long for me to start feeling suffocated.
I began craving wild, open spaces, and so I set out to find the places others had written off as too cold, too remote, and too dangerous to surf, and that challenge intrigued me. I began this sort of personal crusade against the mundane, because if there's one thing I've realized, it's that any career, even one as seemingly glamorous as surf photography, has the danger of becoming monotonous.
So in my search to break up this monotony, I realized something: There's only about a third of the Earth's oceans that are warm, and it's really just that thin band around the equator. So if I was going to find perfect waves, it was probably going to happen somewhere cold, where the seas are notoriously rough, and that's exactly where I began to look. And it was my first trip to Iceland that I felt like I found exactly what I was looking for.
I was blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape, but most importantly, I couldn't believe we were finding perfect waves in such a remote and rugged part of the world. At one point, we got to the beach only to find massive chunks of ice had piled on the shoreline. They created this barrier between us and the surf, and we had to weave through this thing like a maze just to get out into the lineup. and once we got there, we were pushing aside these ice chunks trying to get into waves. It was an incredible experience, one I'll never forget, because amidst those harsh conditions, I felt like I stumbled onto one of the last quiet places, somewhere that I found a clarity and a connection with the world I knew I would never find on a crowded beach.
I was hooked. I was hooked. (Laughter) Cold water was constantly on my mind, and from that point on, my career focused on these types of harsh and unforgiving environments, and it took me to places like Russia, Norway, Alaska, Iceland, Chile, the Faroe Islands, and a lot of places in between. And one of my favorite things about these places was simply the challenge and the creativity it took just to get there: hours, days, weeks spent on Google Earth trying to pinpoint any remote stretch of beach or reef we could actually get to. And once we got there, the vehicles were just as creative: snowmobiles, six-wheel Soviet troop carriers, and a couple of super-sketchy helicopter flights. (Laughter) Helicopters really scare me, by the way.
There was this one particularly bumpy boat ride up the coast of Vancouver Island to this kind of remote surf spot, where we ended up watching helplessly from the water as bears ravaged our camp site. They walked off with our food and bits of our tent, clearly letting us know that we were at the bottom of the food chain and that this was their spot, not ours. But to me, that trip was a testament to the wildness I traded for those touristy beaches.
Now, it wasn't until I traveled to Norway -- (Laughter) -- that I really learned to appreciate the cold. So this is the place where some of the largest, the most violent storms in the world send huge waves smashing into the coastline. We were in this tiny, remote fjord, just inside the Arctic Circle. It had a greater population of sheep than people, so help if we needed it was nowhere to be found. I was in the water taking pictures of surfers, and it started to snow. And then the temperature began to drop. And I told myself, there's not a chance you're getting out of the water. You traveled all this way, and this is exactly what you've been waiting for: freezing cold conditions with perfect waves. And although I couldn't even feel my finger to push the trigger, I knew I wasn't getting out. So I just did whatever I could. I shook it off, whatever. But that was the point that I felt this wind gush through the valley and hit me, and what started as this light snowfall quickly became a full-on blizzard, and I started to lose perception of where I was. I didn't know if I was drifting out to sea or towards shore, and all I could really make out was the faint sound of seagulls and crashing waves.
Now, I knew this place had a reputation for sinking ships and grounding planes, and while I was out there floating, I started to get a little bit nervous. Actually, I was totally freaking out -- (Laughter) -- and I was borderline hypothermic, and my friends eventually had to help me out of the water. And I don't know if it was delirium setting in or what, but they told me later I had a smile on my face the entire time.
Now, it was this trip and probably that exact experience where I really began to feel like every photograph was precious, because all of a sudden in that moment, it was something I was forced to earn. And I realized, all this shivering had actually taught me something: In life, there are no shortcuts to joy. Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer just a little bit, and that tiny bit of suffering that I did for my photography, it added a value to my work that was so much more meaningful to me than just trying to fill the pages of magazines. See, I gave a piece of myself in these places, and what I walked away with was a sense of fulfillment I had always been searching for.
So I look back at this photograph. It's easy to see frozen fingers and cold wetsuits and even the struggle that it took just to get there, but most of all, what I see is just joy.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 284
} |
Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And when we say "infidelity," what exactly do we mean? Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship?
For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness and their very identity: an affair. And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. So this talk is for anyone who has ever loved.
Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it. In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so, that this is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible: once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. (Laughter) So how do we reconcile what is universally forbidden, yet universally practiced?
Now, throughout history, men practically had a license to cheat with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam, so the double standard is as old as adultery itself. But who knows what's really going on under the sheets there, right? Because when it comes to sex, the pressure for men is to boast and to exaggerate, but the pressure for women is to hide, minimize and deny, which isn't surprising when you consider that there are still nine countries where women can be killed for straying.
Now, monogamy used to be one person for life. Today, monogamy is one person at a time. (Laughter) (Applause)
I mean, many of you probably have said, "I am monogamous in all my relationships." (Laughter)
We used to marry, and had sex for the first time. But now we marry, and we stop having sex with others. The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die.
Now, everyone wants to know what percentage of people cheat. I've been asked that question since I arrived at this conference. (Laughter) It applies to you. But the definition of infidelity keeps on expanding: sexting, watching porn, staying secretly active on dating apps. So because there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes an infidelity, estimates vary widely, from 26 percent to 75 percent. But on top of it, we are walking contradictions. So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one. (Laughter)
Now, I like this definition of an affair -- it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving, can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
So it's never been easier to cheat, and it's never been more difficult to keep a secret. And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll. When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security. Ironically, we used to turn to adultery -- that was the space where we sought pure love. But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it.
Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one. And infidelity tells me I'm not. It is the ultimate betrayal. Infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love. But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self.
So my patient Fernando, he's plagued. He goes on: "I thought I knew my life. I thought I knew who you were, who we were as a couple, who I was. Now, I question everything." Infidelity -- a violation of trust, a crisis of identity. "Can I ever trust you again?" he asks. "Can I ever trust anyone again?"
And this is also what my patient Heather is telling me, when she's talking to me about her story with Nick. Married, two kids. Nick just left on a business trip, and Heather is playing on his iPad with the boys, when she sees a message appear on the screen: "Can't wait to see you." Strange, she thinks, we just saw each other. And then another message: "Can't wait to hold you in my arms." And Heather realizes these are not for her. She also tells me that her father had affairs, but her mother, she found one little receipt in the pocket, and a little bit of lipstick on the collar. Heather, she goes digging, and she finds hundreds of messages, and photos exchanged and desires expressed. The vivid details of Nick's two-year affair unfold in front of her in real time, And it made me think: Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts.
But then we have another paradox that we're dealing with these days. Because of this romantic ideal, we are relying on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb. And if the situation were reversed, Nick would be in the same situation. Staying is the new shame.
So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can't all be pathological. The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life? What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? If even happy people cheat, what is it about?
The vast majority of people that I actually work with are not at all chronic philanderers. They are often people who are deeply monogamous in their beliefs, and at least for their partner. But they find themselves in a conflict between their values and their behavior. They often are people who have actually been faithful for decades, but one day they cross a line that they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything. But for a glimmer of what? Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy.
I'm thinking about another patient of mine, Priya, who is blissfully married, loves her husband, and would never want to hurt the man. But she also tells me that she's always done what was expected of her: good girl, good wife, good mother, taking care of her immigrant parents. Priya, she fell for the arborist who removed the tree from her yard after Hurricane Sandy. And with his truck and his tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. But at 47, Priya's affair is about the adolescence that she never had. And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.
Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. They feel alive. And they often will tell me stories of recent losses -- of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor. Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. Is this it? Is there more? Am I going on for another 25 years like this? Will I ever feel that thing again? And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death.
And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have.
Now some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do. First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity. But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to. And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me. (Laughter)
So how do we heal from an affair? Desire runs deep. Betrayal runs deep. But it can be healed. And some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine. But others will jolt us into new possibilities. The fact is, the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together. But some of them will merely survive, and others will actually be able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, "You think I didn't want more? But I'm not the one who did it." But now that the affair is exposed, they, too, get to claim more, and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well, either.
I've noticed that a lot of couples, in the immediate aftermath of an affair, because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order, will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. And, partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustfully voracious, they don't know where it's coming from. Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire, and make way for an entirely new kind of truth.
So when an affair is exposed, what are some of the specific things that couples can do? We know from trauma that healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing. So for the partner who had the affair, for Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential, important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife. But the truth is that I have noticed that quite a lot of people who have affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partner, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important. And Nick, he needs to hold vigil for the relationship. He needs to become, for a while, the protector of the boundaries. It's his responsibility to bring it up, because if he thinks about it, he can relieve Heather from the obsession, and from having to make sure that the affair isn't forgotten, and that in itself begins to restore trust.
But for Heather, or deceived partners, it is essential to do things that bring back a sense of self-worth, to surround oneself with love and with friends and activities that give back joy and meaning and identity. But even more important, is to curb the curiosity to mine for the sordid details -- Where were you? Where did you do it? How often? Is she better than me in bed? -- questions that only inflict more pain, and keep you awake at night. And instead, switch to what I call the investigative questions, the ones that mine the meaning and the motives -- What did this affair mean for you? What were you able to express or experience there that you could no longer do with me? What was it like for you when you came home? What is it about us that you value? Are you pleased this is over?
Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. But affairs are here to stay, and they're not going away. And the dilemmas of love and desire, they don't yield just simple answers of black and white and good and bad, and victim and perpetrator. Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms. There are many ways that we betray our partner: with contempt, with neglect, with indifference, with violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt a partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage.
Now, you've listened to me, and I know what you're thinking: She has a French accent, she must be pro-affair. (Laughter) So, you're wrong. I am not French. (Laughter) (Applause) And I'm not pro-affair. But because I think that good can come out of an affair, I have often been asked this very strange question: Would I ever recommend it? Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective. The main question that I've been asked since I arrived at this conference when I said I would talk about infidelity is, for or against? I said, "Yes." (Laughter)
I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other -- what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 306
} |
I'd like to have you look at this pencil. It's a thing. It's a legal thing. And so are books you might have or the cars you own. They're all legal things. The great apes that you'll see behind me, they too are legal things.
Now, I can do that to a legal thing. I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. These great apes, you'll see. The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison who wrote a book called "James & Other Apes." And he tells in his book how every single one them, almost every one of them, is an orphan who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. They're legal things.
So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human beings are legal persons.
But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.
But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed.
Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, and indeed I was moved by it, because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, defend the defenseless, and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, billions of nonhuman animals are. And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something that was literally impossible, the reason being that all of my clients, all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, were legal things; they were invisible. It was not going to work, so I decided that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole onto the other side of being legal persons.
Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about truly animal rights, about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, and I knew it was going to take a long time. And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28.
So what we had to do in order to begin was not only to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts of how you litigate that kind of case.
So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, a legal cause of action. And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use to put their arguments in front of courts.
It turns out there's a very interesting case that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart, whereby a black slave had used the legal system and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it.
James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. He survived the Middle Passage, and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia. Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, because he wanted to get a set of godparents, because to an 18th-century slave, they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers was to help you escape.
And so in the fall of 1771, James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers to canvass the city of London, find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, and he was chained to the deck, and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica where James was to be sold in the slave markets and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. Well now James' godparents swung into action. They approached the most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus on behalf of James Somerset.
Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make when they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, capital G, capital W, and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. A writ of habeus corpus is issued. The detainer is required to bring the detainee in and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty.
Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, because if James Somerset was a legal thing, he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, only if he could be a legal person. So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was brought in by the captain of the ship.
There were a series of hearings over the next six months. On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word "odious," that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. The free man who walked out of the courtroom looked exactly like the slave who had walked in, but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in common.
The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, which I founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles do we want to put before the judges? What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, were they taught in law school, do they use every day, do they believe with all their hearts -- and we chose liberty and equality.
Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because of how you're put together, and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. And the supreme interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. So they are so powerful that in a common law country, if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect your self-determination and your autonomy.
Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, and there's the rub, relevant way. So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, you're entitled to the right. Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. Some are included, some are excluded. But you have to, at the bare minimum you must -- that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being like you're seeing behind me, that that's a violation of equality.
We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. We chose the state of New York. Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. We decided upon chimpanzees, not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, but because they, Jane and others, have studied chimpanzees intensively for decades. We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits in which they set out more than 40 ways in which their complex cognitive capability, either individually or together, all added up to autonomy and self-determination.
Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. But they're also conscious that they're conscious. They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. They know they're individuals, and that they can live. They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. They can anticipate tomorrow, which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, especially alone. It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it.
They have some kind of moral capacity. When they play economic games with human beings, they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. They are numerate. They understand numbers. They can do some simple math. They can engage in language -- or to stay out of the language wars, they're involved in intentional and referential communication in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those with whom they are speaking. They have culture. They have a material culture, a social culture. They have a symbolic culture. Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. It takes a long time to learn how to do that, and they excavated the area and they found that this material culture, this way of doing it, these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years through 225 chimpanzee generations.
So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. Our chimpanzee, first we found two of them in the state of New York. Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. Then we found Tommy. Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. Tommy was a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. And we found Hercules and Leo. They're two young male chimpanzees who are being used for biomedical, anatomical research at Stony Brook. We found them.
And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument that had been used with James Somerset, and we demanded that the judges issue these common law writs of habeus corpus. We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands -- there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible.
Now, all these cases are still going on. We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. We shall. We shall. This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. And to quote Winston Churchill, the way we view our cases is that they're not the end, they're not even the beginning of the end, but they are perhaps the end of the beginning.
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 202.7
} |
When I was growing up, I really liked playing hide-and-seek a lot. One time, though, I thought climbing a tree would lead to a great hiding spot, but I fell and broke my arm. I actually started first grade with a big cast all over my torso. It was taken off six weeks later, but even then, I couldn't extend my elbow, and I had to do physical therapy to flex and extend it, 100 times per day, seven days per week. I barely did it, because I found it boring and painful, and as a result, it took me another six weeks to get better.
Many years later, my mom developed frozen shoulder, which leads to pain and stiffness in the shoulder. The person I believed for half of my life to have superpowers suddenly needed help to get dressed or to cut food. She went each week to physical therapy, but just like me, she barely followed the home treatment, and it took her over five months to feel better.
Both my mom and I required physical therapy, a process of doing a suite of repetitive exercises in order to regain the range of movement lost due to an accident or injury. At first, a physical therapist works with patients, but then it's up to the patients to do their exercises at home. But patients find physical therapy boring, frustrating, confusing and lengthy before seeing results. Sadly, patient noncompliance can be as high as 70 percent. This means the majority of patients don't do their exercises and therefore take a lot longer to get better. All physical therapists agree that special exercises reduce the time needed for recovery, but patients lack the motivation to do them.
So together with three friends, all of us software geeks, we asked ourselves, wouldn't it be interesting if patients could play their way to recovery? We started building MIRA, A P.C. software platform that uses this Kinect device, a motion capture camera, to transform traditional exercises into video games.
My physical therapist has already set up a schedule for my particular therapy. Let's see how this looks. The first game asks me to fly a bee up and down to gather pollen to deposit in beehives, all while avoiding the other bugs. I control the bee by doing elbow extension and flexion, just like when I was seven years old after the cast was taken off.
When designing a game, we speak to physical therapists at first to understand what movement patients need to do. We then make that a video game to give patients simple, motivating objectives to follow. But the software is very customizable, and physical therapists can also create their own exercises. Using the software, my physical therapist recorded herself performing a shoulder abduction, which is one of the movements my mom had to do when she had frozen shoulder. I can follow my therapist's example on the left side of the screen, while on the right, I see myself doing the recommended movement. I feel more engaged and confident, as I'm exercising alongside my therapist with the exercises my therapist thinks are best for me. This basically extends the application for physical therapists to create whatever exercises they think are best.
This is an auction house game for preventing falls, designed to strengthen muscles and improve balance. As a patient, I need to do sit and stand movements, and when I stand up, I bid for the items I want to buy. (Laughter)
In two days, my grandmother will be 82 years old, and there's a 50 percent chance for people over 80 to fall at least once per year, which could lead to a broken hip or even worse. Poor muscle tone and impaired balance are the number one cause of falls, so reversing these problems through targeted exercise will help keep older people like my grandmother safer and independent for longer. When my schedule ends, MIRA briefly shows me how I progressed throughout my session.
I have just shown you three different games for kids, adults and seniors. These can be used with orthopedic or neurologic patients, but we'll soon have options for children with autism, mental health or speech therapy. My physical therapist can go back to my profile and see the data gathered during my sessions. She can see how much I moved, how many points I scored, with what speed I moved my joints, and so on. My physical therapist can use all of this to adapt my treatment.
I'm so pleased this version is now in use in over 10 clinics across Europe and the U.S., and we're working on the home version. We want to enable physical therapists to prescribe this digital treatment and help patients play their way to recovery at home. If my mom or I had a tool like this when we needed physical therapy, then we would have been more successful following the treatment, and perhaps gotten better a lot sooner.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Tom Rielly: So Cosmin, tell me what hardware is this that they're rapidly putting away? What is that made of, and how much does it cost?
Cosmin Milhau: So it's a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for the demo, but you just need a computer and a Kinect, which is 120 dollars.
TR: Right, and the Kinect is the thing that people use for their Xboxes to do 3D games, right?
CM: Exactly, but you don't need the Xbox, you only need a camera.
TR: Right, so this is less than a $1,000 solution.
CM: Definitely, 400 dollars, you can definitely use it.
TR: So right now, you're doing clinical trials in clinics.
CM: Yes.
TR: And then the hope is to get it so it's a home version and I can do my exercise remotely, and the therapist at the clinic can see how I'm doing and stuff like that.
CM: Exactly.
TR: Cool. Thanks so much. CM: Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 380.4
} |
Chris Anderson: So I guess what we're going to do is we're going to talk about your life, and using some pictures that you shared with me. And I think we should start right here with this one. Okay, now who is this?
Martine Rothblatt: This is me with our oldest son Eli. He was about age five. This is taken in Nigeria right after having taken the Washington, D.C. bar exam.
CA: Okay. But this doesn't really look like a Martine.
MR: Right. That was myself as a male, the way I was brought up. Before I transitioned from male to female and Martin to Martine.
CA: You were brought up Martin Rothblatt.
MR: Correct.
CA: And about a year after this picture, you married a beautiful woman. Was this love at first sight? What happened there?
MR: It was love at the first sight. I saw Bina at a discotheque in Los Angeles, and we later began living together, but the moment I saw her, I saw just an aura of energy around her. I asked her to dance. She said she saw an aura of energy around me. I was a single male parent. She was a single female parent. We showed each other our kids' pictures, and we've been happily married for a third of a century now. (Applause)
CA: And at the time, you were kind of this hotshot entrepreneur, working with satellites. I think you had two successful companies, and then you started addressing this problem of how could you use satellites to revolutionize radio. Tell us about that.
MR: Right. I always loved space technology, and satellites, to me, are sort of like the canoes that our ancestors first pushed out into the water. So it was exciting for me to be part of the navigation of the oceans of the sky, and as I developed different types of satellite communication systems, the main thing I did was to launch bigger and more powerful satellites, the consequence of which was that the receiving antennas could be smaller and smaller, and after going through direct television broadcasting, I had the idea that if we could make a more powerful satellite, the receiving dish could be so small that it would just be a section of a parabolic dish, a flap of a plate embedded into the roof of an automobile, and it would be possible to have nationwide satellite radio, and that's Sirius XM today.
CA: Wow. So who here has used Sirius?
(Applause)
MR: Thank you for your monthly subscriptions.
(Laughter)
CA: So that succeeded despite all predictions at the time. It was a huge commercial success, but soon after this, in the early 1990s, there was this big transition in your life and you became Martine.
MR: Correct. CA: So tell me, how did that happen? MR: It happened in consultation with Bina and our four beautiful children, and I discussed with each of them that I felt my soul was always female, and as a woman, but I was afraid people would laugh at me if I expressed it, so I always kept it bottled up and just showed my male side. And each of them had a different take on this. Bina said, "I love your soul, and whether the outside is Martin and Martine, it doesn't it matter to me, I love your soul." My son said, "If you become a woman, will you still be my father?" And I said, "Yes, I'll always be your father, and I'm still his father today." My youngest daughter did an absolutely brilliant five-year-old thing. She told people, "I love my dad and she loves me." So she had no problem with a gender blending whatsoever.
CA: And a couple years after this, you published this book: "The Apartheid of Sex." What was your thesis in this book?
MR: My thesis in this book is that there are seven billion people in the world, and actually, seven billion unique ways to express one's gender. And while people may have the genitals of a male or a female, the genitals don't determine your gender or even really your sexual identity. That's just a matter of anatomy and reproductive tracts, and people could choose whatever gender they want if they weren't forced by society into categories of either male or female the way South Africa used to force people into categories of black or white. We know from anthropological science that race is fiction, even though racism is very, very real, and we now know from cultural studies that separate male or female genders is a constructed fiction. The reality is a gender fluidity that crosses the entire continuum from male to female.
CA: You yourself don't always feel 100 percent female.
MR: Correct. I would say in some ways I change my gender about as often as I change my hairstyle.
CA: (Laughs) Okay, now, this is your gorgeous daughter, Genesis. And I guess she was about this age when something pretty terrible happened.
MR: Yes, she was finding herself unable to walk up the stairs in our house to her bedroom, and after several months of doctors, she was diagnosed to have a rare, almost invariably fatal disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension.
CA: So how did you respond to that?
MR: Well, we first tried to get her to the best doctors we could. We ended up at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. The head of pediatric cardiology told us that he was going to refer her to get a lung transplant, but not to hold out any hope, because there are very few lungs available, especially for children. He said that all people with this illness died, and if any of you have seen the film "Lorenzo's Oil," there's a scene when the protagonist kind of rolls down the stairway crying and bemoaning the fate of his son, and that's exactly how we felt about Genesis.
CA: But you didn't accept that as the limit of what you could do. You started trying to research and see if you could find a cure somehow.
MR: Correct. She was in the intensive care ward for weeks at a time, and Bina and I would tag team to stay at the hospital while the other watched the rest of the kids, and when I was in the hospital and she was sleeping, I went to the hospital library. I read every article that I could find on pulmonary hypertension. I had not taken any biology, even in college, so I had to go from a biology textbook to a college-level textbook and then medical textbook and the journal articles, back and forth, and eventually I knew enough to think that it might be possible that somebody could find a cure. So we started a nonprofit foundation. I wrote a description asking people to submit grants and we would pay for medical research. I became an expert on the condition -- doctors said to me, Martine, we really appreciate all the funding you've provided us, but we are not going to be able to find a cure in time to save your daughter. However, there is a medicine that was developed at the Burroughs Wellcome Company that could halt the progression of the disease, but Burroughs Wellcome has just been acquired by Glaxo Wellcome. They made a decision not to develop any medicines for rare and orphan diseases, and maybe you could use your expertise in satellite communications to develop this cure for pulmonary hypertension.
CA: So how on earth did you get access to this drug?
MR: I went to Glaxo Wellcome and after three times being rejected and having the door slammed in my face because they weren't going to out-license the drug to a satellite communications expert, they weren't going to send the drug out to anybody at all, and they thought I didn't have the expertise, finally I was able to persuade a small team of people to work with me and develop enough credibility. I wore down their resistance, and they had no hope this drug would even work, by the way, and they tried to tell me, "You're just wasting your time. We're sorry about your daughter." But finally, for 25,000 dollars and agreement to pay 10 percent of any revenues we might ever get, they agreed to give me worldwide rights to this drug.
CA: And so you put this drug on the market in a really brilliant way, by basically charging what it would take to make the economics work.
MR: Oh yes, Chris, but this really wasn't a drug that I ended up -- after I wrote the check for 25,000, and I said, "Okay, where's the medicine for Genesis?" they said, "Oh, Martine, there's no medicine for Genesis. This is just something we tried in rats." And they gave me, like, a little plastic Ziploc bag of a small amount of powder. They said, "Don't give it to any human," and they gave me a piece of paper which said it was a patent, and from that, we had to figure out a way to make this medicine. A hundred chemists in the U.S. at the top universities all swore that little patent could never be turned into a medicine. If it was turned into a medicine, it could never be delivered because it had a half-life of only 45 minutes.
CA: And yet, a year or two later, you were there with a medicine that worked for Genesis.
MR: Chris, the astonishing thing is that this absolutely worthless piece of powder that had the sparkle of a promise of hope for Genesis is not only keeping Genesis and other people alive today, but produces almost a billion and a half dollars a year in revenue.
(Applause)
CA: So here you go. So you took this company public, right? And made an absolute fortune. And how much have you paid Glaxo, by the way, after that 25,000?
MR: Yeah, well, every year we pay them 10 percent of 1.5 billion, 150 million dollars, last year 100 million dollars. It's the best return on investment they ever received. (Laughter)
CA: And the best news of all, I guess, is this.
MR: Yes. Genesis is an absolutely brilliant young lady. She's alive, healthy today at 30. You see me, Bina and Genesis there. The most amazing thing about Genesis is that while she could do anything with her life, and believe me, if you grew up your whole life with people in your face saying that you've got a fatal disease, I would probably run to Tahiti and just not want to run into anybody again. But instead she chooses to work in United Therapeutics. She says she wants to do all she can to help other people with orphan diseases get medicines, and today, she's our project leader for all telepresence activities, where she helps digitally unite the entire company to work together to find cures for pulmonary hypertension.
CA: But not everyone who has this disease has been so fortunate. There are still many people dying, and you are tackling that too. How?
MR: Exactly, Chris. There's some 3,000 people a year in the United States alone, perhaps 10 times that number worldwide, who continue to die of this illness because the medicines slow down the progression but they don't halt it. The only cure for pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, emphysema, COPD, what Leonard Nimoy just died of, is a lung transplant, but sadly, there are only enough available lungs for 2,000 people in the U.S. a year to get a lung transplant, whereas nearly a half million people a year die of end-stage lung failure. CA: So how can you address that? MR: So I conceptualize the possibility that just like we keep cars and planes and buildings going forever with an unlimited supply of building parts and machine parts, why can't we create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs to keep people living indefinitely, and especially people with lung disease. So we've teamed up with the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter, and the company he founded with Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize, to genetically modify the pig genome so that the pig's organs will not be rejected by the human body and thereby to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. We do this through our company, United Therapeutics.
CA: So you really believe that within, what, a decade, that this shortage of transplantable lungs maybe be cured, through these guys?
MR: Absolutely, Chris. I'm as certain of that as I was of the success that we've had with direct television broadcasting, Sirius XM. It's actually not rocket science. It's straightforward engineering away one gene after another. We're so lucky to be born in the time that sequencing genomes is a routine activity, and the brilliant folks at Synthetic Genomics are able to zero in on the pig genome, find exactly the genes that are problematic, and fix them.
CA: But it's not just bodies that -- though that is amazing. (Applause) It's not just long-lasting bodies that are of interest to you now. It's long-lasting minds. And I think this graph for you says something quite profound. What does this mean?
MR: What this graph means, and it comes from Ray Kurzweil, is that the rate of development in computer processing hardware, firmware and software, has been advancing along a curve such that by the 2020s, as we saw in earlier presentations today, there will be information technology that processes information and the world around us at the same rate as a human mind.
CA: And so that being so, you're actually getting ready for this world by believing that we will soon be able to, what, actually take the contents of our brains and somehow preserve them forever? How do you describe that?
MR: Well, Chris, what we're working on is creating a situation where people can create a mind file, and a mind file is the collection of their mannerisms, personality, recollection, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, everything that we've poured today into Google, into Amazon, into Facebook, and all of this information stored there will be able, in the next couple decades, once software is able to recapitulate consciousness, be able to revive the consciousness which is imminent in our mind file.
CA: Now you're not just messing around with this. You're serious. I mean, who is this?
MR: This is a robot version of my beloved spouse, Bina. And we call her Bina 48. She was programmed by Hanson Robotics out of Texas. There's the centerfold from National Geographic magazine with one of her caregivers, and she roams the web and has hundreds of hours of Bina's mannerisms, personalities. She's kind of like a two-year-old kid, but she says things that blow people away, best expressed by perhaps a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Harmon who says her answers are often frustrating, but other times as compelling as those of any flesh person she's interviewed.
CA: And is your thinking here, part of your hope here, is that this version of Bina can in a sense live on forever, or some future upgrade to this version can live on forever? MR: Yes. Not just Bina, but everybody. You know, it costs us virtually nothing to store our mind files on Facebook, Instagram, what-have-you. Social media is I think one of the most extraordinary inventions of our time, and as apps become available that will allow us to out-Siri Siri, better and better, and develop consciousness operating systems, everybody in the world, billions of people, will be able to develop mind clones of themselves that will have their own life on the web.
CA: So the thing is, Martine, that in any normal conversation, this would sound stark-staring mad, but in the context of your life, what you've done, some of the things we've heard this week, the constructed realities that our minds give, I mean, you wouldn't bet against it.
MR: Well, I think it's really nothing coming from me. If anything, I'm perhaps a bit of a communicator of activities that are being undertaken by the greatest companies in China, Japan, India, the U.S., Europe. There are tens of millions of people working on writing code that expresses more and more aspects of our human consciousness, and you don't have to be a genius to see that all these threads are going to come together and ultimately create human consciousness, and it's something we'll value. There are so many things to do in this life, and if we could have a simulacrum, a digital doppelgänger of ourselves that helps us process books, do shopping, be our best friends, I believe our mind clones, these digital versions of ourselves, will ultimately be our best friends, and for me personally and Bina personally, we love each other like crazy. Each day, we are always saying, like, "Wow, I love you even more than 30 years ago. And so for us, the prospect of mind clones and regenerated bodies is that our love affair, Chris, can go on forever. And we never get bored of each other. I'm sure we never will.
CA: I think Bina's here, right? MR: She is, yeah. CA: Would it be too much, I don't know, do we have a handheld mic? Bina, could we invite you to the stage? I just have to ask you one question. Besides, we need to see you.
(Applause)
Thank you, thank you. Come and join Martine here. I mean, look, when you got married, if someone had told you that, in a few years time, the man you were marrying would become a woman, and a few years after that, you would become a robot -- (Laughter) -- how has this gone? How has it been?
Bina Rothblatt: It's been really an exciting journey, and I would have never thought that at the time, but we started making goals and setting those goals and accomplishing things, and before you knew it, we just keep going up and up and we're still not stopping, so it's great.
CA: Martine told me something really beautiful, just actually on Skype before this, which was that he wanted to live for hundreds of years as a mind file, but not if it wasn't with you.
BR: That's right, we want to do it together. We're cryonicists as well, and we want to wake up together.
CA: So just so as you know, from my point of view, this isn't only one of the most astonishing lives I have heard, it's one of the most astonishing love stories I've ever heard. It's just a delight to have you both here at TED. Thank you so much.
MR: Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 278.1
} |
(Music) Dannielle Hadley: Life in Pennsylvania means just that: life without the possibility of parole. For us lifers, as we call ourselves, our only chance for release is through commutation, which has only been granted to two women since 1989, close to 30 years ago. Our song, "This Is Not Our Home," it tells of our experiences while doing life without the possibility of parole.
(Music)
Brenda Watkins: I'm a woman.
I'm a grandmother.
I'm a daughter.
I have a son.
I'm not an angel.
I'm not the devil.
I came to jail
when I was so young.
I spend my time here
inside these prison walls.
Lost friends to death,
saw some go home.
Watch years pass,
people come and go,
while I do life without parole.
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.
I'm doing time here.
This is not my home.
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.
Will I see
my family
or die alone?
As the years go by,
I hold back my tears,
because if I cry I'd give in to fear.
I must be strong, have to hold on.
Gotta get through
another year.
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.
I'm doing time here. This is not my home.
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.
Will I see
my family
or die alone?
I'm not saying that I'm not guilty,
I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay.
All I'm asking is for forgiveness.
Gotta have hope I'll be free someday.
Is there a place for me
in the world out there?
Will they ever know or care that I'm chained?
Is there redemption for the sin of my younger days?
Because I've changed.
Lord knows I've changed.
I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done.
I'm doing time here. This is not my home.
Dream of freedom, hope for mercy.
Will I see
my family
or die alone?
Will I see
my family
or die alone?
I'm known to you as Inmate 008106. Incarcerated 29 years. My name is Brenda Watkins. I was born and raised in Hoffman, North Carolina. This is not my home.
(Applause)
Thelma Nichols: Inmate number 0B2472. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Thelma Nichols. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A. This is not my home.
(Applause)
DH: 008494. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Dannielle Hadley. I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A, and this is not my home.
(Applause)
Theresa Battles: Inmate 008309. I've been incarcerated for 27 years. My name is Theresa Battles. I'm from Norton, New Jersey, and this is not my home.
(Applause)
Debra Brown: I am known as Inmate 007080. I've been incarcerated for 30 years. My name is Debra Brown. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is not my home.
(Applause)
Joann Butler: 005961. I've been incarcerated for 37 years. My name is Joann Butler, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia. This is not my home.
(Applause)
Diane Hamill Metzger: Number 005634. I've been incarcerated for 39 and one half years. My name is Diane Hamill Metzger. I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.
(Applause)
Lena Brown: I am 004867. Incarcerated 40 years. My name is Lena Brown, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.
(Applause)
Trina Garnett: My number is 005545. My name is Trina Garnett, I've been incarcerated for 37 years, since I was 14 years old. Born and raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home.
(Applause)
Will I see
my family
or die alone?
Or die alone?
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 328
} |
I know what you're thinking: "Why does that guy get to sit down?" That's because this is radio.
(Music)
I tell radio stories about design, and I report on all kinds of stories: buildings and toothbrushes and mascots and wayfinding and fonts. My mission is to get people to engage with the design that they care about so they begin to pay attention to all forms of design. When you decode the world with design intent in mind, the world becomes kind of magical. Instead of seeing the broken things, you see all the little bits of genius that anonymous designers have sweated over to make our lives better. And that's essentially the definition of design: making life better and providing joy. And few things give me greater joy than a well-designed flag.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Yeah! Happy 50th anniversary on your flag, Canada. It is beautiful, gold standard. Love it.
I'm kind of obsessed with flags. Sometimes I bring up the topic of flags, and people are like, "I don't care about flags," and then we start talking about flags, and trust me, 100 percent of people care about flags. There's just something about them that works on our emotions.
My family wrapped my Christmas presents as flags this year, including the blue gift bag that's dressed up as the flag of Scotland. I put this picture online, and sure enough, within the first few minutes, someone left a comment that said, "You can take that Scottish Saltire and shove it up your ass." (Laughter) Which -- see, people are passionate about flags, you know? That's the way it is.
What I love about flags is that once you understand the design of flags, what makes a good flag, what makes a bad flag, you can understand the design of almost anything. So what I'm going to do here is, I cracked open an episode of my radio show, "99% Invisible," and I'm going to reconstruct it here on stage, so when I press a button over here -- Voice: S for Sound -- Roman Mars: It's going to make a sound, and so whenever you hear a sound or a voice or a piece of music, it's because I pressed a button.
Voice: Sssssound.
RM: All right, got it? Here we go. Three, two.
This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design.
Roman Mars: According to the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillological.
Ted Kaye: Vexillology is the study of flags.
RM: It's that extra "lol" that makes it sound weird.
Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory.
RM: Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn't even know cities had their own flags.
TK: Most larger cities do have flags.
RM: Well, I didn't know that. That's Ted Kaye, by the way.
TK: Hello. RM: He's a flag expert. He's a totally awesome guy.
TK: I'm Ted Kaye. I have edited a scholarly journal on flag studies, and I am currently involved with the Portland Flag Association and the North American Vexillological Association.
RM: Ted literally wrote the book on flag design.
Narrator: "Good Flag, Bad Flag."
RM: It's more of a pamphlet, really. It's about 16 pages.
TK: Yes, it's called "Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag."
RM: And that first city flag I discovered in Chicago is a beaut: white field, two horizontal blue stripes, and four six-pointed red stars down the middle.
Narrator: Number two: use meaningful symbolism.
TK: The blue stripes represent the water, the river and the lake.
Narrator: The flag's images, colors or pattern should relate to what it symbolizes.
TK: The red stars represent significant events in Chicago's history. RM: Namely, the founding of Fort Dearborn on the future site of Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire, the World Columbian Exposition, which everyone remembers because of the White City, and the Century of Progress Exposition, which no one remembers at all.
Narrator: Number three, use two to three basic colors.
TK: The basic rule for colors is to use two to three colors from the standard color set: red, white, blue, green, yellow and black.
RM: The design of the Chicago flag has complete buy-in with an entire cross-section of the city. It is everywhere; every municipal building flies the flag.
Whet Moser: Like, there's probably at least one store on every block near where I work that sells some sort of Chicago flag paraphernalia.
RM: That's Whet Moser from Chicago magazine.
WM: Today, just for example, I went to get a haircut, and when I sat down in the barber's chair, there was a Chicago flag on the box that the barber kept all his tools in, and then in the mirror there was a Chicago flag on the wall behind me. When I left, a guy passed me who had a Chicago flag badge on his backpack. RM: It's adaptable and remixable. The six-pointed stars in particular show up in all kinds of places. WM: The coffee I bought the other day had a Chicago star on it. RM: It's a distinct symbol of Chicago pride. TK: When a police officer or a firefighter dies in Chicago, often it's not the flag of the United States on his casket. It can be the flag of the city of Chicago. That's how deeply the flag has gotten into the civic imagery of Chicago.
RM: And it isn't just that people love Chicago and therefore love the flag. I also think that people love Chicago more because the flag is so cool.
TK: A positive feedback loop there between great symbolism and civic pride.
RM: Okay. So when I moved back to San Francisco in 2008, I researched its flag, because I had never seen it in the previous eight years I lived there. And I found it, I am sorry to say, sadly lacking.
(Laughter)
I know. It hurts me, too.
(Laughter)
TK: Well, let me start from the top.
Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. TK: Keeping it simple.
Narrator: The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory.
TK: It's a relatively complex flag.
RM: Okay, here we go. Okay. The main component of the San Francisco flag is a phoenix representing the city rising from the ashes after the devastating fires of the 1850s.
TK: A powerful symbol for San Francisco.
RM: I still don't really dig the phoenix. Design-wise, it manages to both be too crude and have too many details at the same time, which if you were trying for that, you wouldn't be able to do it, and it just looks bad at a distance, but having deep meaning puts that element in the plus column. Behind the phoenix, the background is mostly white, and then it has a substantial gold border around it.
TK: Which is a very attractive design element.
RM: I think it's okay. But -- (Laughter) -- here come the big no-nos of flag design.
Narrator: Number four, no lettering or seals. Never use writing of any kind.
RM: Underneath the phoenix, there's a motto on a ribbon that translates to "Gold in peace, iron in war," plus -- and this is the big problem -- it says San Francisco across the bottom.
TK: If you need to write the name of what you're representing on your flag, your symbolism has failed.
(Laughter) (Applause)
RM: The United States flag doesn't say "USA" across the front. In fact, country flags, they tend to behave. Like, hats off to South Africa and Turkey and Israel and Somalia and Japan and Gambia. There's a bunch of really great country flags, but they obey good design principles because the stakes are high. They're on the international stage. But city, state and regional flags are another story. (Laughter) There is a scourge of bad flags, and they must be stopped. (Laughter) (Applause) That is the truth and that is the dare. The first step is to recognize that we have a problem. A lot of people tend to think that good design is just a matter of taste, and quite honestly, sometimes it is, actually, but sometimes it isn't, all right? Here's the full list of NAVA flag design principles.
Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design. Number one. TK: Keep it simple. Narrator: Number two. TK: Use meaningful symbolism.
Narrator: Number three. TK: Use two to three basic colors.
Narrator: Number four. TK: No lettering or seals.
Narrator: Never use writing of any kind.
TK: Because you can't read that at a distance.
Narrator: Number five. TK: And be distinctive.
RM: All the best flags tend to stick to these principles. And like I said before, most country flags are okay. But here's the thing: if you showed this list of principles to any designer of almost anything, they would say these principles -- simplicity, deep meaning, having few colors or being thoughtful about colors, uniqueness, don't have writing you can't read -- all those principles apply to them, too. But sadly, good design principles are rarely invoked in U.S. city flags. Our biggest problem seems to be that fourth one. We just can't stop ourselves from putting our names on our flags, or little municipal seals with tiny writing on them. Here's the thing about municipal seals: They were designed to be on pieces of paper where you can read them, not on flags 100 feet away flapping in the breeze.
So here's a bunch of flags again. Vexillologists call these SOBs: seals on a bedsheet -- (Laughter) -- and if you can't tell what city they go to, yeah, that's exactly the problem, except for Anaheim, apparently. They fixed it. (Laughter)
These flags are everywhere in the U.S. The European equivalent of the municipal seal is the city coat of arms, and this is where we can learn a lesson for how to do things right. So this is the city coat of arms of Amsterdam. Now, if this were a United States city, the flag would probably look like this. You know, yeah. (Laughter) But instead, the flag of Amsterdam looks like this. Rather than plopping the whole coat of arms on a solid background and writing "Amsterdam" below it, they just take the key elements of the escutcheon, the shield, and they turn it into the most badass city flag in the world. (Laughter) (Applause)
And because it's so badass, those flags and crosses are found throughout Amsterdam, just like Chicago, they're used.
Even though seal-on-a-bedsheet flags are particularly painful and offensive to me, nothing can quite prepare you for one of the biggest train wrecks in vexillological history. Are you ready? It's the flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Laughter) I mean, it's distinctive, I'll give them that.
Steve Kodis: It was adopted in 1955.
RM: The city ran a contest and gathered a bunch of submissions with all kinds of designs.
SK: And an alderman by the name of Fred Steffan cobbled together parts of the submissions to make what is now the Milwaukee flag.
RM: It's a kitchen sink flag. There's a gigantic gear representing industry, there's a ship recognizing the port, a giant stalk of wheat paying homage to the brewing industry. It's a hot mess, and Steve Kodis, a graphic designer from Milwaukee, wants to change it.
SK: It's really awful. It's a misstep on the city's behalf, to say the least.
RM: But what puts the Milwaukee flag over the top, almost to the point of self-parody, is on it is a picture of the Civil War battle flag of the Milwaukee regiment.
SK: So that's the final element in it that just makes it that much more ridiculous, that there is a flag design within the Milwaukee flag.
RM: On the flag. Yeah. Yeah. (Laughter) Yeah.
(Music)
Now, Milwaukee is a fantastic city. I've been there. I love it. The most depressing part of this flag, though, is that there have been two major redesign contests. The last one was held in 2001. One hundred and five entries were received.
TK: But in the end, the members of the Milwaukee Arts Board decided that none of the new entries were worthy of flying over the city.
RM: They couldn't agree to change that thing! (Laughter) That's discouraging enough to make you think that good design and democracy just simply do not go together. But Steve Kotas is going to try one more time to redesign the Milwaukee flag.
SK: I believe Milwaukee is a great city. Every great city deserves a great flag.
RM: Steve isn't ready to reveal his design yet. One of the things about proposing one of these things is you have to get people on board, and then you reveal your design. But here's the trick: If you want to design a great flag, a kickass flag like Chicago's or D.C.'s, which also has a great flag, start by drawing a one-by-one-and-a-half- inch rectangle on a piece of paper. Your design has to fit within that tiny rectangle. Here's why.
TK: A three-by-five-foot flag on a pole 100 feet away looks about the same size as a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch rectangle seen about 15 inches from your eye. You'd be surprised by how compelling and simple the design can be when you hold yourself to that limitation.
RM: Meanwhile, back in San Francisco. Is there anything we can do?
TK: I like to say that in every bad flag there's a good flag trying to get out. (Laughter) The way to make San Francisco's flag a good flag is to take the motto off because you can't read that at a distance. Take the name off, and the border might even be made thicker, so it's more a part of the flag. And I would simply take the phoenix and make it a great big element in the middle of the flag.
RM: But the current phoenix, that's got to go.
TK: I would simplify or stylize the phoenix. Depict a big, wide-winged bird coming out of flames. Emphasize those flames.
RM: So this San Francisco flag was designed by Frank Chimero based on Ted Kaye's suggestions. I don't know what he would do if we was completely unfettered and didn't follow those guidelines. Fans of my radio show and podcast, they've heard me complain about bad flags. They've sent me other suggested designs. This one's by Neil Mussett. Both are so much better. And I think if they were adopted, I would see them around the city.
In my crusade to make flags of the world more beautiful, many listeners have taken it upon themselves to redesign their flags and look into the feasibility of getting them officially adopted. If you see your city flag and like it, fly it, even if it violates a design rule or two. I don't care. But if you don't see your city flag, maybe it doesn't exist, but maybe it does, and it just sucks, and I dare you to join the effort to try to change that.
As we move more and more into cities, the city flag will become not just a symbol of that city as a place, but also it could become a symbol of how that city considers design itself, especially today, as the populace is becoming more design-aware. And I think design awareness is at an all-time high. A well-designed flag could be seen as an indicator of how a city considers all of its design systems: its public transit, its parks, its signage. It might seem frivolous, but it's not.
TK: Often when city leaders say, "We have more important things to do than worry about a city flag," my response is, "If you had a great city flag, you would have a banner for people to rally under to face those more important things."
RM: I've seen firsthand what a good city flag can do in the case of Chicago. The marriage of good design and civic pride is something that we need in all places. The best part about municipal flags is that we own them. They are an open-source, publicly owned design language of the community. When they are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and they are powerful. We could control the branding and graphical imagery of our cities with a good flag, but instead, by having bad flags we don't use, we cede that territory to sports teams and chambers of commerce and tourism boards. Sports teams can leave and break our hearts. And besides, some of us don't really care about sports. And tourism campaigns can just be cheesy. But a great city flag is something that represents a city to its people and its people to the world at large. And when that flag is a beautiful thing, that connection is a beautiful thing. So maybe all the city flags can be as inspiring as Hong Kong or Portland or Trondheim, and we can do away with all the bad flags like San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, and finally, when we're all done, we can do something about Pocatello, Idaho, considered by the North American Vexillological Association as the worst city flag in North America. (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. That thing has a trademark symbol on it, people. (Laughter) That hurts me just to look at.
Thank you so much for listening.
(Applause)
["Music by: Melodium (@melodiumbox) and Keegan DeWitt (@keegandewitt)"] | {
"perplexity_score": 302
} |
When I was nine years old, my mom asked me what I would want my house to look like, and I drew this fairy mushroom. And then she actually built it. (Laughter)
I don't think I realized this was so unusual at the time, and maybe I still haven't, because I'm still designing houses. This is a six-story bespoke home on the island of Bali. It's built almost entirely from bamboo. The living room overlooks the valley from the fourth floor. You enter the house by a bridge. It can get hot in the tropics, so we make big curving roofs to catch the breezes. But some rooms have tall windows to keep the air conditioning in and the bugs out. This room we left open. We made an air-conditioned, tented bed. And one client wanted a TV room in the corner of her living room. Boxing off an area with tall walls just didn't feel right, so instead, we made this giant woven pod.
Now, we do have all the necessary luxuries, like bathrooms. This one is a basket in the corner of the living room, and I've got tell you, some people actually hesitate to use it. We have not quite figured out our acoustic insulation. (Laughter) So there are lots of things that we're still working on, but one thing I have learned is that bamboo will treat you well if you use it right.
It's actually a wild grass. It grows on otherwise unproductive land -- deep ravines, mountainsides. It lives off of rainwater, spring water, sunlight, and of the 1,450 species of bamboo that grow across the world, we use just seven of them.
That's my dad. He's the one who got me building with bamboo, and he is standing in a clump of Dendrocalamus asper niger that he planted just seven years ago. Each year, it sends up a new generation of shoots. That shoot, we watched it grow a meter in three days just last week, so we're talking about sustainable timber in three years.
Now, we harvest from hundreds of family-owned clumps. Betung, as we call it, it's really long, up to 18 meters of usable length. Try getting that truck down the mountain. And it's strong: it has the tensile strength of steel, the compressive strength of concrete. Slam four tons straight down on a pole, and it can take it. Because it's hollow, it's lightweight, light enough to be lifted by just a few men, or, apparently, one woman.
(Laughter) (Applause)
And when my father built Green School in Bali, he chose bamboo for all of the buildings on campus, because he saw it as a promise. It's a promise to the kids. It's one sustainable material that they will not run out of. And when I first saw these structures under construction about six years ago, I just thought, this makes perfect sense. It is growing all around us. It's strong. It's elegant. It's earthquake-resistant. Why hasn't this happened sooner, and what can we do with it next?
So along with some of the original builders of Green School, I founded Ibuku. Ibu means "mother," and ku means "mine," so it represents my Mother Earth, and at Ibuku, we are a team of artisans, architects and designers, and what we're doing together is creating a new way of building. Over the past five years together, we have built over 50 unique structures, most of them in Bali. Nine of them are at Green Village -- you've just seen inside some of these homes -- and we fill them with bespoke furniture, we surround them with veggie gardens, we would love to invite you all to come visit someday. And while you're there, you can also see Green School -- we keep building classrooms there each year -- as well as an updated fairy mushroom house.
We're also working on a little house for export. This is a traditional Sumbanese home that we replicated, right down to the details and textiles. A restaurant with an open-air kitchen. It looks a lot like a kitchen, right? And a bridge that spans 22 meters across a river.
Now, what we're doing, it's not entirely new. From little huts to elaborate bridges like this one in Java, bamboo has been in use across the tropical regions of the world for literally tens of thousands of years. There are islands and even continents that were first reached by bamboo rafts. But until recently, it was almost impossible to reliably protect bamboo from insects, and so, just about everything that was ever built out of bamboo is gone. Unprotected bamboo weathers. Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust. And so that's why most people, especially in Asia, think that you couldn't be poor enough or rural enough to actually want to live in a bamboo house.
And so we thought, what will it take to change their minds, to convince people that bamboo is worth building with, much less worth aspiring to?
First, we needed safe treatment solutions. Borax is a natural salt. It turns bamboo into a viable building material. Treat it properly, design it carefully, and a bamboo structure can last a lifetime.
Second, build something extraordinary out of it. Inspire people. Fortunately, Balinese culture fosters craftsmanship. It values the artisan. So combine those with the adventurous outliers from new generations of locally trained architects and designers and engineers, and always remember that you are designing for curving, tapering, hollow poles. No two poles alike, no straight lines, no two-by-fours here. The tried-and-true, well-crafted formulas and vocabulary of architecture do not apply here. We have had to invent our own rules. We ask the bamboo what it's good at, what it wants to become, and what it says is: respect it, design for its strengths, protect it from water, and to make the most of its curves.
So we design in real 3D, making scale structural models out of the same material that we'll later use to build the house. And bamboo model-making, it's an art, as well as some hardcore engineering.
So that's the blueprint of the house.
(Laughter)
And we bring it to site, and with tiny rulers, we measure each pole, and consider each curve, and we choose a piece of bamboo from the pile to replicate that house on site.
When it comes down to the details, we consider everything. Why are doors so often rectangular? Why not round? How could you make a door better? Well, its hinges battle with gravity, and gravity will always win in the end, so why not have it pivot on the center where it can stay balanced? And while you're at it, why not doors shaped like teardrops?
To reap the selective benefits and work within the constraints of this material, we have really had to push ourselves, and within that constraint, we have found space for something new. It's a challenge: how do you make a ceiling if you don't have any flat boards to work with? Let me tell you, sometimes I dream of sheet rock and plywood. (Laughter) But if what you've got is skilled craftsmen and itsy bitsy little splits, weave that ceiling together, stretch a canvas over it, lacquer it. How do you design durable kitchen countertops that do justice to this curving structure you've just built? Slice up a boulder like a loaf of bread, hand-carve each to fit the other, leave the crusts on, and what we're doing, it is almost entirely handmade. The structural connections of our buildings are reinforced by steel joints, but we use a lot of hand-whittled bamboo pins. There are thousands of pins in each floor. This floor is made of glossy and durable bamboo skin. You can feel the texture under bare feet.
And the floor that you walk on, can it affect the way that you walk? Can it change the footprint that you'll ultimately leave on the world? I remember being nine years old and feeling wonder, and possibility, and a little bit of idealism. And we've got a really long way to go, there's a lot left to learn, but one thing I know is that with creativity and commitment, you can create beauty and comfort and safety and even luxury out of a material that will grow back.
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 303.8
} |
(Music)
These bees are in my backyard in Berkeley, California. Until last year, I'd never kept bees before, but National Geographic asked me to photograph a story about them, and I decided, to be able to take compelling images, I should start keeping bees myself. And as you may know, bees pollinate one third of our food crops, and lately they've been having a really hard time. So as a photographer, I wanted to explore what this problem really looks like. So I'm going to show you what I found over the last year.
This furry little creature is a fresh young bee halfway emerged from its brood cell, and bees right now are dealing with several different problems, including pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss, but the single greatest threat is a parasitic mite from Asia, Varroa destructor. And this pinhead-sized mite crawls onto young bees and sucks their blood. This eventually destroys a hive because it weakens the immune system of the bees, and it makes them more vulnerable to stress and disease.
Now, bees are the most sensitive when they're developing inside their brood cells, and I wanted to know what that process really looks like, so I teamed up with a bee lab at U.C. Davis and figured out how to raise bees in front of a camera. I'm going to show you the first 21 days of a bee's life condensed into 60 seconds.
This is a bee egg as it hatches into a larva, and those newly hatched larvae swim around their cells feeding on this white goo that nurse bees secrete for them. Then, their head and their legs slowly differentiate as they transform into pupae. Here's that same pupation process, and you can actually see the mites running around in the cells. Then the tissue in their body reorganizes and the pigment slowly develops in their eyes. The last step of the process is their skin shrivels up and they sprout hair. (Music)
So -- (Applause)
As you can see halfway through that video, the mites were running around on the baby bees, and the way that beekeepers typically manage these mites is they treat their hives with chemicals. In the long run, that's bad news, so researchers are working on finding alternatives to control these mites.
This is one of those alternatives. It's an experimental breeding program at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge, and this queen and her attendant bees are part of that program.
Now, the researchers figured out that some of the bees have a natural ability to fight mites, so they set out to breed a line of mite-resistant bees. This is what it takes to breed bees in a lab. The virgin queen is sedated and then artificially inseminated using this precision instrument. Now, this procedure allows the researchers to control exactly which bees are being crossed, but there's a tradeoff in having this much control. They succeeded in breeding mite-resistant bees, but in that process, those bees started to lose traits like their gentleness and their ability to store honey, so to overcome that problem, these researchers are now collaborating with commercial beekeepers. This is Bret Adee opening one of his 72,000 beehives. He and his brother run the largest beekeeping operation in the world, and the USDA is integrating their mite-resistant bees into his operation with the hope that over time, they'll be able to select the bees that are not only mite-resistant but also retain all of these qualities that make them useful to us.
And to say it like that makes it sound like we're manipulating and exploiting bees, and the truth is, we've been doing that for thousands of years. We took this wild creature and put it inside of a box, practically domesticating it, and originally that was so that we could harvest their honey, but over time we started losing our native pollinators, our wild pollinators, and there are many places now where those wild pollinators can no longer meet the pollination demands of our agriculture, so these managed bees have become an integral part of our food system.
So when people talk about saving bees, my interpretation of that is we need to save our relationship to bees, and in order to design new solutions, we have to understand the basic biology of bees and understand the effects of stressors that we sometimes cannot see. In other words, we have to understand bees up close.
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 272.6
} |
In June of 1998, Tori Murden McClure left Nags Head, North Carolina for France.
That's her boat, the American Pearl. It's 23 feet long and just six feet across at its widest point. The deck was the size of a cargo bed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. Tori and her friends built it by hand, and it weighed about 1,800 pounds. Her plan was to row it alone across the Atlantic Ocean -- no motor, no sail -- something no woman and no American had ever done before. This would be her route: over 3,600 miles across the open North Atlantic Ocean.
Professionally, Tori worked as a project administrator for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, her hometown, but her real passion was exploring. This was not her first big expedition. Several years earlier, she'd become the first woman to ski to the South Pole. She was an accomplished rower in college, even competed for a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, but this, this was different.
(Video) (Music) Tori Murden McClure: Hi. It's Sunday, July 5. Sector time 9 a.m. So that's Kentucky time now.
Dawn Landes: Tori made these videos as she rowed. This is her 21st day at sea. At this point, she'd covered over 1,000 miles, had had no radio contact in more than two weeks following a storm that disabled all her long-range communications systems just five days in. Most days looked like this. At this point, she'd rowed over 200,000 strokes, fighting the current and the wind. Some days, she traveled as little as 15 feet. Yeah. And as frustrating as those days were, other days were like this.
(Video) TMM: And I want to show you my little friends.
DL: She saw fish, dolphins, whales, sharks, and even some sea turtles. After two weeks with no human contact, Tori was able to contact a local cargo ship via VHF radio.
(Video) TMM: Do you guys have a weather report, over?
Man: Heading up to a low ahead of you but it's heading, and you're obviously going northeast and there's a high behind us. That'd be coming east-northeast also.
TMM: Good.
DL: She's pretty happy to talk to another human at this point.
(Video) TMM: So weather report says nothing dramatic is going to happen soon.
DL: What the weather report didn't tell her was that she was rowing right into the path of Hurricane Danielle in the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic.
(Video) TMM: Just sprained my ankle. There's a very strong wind from the east now. It's blowing about. It's blowing! After 12 days of storm I get to row for four hours without a flagging wind. I'm not very happy right now. As happy as I was this morning, I am unhappy now, so ...
DL: After nearly three months at sea, she'd covered over 3,000 miles. She was two thirds of the way there, but in the storm, the waves were the size of a seven-story building. Her boat kept capsizing. Some of them were pitchpole capsizes, flipping her end over end, and rowing became impossible.
(Video) TMM: It's 6:30 a.m. I'm in something big, bad and ugly. Two capsizes. Last capsize, I took the rib off the top of my ceiling with my back. I've had about six capsizes now. The last one was a pitchpole. I have the Argus beacon with me. I would set off the distress signal, but quite frankly, I don't think they'd ever be able to find this little boat. It's so far underwater right now, the only part that's showing pretty much is the cabin. It's about 10 a.m. I've lost track of the number of capsizes. I seem to capsize about every 15 minutes. I think I may have broken my left arm. The waves are tearing the boat to shreds. I keep praying because I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this. DL: Tori set off her distress beacon and was rescued by a passing container ship. They found her abandoned boat two months later adrift near France. I read about it in the newspaper.
In 1998, I was a high school student living in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, I live in New York City. I'm a songwriter. And her bravery stuck with me, and I'm adapting her story into a musical called "Row." When Tori returned home, she was feeling disheartened, she was broke. She was having a hard time making the transition back into civilization.
In this scene, she sits at home. The phone is ringing, her friends are calling, but she doesn't know how to talk to them. She sings this song. It's called "Dear Heart."
(Guitar)
When I was dreaming,
I took my body
to beautiful places
I'd never been.
I saw Gibraltar,
and stars of Kentucky
burned in the moonlight,
making me smile.
And when I awoke here,
the sky was so cloudy.
I walked to a party
where people I know
try hard to know me
and ask where I've been,
but I can't explain
what I've seen to them.
Ah, listen, dear heart.
Just pay attention,
go right from the start.
Ah, listen, dear heart.
You can fall off the map,
but don't fall apart.
Ooh ooh ooh,
ah ah ah ah ah.
Ah ah,
ah ah ah.
When I was out there,
the ocean would hold me,
rock me and throw me,
light as a child.
But now I'm so heavy,
nothing consoles me.
My mind floats like driftwood,
wayward and wild.
Ah, listen, dear heart.
Just pay attention,
go right from the start.
Ah, listen, dear heart.
You can fall off the map,
but don't fall apart.
Ooh.
Eventually, Tori starts to get her feet under her. She starts hanging out with her friends again. She meets a guy and falls in love for the first time. She gets a new job working for another Louisville native, Muhammad Ali. One day, at lunch with her new boss, Tori shares the news that two other women are setting out to row across the mid-Atlantic, to do something that she almost died trying to do.
His response was classic Ali: "You don't want to go through life as the woman who almost rowed across the ocean."
He was right. Tori rebuilt the American Pearl, and in December of 1999, she did it.
(Applause) (Guitar)
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 358.8
} |
You may not realize this, but there are more bacteria in your body than stars in our entire galaxy. This fascinating universe of bacteria inside of us is an integral part of our health, and our technology is evolving so rapidly that today we can program these bacteria like we program computers.
Now, the diagram that you see here, I know it looks like some kind of sports play, but it is actually a blueprint of the first bacterial program I developed. And like writing software, we can print and write DNA into different algorithms and programs inside of bacteria. What this program does is produces fluorescent proteins in a rhythmic fashion and generates a small molecule that allows bacteria to communicate and synchronize, as you're seeing in this movie. The growing colony of bacteria that you see here is about the width of a human hair. Now, what you can't see is that our genetic program instructs these bacteria to each produce small molecules, and these molecules travel between the thousands of individual bacteria telling them when to turn on and off. And the bacteria synchronize quite well at this scale, but because the molecule that synchronizes them together can only travel so fast, in larger colonies of bacteria, this results in traveling waves between bacteria that are far away from each other, and you can see these waves going from right to left across the screen.
Now, our genetic program relies on a natural phenomenon called quorum sensing, in which bacteria trigger coordinated and sometimes virulent behaviors once they reach a critical density. You can observe quorum sensing in action in this movie, where a growing colony of bacteria only begins to glow once it reaches a high or critical density. Our genetic program continues producing these rhythmic patterns of fluorescent proteins as the colony grows outwards. This particular movie and experiment we call The Supernova, because it looks like an exploding star.
Now, besides programming these beautiful patterns, I wondered, what else can we get these bacteria to do? And I decided to explore how we can program bacteria to detect and treat diseases in our bodies like cancer. One of the surprising facts about bacteria is that they can naturally grow inside of tumors. This happens because typically tumors are areas where the immune system has no access, and so bacteria find these tumors and use them as a safe haven to grow and thrive. We started using probiotic bacteria which are safe bacteria that have a health benefit, and found that when orally delivered to mice, these probiotics would selectively grow inside of liver tumors. We realized that the most convenient way to highlight the presence of the probiotics, and hence, the presence of the tumors, was to get these bacteria to produce a signal that would be detectable in the urine, and so we specifically programmed these probiotics to make a molecule that would change the color of your urine to indicate the presence of cancer. We went on to show that this technology could sensitively and specifically detect liver cancer, one that is challenging to detect otherwise.
Now, since these bacteria specifically localize to tumors, we've been programming them to not only detect cancer but also to treat cancer by producing therapeutic molecules from within the tumor environment that shrink the existing tumors, and we've been doing this using quorum sensing programs like you saw in the previous movies.
Altogether, imagine in the future taking a programmed probiotic that could detect and treat cancer, or even other diseases. Our ability to program bacteria and program life opens up new horizons in cancer research, and to share this vision, I worked with artist Vik Muniz to create the symbol of the universe, made entirely out of bacteria or cancer cells. Ultimately, my hope is that the beauty and purpose of this microscopic universe can inspire new and creative approaches for the future of cancer research.
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 379.2
} |
Most of us think of motion as a very visual thing. If I walk across this stage or gesture with my hands while I speak, that motion is something that you can see. But there's a world of important motion that's too subtle for the human eye, and over the past few years, we've started to find that cameras can often see this motion even when humans can't.
So let me show you what I mean. On the left here, you see video of a person's wrist, and on the right, you see video of a sleeping infant, but if I didn't tell you that these were videos, you might assume that you were looking at two regular images, because in both cases, these videos appear to be almost completely still. But there's actually a lot of subtle motion going on here, and if you were to touch the wrist on the left, you would feel a pulse, and if you were to hold the infant on the right, you would feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took each breath. And these motions carry a lot of significance, but they're usually too subtle for us to see, so instead, we have to observe them through direct contact, through touch.
But a few years ago, my colleagues at MIT developed what they call a motion microscope, which is software that finds these subtle motions in video and amplifies them so that they become large enough for us to see. And so, if we use their software on the left video, it lets us see the pulse in this wrist, and if we were to count that pulse, we could even figure out this person's heart rate. And if we used the same software on the right video, it lets us see each breath that this infant takes, and we can use this as a contact-free way to monitor her breathing.
And so this technology is really powerful because it takes these phenomena that we normally have to experience through touch and it lets us capture them visually and non-invasively.
So a couple years ago, I started working with the folks that created that software, and we decided to pursue a crazy idea. We thought, it's cool that we can use software to visualize tiny motions like this, and you can almost think of it as a way to extend our sense of touch. But what if we could do the same thing with our ability to hear? What if we could use video to capture the vibrations of sound, which are just another kind of motion, and turn everything that we see into a microphone?
Now, this is a bit of a strange idea, so let me try to put it in perspective for you. Traditional microphones work by converting the motion of an internal diaphragm into an electrical signal, and that diaphragm is designed to move readily with sound so that its motion can be recorded and interpreted as audio. But sound causes all objects to vibrate. Those vibrations are just usually too subtle and too fast for us to see.
So what if we record them with a high-speed camera and then use software to extract tiny motions from our high-speed video, and analyze those motions to figure out what sounds created them? This would let us turn visible objects into visual microphones from a distance. And so we tried this out, and here's one of our experiments, where we took this potted plant that you see on the right and we filmed it with a high-speed camera while a nearby loudspeaker played this sound.
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
And so here's the video that we recorded, and we recorded it at thousands of frames per second, but even if you look very closely, all you'll see are some leaves that are pretty much just sitting there doing nothing, because our sound only moved those leaves by about a micrometer. That's one ten-thousandth of a centimeter, which spans somewhere between a hundredth and a thousandth of a pixel in this image. So you can squint all you want, but motion that small is pretty much perceptually invisible. But it turns out that something can be perceptually invisible and still be numerically significant, because with the right algorithms, we can take this silent, seemingly still video and we can recover this sound.
(Music: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
(Applause)
So how is this possible? How can we get so much information out of so little motion? Well, let's say that those leaves move by just a single micrometer, and let's say that that shifts our image by just a thousandth of a pixel. That may not seem like much, but a single frame of video may have hundreds of thousands of pixels in it, and so if we combine all of the tiny motions that we see from across that entire image, then suddenly a thousandth of a pixel can start to add up to something pretty significant.
On a personal note, we were pretty psyched when we figured this out. (Laughter) But even with the right algorithm, we were still missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. You see, there are a lot of factors that affect when and how well this technique will work. There's the object and how far away it is; there's the camera and the lens that you use; how much light is shining on the object and how loud your sound is. And even with the right algorithm, we had to be very careful with our early experiments, because if we got any of these factors wrong, there was no way to tell what the problem was. We would just get noise back. And so a lot of our early experiments looked like this. And so here I am, and on the bottom left, you can kind of see our high-speed camera, which is pointed at a bag of chips, and the whole thing is lit by these bright lamps. And like I said, we had to be very careful in these early experiments, so this is how it went down.
(Video) Abe Davis: Three, two, one, go. Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb!
(Laughter)
AD: So this experiment looks completely ridiculous. (Laughter) I mean, I'm screaming at a bag of chips -- (Laughter) -- and we're blasting it with so much light, we literally melted the first bag we tried this on. (Laughter) But ridiculous as this experiment looks, it was actually really important, because we were able to recover this sound.
(Audio) Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb!
(Applause)
AD: And this was really significant, because it was the first time we recovered intelligible human speech from silent video of an object. And so it gave us this point of reference, and gradually we could start to modify the experiment, using different objects or moving the object further away, using less light or quieter sounds. And we analyzed all of these experiments until we really understood the limits of our technique, because once we understood those limits, we could figure out how to push them.
And that led to experiments like this one, where again, I'm going to speak to a bag of chips, but this time we've moved our camera about 15 feet away, outside, behind a soundproof window, and the whole thing is lit by only natural sunlight. And so here's the video that we captured. And this is what things sounded like from inside, next to the bag of chips.
(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go.
AD: And here's what we were able to recover from our silent video captured outside behind that window.
(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go.
(Applause)
AD: And there are other ways that we can push these limits as well. So here's a quieter experiment where we filmed some earphones plugged into a laptop computer, and in this case, our goal was to recover the music that was playing on that laptop from just silent video of these two little plastic earphones, and we were able to do this so well that I could even Shazam our results. (Laughter)
(Music: "Under Pressure" by Queen)
(Applause)
And we can also push things by changing the hardware that we use. Because the experiments I've shown you so far were done with a camera, a high-speed camera, that can record video about a 100 times faster than most cell phones, but we've also found a way to use this technique with more regular cameras, and we do that by taking advantage of what's called a rolling shutter. You see, most cameras record images one row at a time, and so if an object moves during the recording of a single image, there's a slight time delay between each row, and this causes slight artifacts that get coded into each frame of a video. And so what we found is that by analyzing these artifacts, we can actually recover sound using a modified version of our algorithm. So here's an experiment we did where we filmed a bag of candy while a nearby loudspeaker played the same "Mary Had a Little Lamb" music from before, but this time, we used just a regular store-bought camera, and so in a second, I'll play for you the sound that we recovered, and it's going to sound distorted this time, but listen and see if you can still recognize the music.
(Audio: "Mary Had a Little Lamb")
And so, again, that sounds distorted, but what's really amazing here is that we were able to do this with something that you could literally run out and pick up at a Best Buy.
So at this point, a lot of people see this work, and they immediately think about surveillance. And to be fair, it's not hard to imagine how you might use this technology to spy on someone. But keep in mind that there's already a lot of very mature technology out there for surveillance. In fact, people have been using lasers to eavesdrop on objects from a distance for decades. But what's really new here, what's really different, is that now we have a way to picture the vibrations of an object, which gives us a new lens through which to look at the world, and we can use that lens to learn not just about forces like sound that cause an object to vibrate, but also about the object itself.
And so I want to take a step back and think about how that might change the ways that we use video, because we usually use video to look at things, and I've just shown you how we can use it to listen to things. But there's another important way that we learn about the world: that's by interacting with it. We push and pull and poke and prod things. We shake things and see what happens. And that's something that video still won't let us do, at least not traditionally. So I want to show you some new work, and this is based on an idea I had just a few months ago, so this is actually the first time I've shown it to a public audience. And the basic idea is that we're going to use the vibrations in a video to capture objects in a way that will let us interact with them and see how they react to us.
So here's an object, and in this case, it's a wire figure in the shape of a human, and we're going to film that object with just a regular camera. So there's nothing special about this camera. In fact, I've actually done this with my cell phone before. But we do want to see the object vibrate, so to make that happen, we're just going to bang a little bit on the surface where it's resting while we record this video.
So that's it: just five seconds of regular video, while we bang on this surface, and we're going to use the vibrations in that video to learn about the structural and material properties of our object, and we're going to use that information to create something new and interactive. And so here's what we've created. And it looks like a regular image, but this isn't an image, and it's not a video, because now I can take my mouse and I can start interacting with the object. And so what you see here is a simulation of how this object would respond to new forces that we've never seen before, and we created it from just five seconds of regular video.
(Applause)
And so this is a really powerful way to look at the world, because it lets us predict how objects will respond to new situations, and you could imagine, for instance, looking at an old bridge and wondering what would happen, how would that bridge hold up if I were to drive my car across it. And that's a question that you probably want to answer before you start driving across that bridge. And of course, there are going to be limitations to this technique, just like there were with the visual microphone, but we found that it works in a lot of situations that you might not expect, especially if you give it longer videos.
So for example, here's a video that I captured of a bush outside of my apartment, and I didn't do anything to this bush, but by capturing a minute-long video, a gentle breeze caused enough vibrations that we could learn enough about this bush to create this simulation. (Applause) And so you could imagine giving this to a film director, and letting him control, say, the strength and direction of wind in a shot after it's been recorded. Or, in this case, we pointed our camera at a hanging curtain, and you can't even see any motion in this video, but by recording a two-minute-long video, natural air currents in this room created enough subtle, imperceptible motions and vibrations that we could learn enough to create this simulation.
And ironically, we're kind of used to having this kind of interactivity when it comes to virtual objects, when it comes to video games and 3D models, but to be able to capture this information from real objects in the real world using just simple, regular video, is something new that has a lot of potential.
So here are the amazing people who worked with me on these projects. (Applause)
And what I've shown you today is only the beginning. We've just started to scratch the surface of what you can do with this kind of imaging, because it gives us a new way to capture our surroundings with common, accessible technology. And so looking to the future, it's going to be really exciting to explore what this can tell us about the world.
Thank you.
(Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 306.2
} |
I am a plant geneticist. I study genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress. In recent years, millions of people around the world have come to believe that there's something sinister about genetic modification. Today, I am going to provide a different perspective.
First, let me introduce my husband, Raoul. He's an organic farmer. On his farm, he plants a variety of different crops. This is one of the many ecological farming practices he uses to keep his farm healthy. Imagine some of the reactions we get: "Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? Can you agree on anything?"
Well, we can, and it's not difficult, because we have the same goal. We want to help nourish the growing population without further destroying the environment. I believe this is the greatest challenge of our time.
Now, genetic modification is not new; virtually everything we eat has been genetically modified in some manner. Let me give you a few examples. On the left is an image of the ancient ancestor of modern corn. You see a single roll of grain that's covered in a hard case. Unless you have a hammer, teosinte isn't good for making tortillas. Now, take a look at the ancient ancestor of banana. You can see the large seeds. And unappetizing brussel sprouts, and eggplant, so beautiful.
Now, to create these varieties, breeders have used many different genetic techniques over the years. Some of them are quite creative, like mixing two different species together using a process called grafting to create this variety that's half tomato and half potato. Breeders have also used other types of genetic techniques, such as random mutagenesis, which induces uncharacterized mutations into the plants. The rice in the cereal that many of us fed our babies was developed using this approach.
Now, today, breeders have even more options to choose from. Some of them are extraordinarily precise.
I want to give you a couple examples from my own work. I work on rice, which is a staple food for more than half the world's people. Each year, 40 percent of the potential harvest is lost to pest and disease. For this reason, farmers plant rice varieties that carry genes for resistance. This approach has been used for nearly 100 years. Yet, when I started graduate school, no one knew what these genes were. It wasn't until the 1990s that scientists finally uncovered the genetic basis of resistance. In my laboratory, we isolated a gene for immunity to a very serious bacterial disease in Asia and Africa. We found we could engineer the gene into a conventional rice variety that's normally susceptible, and you can see the two leaves on the bottom here are highly resistant to infection.
Now, the same month that my laboratory published our discovery on the rice immunity gene, my friend and colleague Dave Mackill stopped by my office. He said, "Seventy million rice farmers are having trouble growing rice." That's because their fields are flooded, and these rice farmers are living on less than two dollars a day. Although rice grows well in standing water, most rice varieties will die if they're submerged for more than three days. Flooding is expected to be increasingly problematic as the climate changes. He told me that his graduate student Kenong Xu and himself were studying an ancient variety of rice that had an amazing property. It could withstand two weeks of complete submergence. He asked if I would be willing to help them isolate this gene. I said yes -- I was very excited, because I knew if we were successful, we could potentially help millions of farmers grow rice even when their fields were flooded.
Kenong spent 10 years looking for this gene. Then one day, he said, "Come look at this experiment. You've got to see it." I went to the greenhouse and I saw that the conventional variety that was flooded for 18 days had died, but the rice variety that we had genetically engineered with a new gene we had discovered, called Sub1, was alive. Kenong and I were amazed and excited that a single gene could have this dramatic effect. But this is just a greenhouse experiment. Would this work in the field?
Now, I'm going to show you a four-month time lapse video taken at the International Rice Research Institute. Breeders there developed a rice variety carrying the Sub1 gene using another genetic technique called precision breeding. On the left, you can see the Sub1 variety, and on the right is the conventional variety. Both varieties do very well at first, but then the field is flooded for 17 days. You can see the Sub1 variety does great. In fact, it produces three and a half times more grain than the conventional variety. I love this video because it shows the power of plant genetics to help farmers. Last year, with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, three and a half million farmers grew Sub1 rice.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Now, many people don't mind genetic modification when it comes to moving rice genes around, rice genes in rice plants, or even when it comes to mixing species together through grafting or random mutagenesis. But when it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, a lot of people say, "Yuck." Why would you do that? The reason is that sometimes it's the cheapest, safest, and most effective technology for enhancing food security and advancing sustainable agriculture. I'm going to give you three examples.
First, take a look at papaya. It's delicious, right? But now, look at this papaya. This papaya is infected with papaya ringspot virus. In the 1950s, this virus nearly wiped out the entire production of papaya on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Many people thought that the Hawaiian papaya was doomed, but then, a local Hawaiian, a plant pathologist named Dennis Gonsalves, decided to try to fight this disease using genetic engineering. He took a snippet of viral DNA and he inserted it into the papaya genome. This is kind of like a human getting a vaccination. Now, take a look at his field trial. You can see the genetically engineered papaya in the center. It's immune to infection. The conventional papaya around the outside is severely infected with the virus. Dennis' pioneering work is credited with rescuing the papaya industry. Today, 20 years later, there's still no other method to control this disease. There's no organic method. There's no conventional method. Eighty percent of Hawaiian papaya is genetically engineered.
Now, some of you may still feel a little queasy about viral genes in your food, but consider this: The genetically engineered papaya carries just a trace amount of the virus. If you bite into an organic or conventional papaya that is infected with the virus, you will be chewing on tenfold more viral protein.
Now, take a look at this pest feasting on an eggplant. The brown you see is frass, what comes out the back end of the insect. To control this serious pest, which can devastate the entire eggplant crop in Bangladesh, Bangladeshi farmers spray insecticides two to three times a week, sometimes twice a day, when pest pressure is high. But we know that some insecticides are very harmful to human health, especially when farmers and their families cannot afford proper protection, like these children. In less developed countries, it's estimated that 300,000 people die every year because of insecticide misuse and exposure. Cornell and Bangladeshi scientists decided to fight this disease using a genetic technique that builds on an organic farming approach. Organic farmers like my husband Raoul spray an insecticide called B.T., which is based on a bacteria. This pesticide is very specific to caterpillar pests, and in fact, it's nontoxic to humans, fish and birds. It's less toxic than table salt. But this approach does not work well in Bangladesh. That's because these insecticide sprays are difficult to find, they're expensive, and they don't prevent the insect from getting inside the plants. In the genetic approach, scientists cut the gene out of the bacteria and insert it directly into the eggplant genome. Will this work to reduce insecticide sprays in Bangladesh? Definitely. Last season, farmers reported they were able to reduce their insecticide use by a huge amount, almost down to zero. They're able to harvest and replant for the next season.
Now, I've given you a couple examples of how genetic engineering can be used to fight pests and disease and to reduce the amount of insecticides. My final example is an example where genetic engineering can be used to reduce malnutrition. In less developed countries, 500,000 children go blind every year because of lack of Vitamin A. More than half will die. For this reason, scientists supported by the Rockefeller Foundation genetically engineered a golden rice to produce beta-carotene, which is the precursor of Vitamin A. This is the same pigment that we find in carrots. Researchers estimate that just one cup of golden rice per day will save the lives of thousands of children. But golden rice is virulently opposed by activists who are against genetic modification. Just last year, activists invaded and destroyed a field trial in the Philippines. When I heard about the destruction, I wondered if they knew that they were destroying much more than a scientific research project, that they were destroying medicines that children desperately needed to save their sight and their lives.
Some of my friends and family still worry: How do you know genes in the food are safe to eat? I explained the genetic engineering, the process of moving genes between species, has been used for more than 40 years in wines, in medicine, in plants, in cheeses. In all that time, there hasn't been a single case of harm to human health or the environment. But I say, look, I'm not asking you to believe me. Science is not a belief system. My opinion doesn't matter. Let's look at the evidence. After 20 years of careful study and rigorous peer review by thousands of independent scientists, every major scientific organization in the world has concluded that the crops currently on the market are safe to eat and that the process of genetic engineering is no more risky than older methods of genetic modification. These are precisely the same organizations that most of us trust when it comes to other important scientific issues such as global climate change or the safety of vaccines.
Raoul and I believe that, instead of worrying about the genes in our food, we must focus on how we can help children grow up healthy. We must ask if farmers in rural communities can thrive, and if everyone can afford the food. We must try to minimize environmental degradation. What scares me most about the loud arguments and misinformation about plant genetics is that the poorest people who most need the technology may be denied access because of the vague fears and prejudices of those who have enough to eat.
We have a huge challenge in front of us. Let's celebrate scientific innovation and use it. It's our responsibility to do everything we can to help alleviate human suffering and safeguard the environment.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Chris Anderson: Powerfully argued. The people who argue against GMOs, as I understand it, the core piece comes from two things. One, complexity and unintended consequence. Nature is this incredibly complex machine. If we put out these brand new genes that we've created, that haven't been challenged by years of evolution, and they started mixing up with the rest of what's going on, couldn't that trigger some kind of cataclysm or problem, especially when you add in the commercial incentive that some companies have to put them out there? The fear is that those incentives mean that the decision is not made on purely scientific grounds, and even if it was, that there would be unintended consequences. How do we know that there isn't a big risk of some unintended consequence? Often our tinkerings with nature do lead to big, unintended consequences and chain reactions.
Pamela Ronald: Okay, so on the commercial aspects, one thing that's really important to understand is that, in the developed world, farmers in the United States, almost all farmers, whether they're organic or conventional, they buy seed produced by seed companies. So there's definitely a commercial interest to sell a lot of seed, but hopefully they're selling seed that the farmers want to buy. It's different in the less developed world. Farmers there cannot afford the seed. These seeds are not being sold. These seeds are being distributed freely through traditional kinds of certification groups, so it is very important in less developed countries that the seed be freely available.
CA: Wouldn't some activists say that this is actually part of the conspiracy? This is the heroin strategy. You seed the stuff, and people have no choice but to be hooked on these seeds forever?
PR: There are a lot of conspiracy theories for sure, but it doesn't work that way. For example, the seed that's being distributed, the flood-tolerant rice, this is distributed freely through Indian and Bangladeshi seed certification agencies, so there's no commercial interest at all. The golden rice was developed through support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Again, it's being freely distributed. There are no commercial profits in this situation. And now to address your other question about, well, mixing genes, aren't there some unintended consequences? Absolutely -- every time we do something different, there's an unintended consequence, but one of the points I was trying to make is that we've been doing kind of crazy things to our plants, mutagenesis using radiation or chemical mutagenesis. This induces thousands of uncharacterized mutations, and this is even a higher risk of unintended consequence than many of the modern methods. And so it's really important not to use the term GMO because it's scientifically meaningless. I feel it's very important to talk about a specific crop and a specific product, and think about the needs of the consumer.
CA: So part of what's happening here is that there's a mental model in a lot of people that nature is nature, and it's pure and pristine, and to tinker with it is Frankensteinian. It's making something that's pure dangerous in some way, and I think you're saying that that whole model just misunderstands how nature is. Nature is a much more chaotic interplay of genetic changes that have been happening all the time anyway.
PR: That's absolutely true, and there's no such thing as pure food. I mean, you could not spray eggplant with insecticides or not genetically engineer it, but then you'd be stuck eating frass. So there's no purity there.
CA: Pam Ronald, thank you. That was powerfully argued. PR: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (Applause) | {
"perplexity_score": 238.5
} |
On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey. The first is the one we hear a lot about: college. Some of you may remember the excitement that you felt when you first set off for college. Some of you may be in college right now and you're feeling this excitement at this very moment.
College has some shortcomings. It's expensive; it leaves young people in debt. But all in all, it's a pretty good path. Young people emerge from college with pride and with great friends and with a lot of knowledge about the world. And perhaps most importantly, a better chance in the labor market than they had before they got there.
Today I want to talk about the second institution overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States. And that institution is prison. Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of with teachers. They're going to court dates instead of to class. Their junior year abroad is instead a trip to a state correctional facility. And they're emerging from their 20s not with degrees in business and English, but with criminal records.
This institution is also costing us a lot, about 40,000 dollars a year to send a young person to prison in New Jersey. But here, taxpayers are footing the bill and what kids are getting is a cold prison cell and a permanent mark against them when they come home and apply for work.
There are more and more kids on this journey to adulthood than ever before in the United States and that's because in the past 40 years, our incarceration rate has grown by 700 percent. I have one slide for this talk. Here it is. Here's our incarceration rate, about 716 people per 100,000 in the population. Here's the OECD countries.
What's more, it's poor kids that we're sending to prison, too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it and the fulfillment of the American Dream. The problem's actually a bit worse than this 'cause we're not just sending poor kids to prison, we're saddling poor kids with court fees, with probation and parole restrictions, with low-level warrants, we're asking them to live in halfway houses and on house arrest, and we're asking them to negotiate a police force that is entering poor communities of color, not for the purposes of promoting public safety, but to make arrest counts, to line city coffers.
This is the hidden underside to our historic experiment in punishment: young people worried that at any moment, they will be stopped, searched and seized. Not just in the streets, but in their homes, at school and at work.
I got interested in this other path to adulthood when I was myself a college student attending the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s. Penn sits within a historic African-American neighborhood. So you've got these two parallel journeys going on simultaneously: the kids attending this elite, private university, and the kids from the adjacent neighborhood, some of whom are making it to college, and many of whom are being shipped to prison.
In my sophomore year, I started tutoring a young woman who was in high school who lived about 10 minutes away from the university. Soon, her cousin came home from a juvenile detention center. He was 15, a freshman in high school. I began to get to know him and his friends and family, and I asked him what he thought about me writing about his life for my senior thesis in college. This senior thesis became a dissertation at Princeton and now a book.
By the end of my sophomore year, I moved into the neighborhood and I spent the next six years
trying to understand what young people were facing as they came of age. The first week I spent in this neighborhood, I saw two boys, five and seven years old, play this game of chase, where the older boy ran after the other boy. He played the cop. When the cop caught up to the younger boy, he pushed him down, handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs, took a quarter out of the other child's pocket, saying, "I'm seizing that." He asked the child if he was carrying any drugs or if he had a warrant. Many times, I saw this game repeated, sometimes children would simply give up running, and stick their bodies flat against the ground with their hands above their heads, or flat up against a wall. Children would yell at each other, "I'm going to lock you up, I'm going to lock you up and you're never coming home!" Once I saw a six-year-old child pull another child's pants down and try to do a cavity search.
In the first 18 months that I lived in this neighborhood, I wrote down every time I saw any contact between police and people that were my neighbors. So in the first 18 months, I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search people, run people's names, chase people through the streets, pull people in for questioning, or make an arrest every single day, with five exceptions. Fifty-two times, I watched the police break down doors, chase people through houses or make an arrest of someone in their home. Fourteen times in this first year and a half, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on or beat young men after they had caught them.
Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers, Chuck and Tim. Chuck was 18 when we met, a senior in high school. He was playing on the basketball team and making C's and B's. His younger brother, Tim, was 10. And Tim loved Chuck; he followed him around a lot, looked to Chuck to be a mentor. They lived with their mom and grandfather in a two-story row home with a front lawn and a back porch. Their mom was struggling with addiction all while the boys were growing up. She never really was able to hold down a job for very long. It was their grandfather's pension that supported the family, not really enough to pay for food and clothes and school supplies for growing boys. The family was really struggling.
So when we met, Chuck was a senior in high school. He had just turned 18. That winter, a kid in the schoolyard called Chuck's mom a crack whore. Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow and the school cops charged him with aggravated assault. The other kid was fine the next day, I think it was his pride that was injured more than anything.
But anyway, since Chuck was 18, this agg. assault case sent him to adult county jail on State Road in northeast Philadelphia, where he sat, unable to pay the bail -- he couldn't afford it -- while the trial dates dragged on and on and on through almost his entire senior year. Finally, near the end of this season, the judge on this assault case threw out most of the charges and Chuck came home with only a few hundred dollars' worth of court fees hanging over his head. Tim was pretty happy that day.
The next fall, Chuck tried to re-enroll as a senior, but the school secretary told him that he was then 19 and too old to be readmitted. Then the judge on his assault case issued him a warrant for his arrest because he couldn't pay the 225 dollars in court fees that came due a few weeks after the case ended. Then he was a high school dropout living on the run.
Tim's first arrest came later that year after he turned 11. Chuck had managed to get his warrant lifted and he was on a payment plan for the court fees and he was driving Tim to school in his girlfriend's car. So a cop pulls them over, runs the car, and the car comes up as stolen in California. Chuck had no idea where in the history of this car it had been stolen. His girlfriend's uncle bought it from a used car auction in northeast Philly. Chuck and Tim had never been outside of the tri-state, let alone to California. But anyway, the cops down at the precinct charged Chuck with receiving stolen property. And then a juvenile judge, a few days later, charged Tim, age 11, with accessory to receiving a stolen property and then he was placed on three years of probation. With this probation sentence hanging over his head,
Chuck sat his little brother down and began teaching him how to run from the police. They would sit side by side on their back porch looking out into the shared alleyway and Chuck would coach Tim how to spot undercover cars, how to negotiate a late-night police raid, how and where to hide.
I want you to imagine for a second what Chuck and Tim's lives would be like if they were living in a neighborhood where kids were going to college, not prison. A neighborhood like the one I got to grow up in. Okay, you might say. But Chuck and Tim, kids like them, they're committing crimes! Don't they deserve to be in prison? Don't they deserve to be living in fear of arrest? Well, my answer would be no. They don't. And certainly not for the same things that other young people with more privilege are doing with impunity. If Chuck had gone to my high school, that schoolyard fight would have ended there, as a schoolyard fight. It never would have become an aggravated assault case. Not a single kid that I went to college with has a criminal record right now. Not a single one. But can you imagine how many might have if the police had stopped those kids and searched their pockets for drugs as they walked to class? Or had raided their frat parties in the middle of the night?
Okay, you might say. But doesn't this high incarceration rate partly account for our really low crime rate? Crime is down. That's a good thing. Totally, that is a good thing. Crime is down. It dropped precipitously in the '90s and through the 2000s. But according to a committee of academics convened by the National Academy of Sciences last year, the relationship between our historically high incarceration rates and our low crime rate is pretty shaky. It turns out that the crime rate goes up and down irrespective of how many young people we send to prison.
We tend to think about justice in a pretty narrow way: good and bad, innocent and guilty. Injustice is about being wrongfully convicted. So if you're convicted of something you did do, you should be punished for it. There are innocent and guilty people, there are victims and there are perpetrators. Maybe we could think a little bit more broadly than that.
Right now, we're asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who have the least amount of family resources, who are attending the country's worst schools, who are facing the toughest time in the labor market, who are living in neighborhoods where violence is an everyday problem, we're asking these kids to walk the thinnest possible line -- to basically never do anything wrong.
Why are we not providing support to young kids facing these challenges? Why are we offering only handcuffs, jail time and this fugitive existence? Can we imagine something better? Can we imagine a criminal justice system that prioritizes recovery, prevention, civic inclusion, rather than punishment? (Applause) A criminal justice system that acknowledges the legacy of exclusion that poor people of color in the U.S. have faced and that does not promote and perpetuate those exclusions. (Applause) And finally, a criminal justice system that believes in black young people, rather than treating black young people as the enemy to be rounded up. (Applause)
The good news is that we already are. A few years ago, Michelle Alexander wrote "The New Jim Crow," which got Americans to see incarceration as a civil rights issue of historic proportions in a way they had not seen it before. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have come out very strongly on sentencing reform, on the need to address racial disparity in incarceration. We're seeing states throw out Stop and Frisk as the civil rights violation that it is. We're seeing cities and states decriminalize possession of marijuana. New York, New Jersey and California have been dropping their prison populations, closing prisons, while also seeing a big drop in crime. Texas has gotten into the game now, also closing prisons, investing in education. This curious coalition is building from the right and the left, made up of former prisoners and fiscal conservatives, of civil rights activists and libertarians, of young people taking to the streets to protest police violence against unarmed black teenagers, and older, wealthier people -- some of you are here in the audience -- pumping big money into decarceration initiatives In a deeply divided Congress, the work of reforming our criminal justice system is just about the only thing that the right and the left are coming together on.
I did not think I would see this political moment in my lifetime. I think many of the people who have been working tirelessly to write about the causes and consequences of our historically high incarceration rates did not think we would see this moment in our lifetime. The question for us now is, how much can we make of it? How much can we change?
I want to end with a call to young people, the young people attending college and the young people struggling to stay out of prison or to make it through prison and return home. It may seem like these paths to adulthood are worlds apart, but the young people participating in these two institutions conveying us to adulthood, they have one thing in common: Both can be leaders in the work of reforming our criminal justice system. Young people have always been leaders in the fight for equal rights, the fight for more people to be granted dignity and a fighting chance at freedom. The mission for the generation of young people coming of age in this, a sea-change moment, potentially, is to end mass incarceration and build a new criminal justice system, emphasis on the word justice.
Thanks.
(Applause) | {
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} |
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