What is so special about the human brain? 
Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? 
What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? 
When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. 
Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. 
This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. 
Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. 
And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. 
Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. 
I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. 
So this is a first indication that the "" all brains are made the same way "" scenario is not quite right. 
But let's play along. 
If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. 
So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. 
And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. 
It seems quite vexing. 
Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. 
It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. 
Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. 
So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. 
That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. 
So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. 
Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. 
Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain. 
The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. 
Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. 
That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working. 
So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. 
And this is where the story started to bother me. 
In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? 
Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. 
Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. 
Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. 
Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. 
So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals? 
Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. 
But nobody did. 
I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. 
It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter. 
So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. 
It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. 
This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. 
Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. 
It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. 
So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. 
Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. 
But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. 
The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. 
Well, what about our brain then? 
We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. 
But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. 
Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. 
So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos. 
That's not possible. 
A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. 
I don't think it looks like us. 
So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. 
The human brain is not a large rat brain. 
Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. 
We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. 
And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. 
And all of you are primates. 
And so was Darwin. 
I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. 
His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains. 
So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. 
It is just a large primate brain. 
I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature. 
Why does it cost so much energy, then? 
Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. 
And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. 
So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. 
So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special. 
Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? 
When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. 
They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. 
So we did the math. 
We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day. 
And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. 
So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. 
To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. 
So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. 
When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both. 
One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. 
Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. 
Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate. 
What about us? 
With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. 
If we ate like a primate, we should not be here. 
How did we get here, then? 
Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. 
And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. 
To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. 
Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. 
So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long. 
So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. 
So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. 
With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. 
So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food. 
So what is the human advantage? 
What is it that we have that no other animal has? 
My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. 
And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? 
In two words, we cook. 
No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. 
And I think that's how we got to become human. 
Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. 
I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

(Music) Good afternoon. 
As you're all aware, we face difficult economic times. 
I come to you with a modest proposal for easing the financial burden. 
This idea came to me while talking to a physicist friend of mine at MIT. 
He was struggling to explain something to me: a beautiful experiment that uses lasers to cool down matter. 
Now he confused me from the very start, because light doesn't cool things down. 
It makes it hotter. It's happening right now. 
The reason that you can see me standing here is because this room is filled with more than 100 quintillion photons, and they're moving randomly through the space, near the speed of light. 
All of them are different colors, they're rippling with different frequencies, and they're bouncing off every surface, including me, and some of those are flying directly into your eyes, and that's why your brain is forming an image of me standing here. 
Now a laser is different. 
It also uses photons, but they're all synchronized, and if you focus them into a beam, what you have is an incredibly useful tool. 
The control of a laser is so precise that you can perform surgery inside of an eye, you can use it to store massive amounts of data, and you can use it for this beautiful experiment that my friend was struggling to explain. 
First you trap atoms in a special bottle. 
It uses electromagnetic fields to isolate the atoms from the noise of the environment. 
And the atoms themselves are quite violent, but if you fire lasers that are precisely tuned to the right frequency, an atom will briefly absorb those photons and tend to slow down. 
Little by little it gets colder until eventually it approaches absolute zero. 
Now if you use the right kind of atoms and you get them cold enough, something truly bizarre happens. 
It's no longer a solid, a liquid or a gas. 
It enters a new state of matter called a superfluid. 
The atoms lose their individual identity, and the rules from the quantum world take over, and that's what gives superfluids such spooky properties. 
For example, if you shine light through a superfluid, it is able to slow photons down to 60 kilometers per hour. 
Another spooky property is that it flows with absolutely no viscosity or friction, so if you were to take the lid off that bottle, it won't stay inside. 
A thin film will creep up the inside wall, flow over the top and right out the outside. 
Now of course, the moment that it does hit the outside environment, and its temperature rises by even a fraction of a degree, it immediately turns back into normal matter. 
Superfluids are one of the most fragile things we've ever discovered. 
And this is the great pleasure of science: the defeat of our intuition through experimentation. 
But the experiment is not the end of the story, because you still have to transmit that knowledge to other people. 
I have a Ph.D in molecular biology. 
I still barely understand what most scientists are talking about. 
So as my friend was trying to explain that experiment, it seemed like the more he said, the less I understood. 
Because if you're trying to give someone the big picture of a complex idea, to really capture its essence, the fewer words you use, the better. 
In fact, the ideal may be to use no words at all. 
I remember thinking, my friend could have explained that entire experiment with a dance. 
Of course, there never seem to be any dancers around when you need them. 
Now, the idea is not as crazy as it sounds. 
I started a contest four years ago called Dance Your Ph.D. 
Instead of explaining their research with words, scientists have to explain it with dance. 
Now surprisingly, it seems to work. 
Dance really can make science easier to understand. 
But don't take my word for it. 
Go on the Internet and search for "" Dance Your Ph.D. "" There are hundreds of dancing scientists waiting for you. 
The most surprising thing that I've learned while running this contest is that some scientists are now working directly with dancers on their research. 
For example, at the University of Minnesota, there's a biomedical engineer named David Odde, and he works with dancers to study how cells move. 
They do it by changing their shape. 
When a chemical signal washes up on one side, it triggers the cell to expand its shape on that side, because the cell is constantly touching and tugging at the environment. 
So that allows cells to ooze along in the right directions. 
But what seems so slow and graceful from the outside is really more like chaos inside, because cells control their shape with a skeleton of rigid protein fibers, and those fibers are constantly falling apart. 
But just as quickly as they explode, more proteins attach to the ends and grow them longer, so it's constantly changing just to remain exactly the same. 
Now, David builds mathematical models of this and then he tests those in the lab, but before he does that, he works with dancers to figure out what kinds of models to build in the first place. 
It's basically efficient brainstorming, and when I visited David to learn about his research, he used dancers to explain it to me rather than the usual method: PowerPoint. 
And this brings me to my modest proposal. 
I think that bad PowerPoint presentations are a serious threat to the global economy. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now it does depend on how you measure it, of course, but one estimate has put the drain at 250 million dollars per day. 
Now that assumes half-hour presentations for an average audience of four people with salaries of 35,000 dollars, and it conservatively assumes that about a quarter of the presentations are a complete waste of time, and given that there are some apparently 30 million PowerPoint presentations created every day, that would indeed add up to an annual waste of 100 billion dollars. 
Of course, that's just the time we're losing sitting through presentations. 
There are other costs, because PowerPoint is a tool, and like any tool, it can and will be abused. 
To borrow a concept from my country's CIA, it helps you to soften up your audience. 
It distracts them with pretty pictures, irrelevant data. 
It allows you to create the illusion of competence, the illusion of simplicity, and most destructively, the illusion of understanding. 
So now my country is 15 trillion dollars in debt. 
Our leaders are working tirelessly to try and find ways to save money. 
One idea is to drastically reduce public support for the arts. 
For example, our National Endowment for the Arts, with its $150 million budget, slashing that program would immediately reduce the national debt by about one one-thousandth of a percent. 
One certainly can't argue with those numbers. 
However, once we eliminate public funding for the arts, there will be some drawbacks. 
The artists on the street will swell the ranks of the unemployed. 
Many will turn to drug abuse and prostitution, and that will inevitably lower property values in urban neighborhoods. 
All of this could wipe out the savings we're hoping to make in the first place. 
I shall now, therefore, humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. 
Once we eliminate public funding for the artists, let's put them back to work by using them instead of PowerPoint. 
As a test case, I propose we start with American dancers. 
After all, they are the most perishable of their kind, prone to injury and very slow to heal due to our health care system. 
Rather than dancing our Ph.Ds, we should use dance to explain all of our complex problems. 
Imagine our politicians using dance to explain why we must invade a foreign country or bail out an investment bank. 
It's sure to help. 
Of course someday, in the deep future, a technology of persuasion even more powerful than PowerPoint may be invented, rendering dancers unnecessary as tools of rhetoric. 
However, I trust that by that day, we shall have passed this present financial calamity. 
Perhaps by then we will be able to afford the luxury of just sitting in an audience with no other purpose than to witness the human form in motion. 
(Music) (Applause) 

I'm actually here to make a challenge to people. 
I know there have been many challenges made to people. 
The one I'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means. 
Peace is not "" Kumbaya, my Lord. "" Peace is not the dove and the rainbow — as lovely as they are. 
When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity. 
I think of meditation. 
I do not think about what I consider to be peace, which is sustainable peace with justice and equality. 
It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear. 
This is called human security. 
And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire. 
I understand that humans are so "" messed up "" — to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public. 
And I'm trying harder and harder. 
Mom, I'm really trying. 
We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense. 
We need to redefine what makes us secure in this world. 
It is not arming our country to the teeth. 
It is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them. 
It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure. 
I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote. 
I certainly support the START vote. 
But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons. 
Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars? 
Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in my bank account — it's not, but... 
In global terms, it's a little bit of money. 
But it's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up off our... 
and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security. 
It is saving the tigers. 
It is stopping the tar sands. 
It is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer. 
It is all of those things. 
It is using our money for all of those things. 
It is about action. 
I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness — we're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates. 
And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church. 
We're staring at everybody, waiting our turn to speak, and he leans over to me, and he says, "Jody, I'm a Buddhist monk." 
I said, "" Yes, Your Holiness. 
Your robe gives it away. "" (Laughter) He said, "" You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray. "" I said, "" That's good. That's good. 
We need that in the world. 
I don't follow that, but that's cool. "" And he says, "" But I have become skeptical. 
I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world. 
I think what we need is action. "" His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero. 
I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago. 
As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma. 
You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy. 
She was just released a couple of weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon, agitating for change. 
She is already out in the streets, working with the party to try to rebuild it. 
But I talked to her for a range of issues. 
But one thing that I want to say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said. 
She said, "" You know, we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country. 
But I don't believe in hope without endeavor. 
I don't believe in the hope of change, unless we take action to make it so. "" Here's another woman hero of mine. 
She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 
She has been in exile for the last year and a half. 
You ask her where she lives — where does she live in exile? 
She says the airports of the world. 
She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections. 
And instead of going home, she conferred with all the other women that she works with, who said to her, "" Stay out. We need you out. 
We need to be able to talk to you out there, so that you can give the message of what's happening here. "" A year and a half — she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country. 
Wangari Maathai — 2004 Peace laureate. 
They call her the "" Tree Lady, "" but she's more than the Tree Lady. 
Working for peace is very creative. 
It's hard work every day. 
When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country. 
People could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail. 
But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay — creativity. 
But it's not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai — it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world. 
The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers. 
Working together is what changes our world. 
The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country. 
When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one comes out and joins the movement, recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately bring change in their own country. 
Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side — bringing peace to Northern Ireland. 
I'll tell you the quick story. 
An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into people on the side of the street. 
There was a mother and three children. 
The children were killed on the spot. 
It was Mairead's sister. 
Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty — a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic — and they took to the streets to say, "" No more violence. "" And they were able to get tens of thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change. 
And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do. 
This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. 
She also received the Peace Prize. 
She is now running for president. 
She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy, about how you bring democracy to the country, about educating, about how to vote — but that democracy is not just about voting; it's about being an active citizen. 
That's what I got stuck doing — the landmine campaign. 
One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines. 
Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month. 
They could maybe volunteer that much. 
There were others, like myself, who were full-time. 
But it was the actions, together, of all of us that brought about that change. 
In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace. 
It's not a dirty word. 
It's hard work every single day. 
And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world. 
And we can't wait for the other guy. We have to do it ourselves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Miranda Wang: We're here to talk about accidents. 
How do you feel about accidents? 
When we think about accidents, we usually consider them to be harmful, unfortunate or even dangerous, and they certainly can be. 
But are they always that bad? 
The discovery that had led to penicillin, for example, is one of the most fortunate accidents of all time. 
Without biologist Alexander Fleming's moldy accident, caused by a neglected workstation, we wouldn't be able to fight off so many bacterial infections. 
Jeanny Yao: Miranda and I are here today because we'd like to share how our accidents have led to discoveries. 
In 2011, we visited the Vancouver Waste Transfer Station and saw an enormous pit of plastic waste. 
We realized that when plastics get to the dump, it's difficult to sort them because they have similar densities, and when they're mixed with organic matter and construction debris, it's truly impossible to pick them out and environmentally eliminate them. 
MW: However, plastics are useful because they're durable, flexible, and can be easily molded into so many useful shapes. 
The downside of this convenience is that there's a high cost to this. 
Plastics cause serious problems, such as the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of natural resources, and the reduction of available land space. 
This picture you see here is the Great Pacific Gyre. 
When you think about plastic pollution and the marine environment, we think about the Great Pacific Gyre, which is supposed to be a floating island of plastic waste. 
But that's no longer an accurate depiction of plastic pollution in the marine environment. 
Right now, the ocean is actually a soup of plastic debris, and there's nowhere you can go in the ocean where you wouldn't be able to find plastic particles. 
JY: In a plastic-dependent society, cutting down production is a good goal, but it's not enough. 
And what about the waste that's already been produced? 
Plastics take hundreds to thousands of years to biodegrade. 
So we thought, you know what? 
Instead of waiting for that garbage to sit there and pile up, let's find a way to break them down with bacteria. 
Sounds cool, right? 
Audience: Yeah. JY: Thank you. 
But we had a problem. 
You see, plastics have very complex structures and are difficult to biodegrade. 
Anyhow, we were curious and hopeful and still wanted to give it a go. 
MW: With this idea in mind, Jeanny and I read through some hundreds of scientific articles on the Internet, and we drafted a research proposal in the beginning of our grade 12 year. 
We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates. 
Phthalates are additives used in everyday plastic products to increase their flexibility, durability and transparency. 
Although they're part of the plastic, they're not covalently bonded to the plastic backbone. 
As a result, they easily escape into our environment. 
Not only do phthalates pollute our environment, but they also pollute our bodies. 
To make the matter worse, phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure, such as babies' toys, beverage containers, cosmetics, and even food wraps. 
Phthalates are horrible because they're so easily taken into our bodies. 
They can be absorbed by skin contact, ingested, and inhaled. 
JY: Every year, at least 470 million pounds of phthalates contaminate our air, water and soil. 
The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top-priority pollutant because it's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor. 
We read that each year, the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety. 
So we figured, if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates, and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas, then perhaps, perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates. 
MW: So we presented this good idea to Dr. Lindsay Eltis at the University of British Columbia, and surprisingly, he actually took us into his lab and asked his graduate students Adam and James to help us. 
Little did we know at that time that a trip to the dump and some research on the Internet and plucking up the courage to act upon inspiration would take us on a life-changing journey of accidents and discoveries. 
JY: The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River. 
Out of thousands of bacteria, we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates, so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source. 
This implied that, if anything grew in our cultures, then they must be able to live off of phthalates. 
Everything went well from there, and we became amazing scientists. (Laughter) MW: Um... uh, Jeanny. JY: I'm just joking. 
MW: Okay. Well, it was partially my fault. 
You see, I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture, and as a result, we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice. 
And this is only one of the examples of the many accidents that happened during our experimentation. 
But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous. 
We noticed that the unharmed cultures came from places of opposite contamination levels, so this mistake actually led us to think that perhaps we can compare the different degradative potentials of bacteria from sites of opposite contamination levels. 
JY: Now that we grew the bacteria, we wanted to isolate strains by streaking onto mediate plates, because we thought that would be less accident-prone, but we were wrong again. 
We poked holes in our agar while streaking and contaminated some samples and funghi. 
As a result, we had to streak and restreak several times. 
Then we monitored phthalate utilization and bacterial growth, and found that they shared an inverse correlation, so as bacterial populations increased, phthalate concentrations decreased. 
This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates. 
MW: So now that we found bacteria that could break down phthalates, we wondered what these bacteria were. 
So Jeanny and I took three of our most efficient strains and then performed gene amplification sequencing on them and matched our data with an online comprehensive database. 
We were happy to see that, although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria, two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation, so this was actually a novel discovery. 
JY: To better understand how this biodegradation works, we wanted to verify the catabolic pathways of our three strains. 
To do this, we extracted enzymes from our bacteria and reacted with an intermediate of phthalic acid. 
MW: We monitored this experiment with spectrophotometry and obtained this beautiful graph. 
This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates. 
Our bacteria can transform phthalates, which is a harmful toxin, into end products such as carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. 
I know some of you in the crowd are thinking, well, carbon dioxide is horrible, it's a greenhouse gas. 
But if our bacteria did not evolve to break down phthalates, they would have used some other kind of carbon source, and aerobic respiration would have led it to have end products such as carbon dioxide anyway. 
We were also interested to see that, although we've obtained greater diversity of bacteria biodegraders from the bird habitat site, we obtained the most efficient degraders from the landfill site. 
So this fully shows that nature evolves through natural selection. 
JY: So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential. 
Although we're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates, we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem. 
We have not only shown that bacteria can be the solution to plastic pollution, but also that being open to uncertain outcomes and taking risks create opportunities for unexpected discoveries. 
Throughout this journey, we have also discovered our passion for science, and are currently continuing research on other fossil fuel chemicals in university. 
We hope that in the near future, we'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants. 
We can apply this to wastewater treatment plants to clean up our rivers and other natural resources. 
And perhaps one day we'll be able to tackle the problem of solid plastic waste. 
MW: I think our journey has truly transformed our view of microorganisms, and Jeanny and I have shown that even mistakes can lead to discoveries. 
Einstein once said, "" You can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them. "" If we're making plastic synthetically, then we think the solution would be to break them down biochemically. 
Thank you. JY: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Thank you very much, Chris. Everybody who came up here said they were scared. I don't know if I'm scared, but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this. 
And I don't have any smart technology for you to look at. 
There are no slides, so you'll just have to be content with me. 
(Laughter) What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa. 
Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV / AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters. 
While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much. 
And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why. 
This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to. 
This is the Africa of opportunity. 
This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies. 
And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today. 
And I want to start by telling you a story about that change in Africa. 
On 15th of September 2005, Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria, was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London. 
He was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family. 
This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria — led by one of our most able and courageous people: Mr. Nuhu Ribadu. 
Alamieyeseigha was arraigned in London. 
Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president — as in many countries — have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office. 
Today, Alams — as we call him for short — is in jail. 
This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders. 
This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite. 
And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa — corruption all the time — I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging. 
Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no. 
There's still a long way to go, but that there's a will there. 
And that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight. 
So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this — that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case. 
There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go. 
But the truth of the matter is that this is going on. 
The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving. 
A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries. 
And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance. 
That is that people talk about corruption, corruption. 
All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa. 
That's the image: African countries. But let me say this: if Alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in London — if the other people who had taken money, estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries — if they're able to do this, what is that? Is that not corruption? 
In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted? 
So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe — where the money's going and what can be done to stop it. 
I'm working on an initiative now, along with the World Bank, on asset recovery, trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad — developing countries' moneys — to get that sent back. 
Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together. 
(Applause) The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform. 
Africans, after — they're tired, we're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care. 
We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform. 
And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it. 
We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start. 
We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information. 
And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria. 
In fact, if you're not in Nigeria, you're not in Africa. 
I want to tell you that. 
(Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people — chaotic people — but very interesting people. You'll never be bored. (Laughter) 
What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves. 
And with the support of a leader who was willing, at the time, to do the reforms, we put forward a comprehensive reform program, which we developed ourselves. 
Not the International Monetary Fund. Not the World Bank, where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president. 
No one can do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. 
We put together a program that would, one: get the state out of businesses it had nothing — it had no business being in. 
The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it's inefficient and incompetent. 
So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises. 
(Applause) We — as a result, we decided to liberalize many of our markets. 
Can you believe that prior to this reform — which started at the end of 2003, when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister — we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history? 
(Laughter) Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury. 
You couldn't get it. You had to bribe. 
You had to do everything to get your phone. 
When President Obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector, we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million GSM lines, and counting. 
Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people. 
(Laughter) The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa. 
And in the three years that I was Finance Minister, they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year. 
360 million in a market — in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita. 
So the market is there. 
When they kept this under wraps, but soon others got to know. 
Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in. 
But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know. 
So privatization is one of the things we've done. 
The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better. 
Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well. 
And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. 
So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price. 
Before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in, because oil is the biggest, most revenue-earning sector in the economy: 70 percent of our revenues come from oil. 
We de-linked that, and once we did it, we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price. 
We didn't know we could pull it off; it was very controversial. 
But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development — where, even if oil prices were high, we would grow very fast. 
When they crashed, we crashed. 
And we could hardly even pay anything, any salaries, in the economy. 
That smoothened out. We were able to save, just before I left, 27 billion dollars. Whereas — and this went to our reserves — when I arrived in 2003, we had seven billion dollars in reserves. 
By the time I left, we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars. And as we speak now, we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances. 
And that shores up our economy, makes it stable. 
Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy. 
We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent. 
And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now. 
So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy. 
And what is more important, because we want to get away from oil and diversify — and there are so many opportunities in this one big country, as in many countries in Africa — what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone, but from non-oil. 
Agriculture grew at better than eight percent. 
As telecoms sector grew, housing and construction, and I could go on and on. And this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out, the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous. 
We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said. 
We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world. 
We have opportunities in housing and real estate. 
There was nothing in a country of 140 million people — no shopping malls as you know them here. 
This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people. 
And now, we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected. 
So, huge things in construction, real estate, mortgage markets. Financial services: we had 89 banks. Too many not doing their real business. 
We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital — share capital. 
And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars. 
The banks — these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside. 
Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million. 
Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million. 
And I can go on. Dollars, on and on, into the system. 
We are doing the same with the insurance sector. 
So in financial services, a great deal of opportunity. 
In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity. 
And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on. 
But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important. 
So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. 
A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. 
Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear. 
I'm trying to tell you that since the past three years, the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum. 
This is better than the performance of many OECD countries. 
So it's clear that things are changing. 
Conflicts are down on the continent; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago, we are down to three or four conflicts — one of the most terrible, of course, of which is Darfur. 
And, you know, you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected. 
But you should know that this continent is not — is a continent of many countries, not one country. 
And if we are down to three or four conflicts, it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable, growing, exciting economies where there's plenty of opportunity. 
And I want to just make one point about this investment. 
The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. 
And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs. 
There's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children's lives. That's not what I'm saying. That is fine. 
But imagine the impact on a family: if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school, that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves. 
If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet, isn't that a wonderful opportunity? Isn't that the way to go? 
And I want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women. 
(Applause) I have a CD here. I'm sorry that I didn't say anything on time. 
Otherwise, I would have liked you to have seen this. 
It says, "" Africa: Open for Business. "" And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year. 
Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June. 
But it shows you Africans, and particularly African women, who against all odds have developed businesses, some of them world-class. 
One of the women in this video, Adenike Ogunlesi, making children's clothes — which she started as a hobby and grew into a business. 
Mixing African materials, such as we have, with materials from elsewhere. 
So, she'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys, with African material mixed in. Very creative designs, has reached a stage where she even had an order from Wal-Mart. 
(Laughter) For 10,000 pieces. 
So that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing. 
And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard. 
I could go on giving examples: Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda, who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her. 
However, many of these are starved for capital to expand, because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary. Nobody thinks in terms of a market. 
Nobody thinks there's opportunity. 
But I'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now, will miss it forever. 
So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing. 
Think about the Beatrices, think about the Adenikes of this world, who are doing incredible things, that are bringing them into the global economy, whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed, and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income. 
So I invite you to explore the opportunities. 
When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. 
There's a certain — (Laughter) That's true in everything risky, except technology. 
For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. 
The space bar scrolls down one page. 
Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. 
Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. 
You make the text larger with each tap. 
Go space, space. 
Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. 
Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, "" Leave a message, "" and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! 
(Laughter) I'm not bitter. (Laughter) 
So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. 
(Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. 
While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example — (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. 
Double click the word. 
Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. 
You can just type over it. 
Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. 
(Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! 
And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! 
(Laughter) So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "" whiteout, "" and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. 
So I know I went super fast. 

I'd like to talk to you today about the human brain, which is what we do research on at the University of California. 
Just think about this problem for a second. 
Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. 
But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. 
It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence, about the nature of God. 
And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world. 
It's the greatest mystery confronting human beings: How does this all come about? 
Well, the brain, as you know, is made up of neurons. 
We're looking at neurons here. 
There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. 
And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. 
And based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. 
So, how do you go about studying the brain? 
One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain, and study changes in their behavior. 
This is what I spoke about in the last TED. 
Today I'll talk about a different approach, which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain, and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. 
Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain. 
Now, one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes. 
Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. 
These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. 
For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. 
If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. 
These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time. 
But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action. 
So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. 
And this is truly astonishing. 
Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view. 
It's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action. 
Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? 
For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation. 
Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person's point of view. 
So, this is important for imitation and emulation. 
Well, why is that important? 
Well, let's take a look at the next slide. 
So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? 
Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation. 
Now, let's look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. 
If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, let's look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. 
And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. 
All of that happened relatively quickly. 
Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly. 
And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. 
So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out, this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations. 
So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. 
Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. 
A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. 
A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. 
And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population. 
This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. 
Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. 
And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. 
In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. 
But the same neuron, in some cases, will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. 
So, it's empathizing the other person being touched. 
So, most of them will fire when I'm touched in different locations. Different neurons for different locations. 
But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location. 
So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. 
Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? 
I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. 
Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "" Don't worry, you're not being touched. 
So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch, otherwise you'll get confused and muddled. "" Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. 
But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. 
In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. 
So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons. 
(Laughter) And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense. 
All that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. 
Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. 
You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. 
And this, of course, is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. 
You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. 
And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. 
And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness. 
And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. 
It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. 
So, you have a patient with a phantom limb. If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom, and you watch somebody else being touched, you feel it in your phantom. 
Now the astonishing thing is, if you have pain in your phantom limb, you squeeze the other person's hand, massage the other person's hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged. 
So, here you have my last slide. 
For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. 
C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. 
So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind. 
There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. 
Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. 
Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. 
Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. 
And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. 
He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. 
He was a slightly unusual guy. 
And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official. 
There's Teodorín Obiang. 
So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. 
The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. 
So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. 
I've been up to its front gates. 
I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. 
He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece — oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too. 
Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars. 
And there's Dan Etete. 
Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. 
We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion — that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later. 
So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. 
But does it just happen over there? 
Well, at 22, I was very lucky. 
My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. 
And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. 
In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. 
Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia. 
So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. 
Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film "" Blood Diamond, "" the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. 
Well, some of that sprang from our work. 
Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. 
And it was a slightly crazy place. 
So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. 
But it wasn't about blood diamonds. 
Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. 
And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. 
And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase "" weak governance. "" I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators. 
So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. 
Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. 
Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. 
He did business with global banks. 
A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. 
And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. 
He used shell companies. 
He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place. 
And then there's Dan Etete. 
Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. 
Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government — now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around. 
So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan. 
This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff. 
Now let's take the banks first. 
Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. 
For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. 
Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. 
So how did that happen? 
Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. 
So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. 
And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. 
The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. 
Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. 
And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case. 
And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. 
Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. 
But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. 
In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal. 
A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. 
It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. 
Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too. 
You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens. 
One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. 
So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. 
And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. 
Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. 
That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. 
And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? 
Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it. 
And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? 
Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. 
Corruption in that sector, no surprise. 
There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? 
Well, because there's a lot at stake. 
In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. 
Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away. 
Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. 
And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right. 
Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. 
Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. 
The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. 
Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. 
And here's the thing. 
After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there. 
Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. 
I mean, these are state assets. 
They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. 
But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so. 
And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. 
It's just how some business is done. 
It's too complex and difficult to change. 
So in effect, what? We just accept it. 
But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. 
In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. 
In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. 
But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. 
Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds. 
So this is change happening. 
This is progress. 
But we're not there yet, by far. 
Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? 
In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. 
And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings. 
And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. 
Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. 
I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental — if you'll pardon the pun — in helping Nathaniel get off the streets. 
I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. 
He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. 
He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. 
And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me. 
Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. 
But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him. 
And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall — he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. 
And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep. 
And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. 
(Laughter) So, I just started playing. 
And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. 
And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. 
It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. 
And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. 
And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete — Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. 
And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen. 
And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. 
He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. 
And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician. 
Music is medicine. Music changes us. 
And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. 
Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. 
And that is an escape from his tormented state. 
And I understood that this was the very essence of art. 
This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. 
And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us. 
And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. 
The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. 
And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. 
Robert Gupta. 
(Applause) Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. 
So, please forgive me. 
(Laughter) (Music) (Applause) 

I'm here to show you how something you can't see can be so much fun to look at. 
You're about to experience a new, available and exciting technology that's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives. 
What I have here is a cinder block that we've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material. 
It's called Ultra-Ever Dry, and when you apply it to any material, it turns into a superhydrophobic shield. 
So this is a cinder block, uncoated, and you can see that it's porous, it absorbs water. 
Not anymore. 
Porous, nonporous. 
So what's superhydrophobic? 
Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface. 
The rounder it is, the more hydrophobic it is, and if it's really round, it's superhydrophobic. 
A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees. 
A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees. 
But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic. 
So as part of the demonstration, what I have is a pair of gloves, and we've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating, and let's see if you can tell which one, and I'll give you a hint. 
Did you guess the one that was dry? 
When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience, what's occurred is that we're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits. 
And we're talking really small here. 
The way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers, and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and to put some scale to that, if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick, and you put it side by side, and you had 50,000 of them, you'd be the width of a human hair. 
So very small, but very useful. 
And it's not just water that this works with. 
It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well. 
You can see the difference. 
Moving onto the next demonstration, we've taken a pane of glass and we've coated the outside of it, we've framed it with the nanotechnology coating, and we're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle, and you're going to see, it's going to spread out on glass like you'd normally think it would, except when it hits the coating, it stops, and I can't even coax it to leave. 
It's that afraid of the water. 
(Applause) So what's going on here? What's happening? 
Well, the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface. 
You'd think it'd be smooth, but it's actually not. 
And it has billions of interstitial spaces, and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules, and cover the surface with air. 
It's an umbrella of air all across it, and that layer of air is what the water hits, the mud hits, the concrete hits, and it glides right off. 
So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry. 
So what are the applications? 
I mean, many of you right now are probably going through your head. 
Everyone that sees this gets excited, and says, "Oh, I could use it for this and this and this." 
The applications in a general sense could be anything that's anti-wetting. 
We've certainly seen that today. 
It could be anything that's anti-icing, because if you don't have water, you don't have ice. 
It could be anti-corrosion. 
No water, no corrosion. 
It could be anti-bacterial. 
Without water, the bacteria won't survive. 
And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well. 
So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work. 
And I'm going to leave you with one last demonstration, but before I do that, I would like to say thank you, and think small. 
(Applause) It's going to happen. Wait for it. Wait for it. 
Chris Anderson: You guys didn't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED? (Laughter) [Two minutes later...] He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part. 
It's happening! 
(Applause) 

Good morning. How are you? 
I have an interest in education. 
But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "" What do you do? "" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. 
And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. 
And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. 
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. 
We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "" James Robinson IS Joseph! "" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? 
What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. 
(Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. 
Shakespeare being seven? 
I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. 
He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. 
(Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. 
If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "" What's it for, public education? "" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. 
They're just a form of life, another form of life. 
(Laughter) Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it. (Laughter) 
And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. 
And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. 
If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. 
The brain isn't divided into compartments. 
In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. 
By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. 
Because you are, aren't you? 
(Laughter) No, she's good at some things, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. 
If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. 
I say, "" Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. "" (Laughter) "Give me a break." (Laughter) 
I saw a great t-shirt recently, which said, "" If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? "" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. 
And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." 
(Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. (Laughter) 
And when they got out, he said to her mother, "" Just stand and watch her. "" And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. 
And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "" Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. 
Take her to a dance school. "" I said, "" What happened? "" She said, "" She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. 
We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. 
People who had to move to think. "" Who had to move to think. 
(Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. 
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. 
Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. 
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. 
And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. 
By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. 

Ichthyology, the study of fishes. 
It looks like a big, boring word, but it's actually quite exciting, because ichthyology is the only "" ology "" with "" YOLO "" in it. 
(Laughter) Now, to the cool kids in the audience, you already know, YOLO stands for "" you only live once, "" and because I only have one life, I'm going to spend it doing what I always dreamt of doing: seeing the hidden wonders of the world and discovering new species. 
And that's what I get to do. 
Now, in recent years, I really focused on caves for finding new species. 
And it turns out, there's lots of new cavefish species out there. 
You just have to know where to look, and to maybe be a little thin. 
(Laughter) Now, cavefishes can tell me a lot about biology and geology. 
They can tell me how the landmasses around them have changed and moved by being stuck in these little holes, and they can tell me about the evolution of sight, by being blind. 
Now, fish have eyes that are essentially the same as ours. 
All vertebrates do, and each time a fish species starts to adapt to this dark, cold, cave environment, over many, many generations, they lose their eyes and their eyesight until the end up like an eyeless cavefish like this one here. 
Now, each cavefish species has evolved in a slightly different way, and each one has a unique geological and biological story to tell us, and that's why it's so exciting when we find a new species. 
So this is a new species we described, from southern Indiana. 
We named it Amblyopsis hoosieri, the Hoosier cavefish. 
(Laughter) Its closest relatives are cavefishes in Kentucky, in the Mammoth Cave system. 
And they start to diverge when the Ohio River split them a few million years ago. 
And in that time they developed these subtle differences in the genetic architecture behind their blindness. 
There's this gene called rhodopsin that's super-critical for sight. 
We have it, and these species have it too, except one species has lost all function in that gene, and the other one maintains it. 
So this sets up this beautiful natural experiment where we can look at the genes behind our vision, and at the very roots of how we can see. 
But the genes in these cavefishes can also tell us about deep geological time, maybe no more so than in this species here. 
This is a new species we described from Madagascar that we named Typhleotris mararybe. 
That means "" big sickness "" in Malagasy, for how sick we got trying to collect this species. 
Now, believe it or not, swimming around sinkholes full of dead things and cave full of bat poop isn't the smartest thing you could be doing with your life, but YOLO. 
(Laughter) Now, I love this species despite the fact that it tried to kill us, and that's because this species in Madagascar, its closest relatives are 6,000 kilometers away, cavefishes in Australia. 
Now, there's no way a three-inch-long freshwater cavefish can swim across the Indian Ocean, so what we found when we compared the DNA of these species is that they've been separated for more than 100 million years, or about the time that the southern continents were last together. 
So in fact, these species didn't move at all. 
It's the continents that moved them. 
And so they give us, through their DNA, this precise model and measure of how to date and time these ancient geological events. 
Now, this species here is so new I'm not even allowed to tell you its name yet, but I can tell you it's a new species from Mexico, and it's probably already extinct. 
It's probably extinct because the only known cave system it's from was destroyed when a dam was built nearby. 
Unfortunately for cavefishes, their groundwater habitat is also our main source of drinking water. 
Now, we actually don't know this species' closest relative, yet. 
It doesn't appear to be anything else in Mexico, so maybe it's something in Cuba, or Florida, or India. 
But whatever it is, it might tell us something new about the geology of the Caribbean, or the biology of how to better diagnose certain types of blindness. 
But I hope we discover this species before it goes extinct too. 
And I'm going to spend my one life as an ichthyologist trying to discover and save these humble little blind cavefishes that can tell us so much about the geology of the planet and the biology of how we see. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model. 
Actually, for 10 years. 
And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. 
(Laughter) So luckily, I brought an outfit change. 
This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. 
If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter. 
(Laughter) I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. 
Not everybody gets to do that. 
These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. 
The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. 
All right. 
So, why did I do that? 
That was awkward. 
(Laughter) Well — (Laughter) Hopefully not as awkward as that picture. 
Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. 
I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds. 
And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. 
I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. 
And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. 
So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. 
And I am on this stage because I am a model. 
I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl. 
I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist. 
I always just say, "" Oh, I was scouted, "" but that means nothing. 
The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. 
Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. 
And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. 
And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen." 
And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive. 
(Laughter) But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white. 
The next question people always ask is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?" 
And the first answer is, "" I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that. "" But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, "" Why? You know? You can be anything. 
You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one. "" (Laughter) If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well, then I say, "" Be my boss. "" Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H & M, or the next Steven Meisel. 
Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. 
It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path. 
I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now. 
So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "" We want a walking shot, "" this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times. 
(Laughter) It will look something like this. (Laughter) 
Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. 
That was — I don't know what happened there. 
Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "" Underwear Model: 10 years, "" people give you a funny look. 
The next question is, "" Do they retouch all the photos? "" And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. 
This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. 
I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. 
This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. 
Here's me on the same day as this shoot. 
My friend got to come. 
Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. 
Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. 
And here's me today. 
And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. 
They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. 
That's not me. 
Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, "Do you get free stuff?" 
(Laughter) I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about. 
I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. 
When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a "" Sorry, officer, "" and we were on our way. 
And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. 
I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. 
And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "" Will I get stopped? "" but "" How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped? "" When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17. 
So, the last question people ask me is, "What is it like to be a model?" 
And I think the answer that they're looking for is, "" If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous. "" And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. 
We say, "" It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people. "" And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure." 
And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. 
And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?" 
you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs, the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet. 
When I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, "Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor," and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, "and it doesn't always make me happy." 
But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries. 
But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now. 
If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Imagine, if you will — a gift. 
I'd like for you to picture it in your mind. 
It's not too big — about the size of a golf ball. 
So envision what it looks like all wrapped up. 
But before I show you what's inside, I will tell you, it's going to do incredible things for you. 
It will bring all of your family together. 
You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven't heard from in years. 
Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you. 
It will recalibrate what's most important in your life. 
It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith. 
You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body. 
You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy. 
You'll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you'll have a healthier lifestyle. 
And get this — you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing. 
You'll eat countless gourmet meals. 
Flowers will arrive by the truckload. 
People will say to you, "You look great. Have you had any work done?" 
And you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs. 
You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled. 
Your life will have new meaning. 
Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana. 
The price? 
$55,000, and that's an incredible deal. 
By now I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one. 
Does Amazon carry it? 
Does it have the Apple logo on it? 
Is there a waiting list? 
Not likely. 
This gift came to me about five months ago. 
It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up — not quite so pretty. 
And this, and then this. 
It was a rare gem — a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma — the gift that keeps on giving. 
And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you. 
I'm not sure you'd want it. 
But I wouldn't change my experience. 
It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn't expect in all the ways I just shared with you. 
So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected, unwanted and uncertain, consider that it just may be a gift. 
(Applause) 

Ladies and gentlemen, gather around. 
I would love to share with you a story. 
Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book. 
Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling. 
It was venerable. 
It was ubiquitous. 
But it was a little bit boring. 
Because in its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device. 
But then one author arrived, and he changed the game forever. 
(Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer. 
Lothar Meggendorfer put his foot down, and he said, "" Genug ist genug! "" He grabbed his pen, he snatched his scissors. 
This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold. 
History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as — who else? — the world's first true inventor of the children's pop-up book. 
(Music) For this delight and for this wonder, people rejoiced. 
(Cheering) They were happy because the story survived, and that the world would keep on spinning. 
Lothar Meggendorfer wasn't the first to evolve the way a story was told, and he certainly wasn't the last. 
Whether storytellers realized it or not, they were channeling Meggendorfer's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville, radio news to radio theater, film to film in motion to film in sound, color, 3D, on VHS and on DVD. 
There seemed to be no cure for this Meggendorferitis. 
And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around. 
(Laughter) Because, not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world, but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices. 
For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine. 
One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D. 
(Laughter) And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate. 
And after all this, everyone paused; they took a step back. 
They realized that, in 6,000 years of storytelling, they've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls. 
And this was a cause for celebration. 
The art of storytelling has remained unchanged. 
And for the most part, the stories are recycled. 
But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty. 
And they remembered a man, one amazing German, every time a new storytelling device popped up next. 
And for that, the audience — the lovely, beautiful audience — would live happily ever after. 
(Applause) 

Living in Africa is to be on the edge, metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008. 
Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off. 
And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution. 
And now we've got the digital revolution. 
These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations. 
Never have been. 
Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world. 
What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem. 
Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself. 
The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain. 
It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be. 
In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow. 
There was a media blackout in 2008, when there was post-election violence in Kenya. 
It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time. 
So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi. 
And Ushahidi means "" testimony "" or "" witness "" in Swahili. 
I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators. 
This is David and Erik. 
I call them brothers from another mother. 
Clearly I have a German mother somewhere. 
And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi. 
And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where, and you could visualize that data. 
And after that initial prototype, we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did. 
All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days. 
And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya. 
We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network. 
And we were able to grow this software footprint, and a few years later it became very useful software, and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were, and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan. 
Now, this year the Internet turns 20, and Ushahidi turned five. 
Ushahidi is not only the software that we made. 
It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee. 
We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world. 
There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps, and even environmental monitoring crowd maps. 
We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with. 
There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen, if I share the information with whatever device that I have, could inform you about what is going on, and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on. 
I moved back to Kenya in 2011. 
Erik moved in 2010. 
Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access. 
I had never had to deal with a blackout. 
And in Kenya, it's a very different reality, and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem. 
The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying. 
Blackouts are not fun. 
Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down with it, so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem, how do I switch back? 
And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again. 
Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa. 
The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge. 
It costs me five Kenyan shillings, or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China. 
Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria? 
Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa. 
And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers. 
This is the reality that we deal with. 
So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "" If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere. "" [Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.] What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection? 
Could we leverage the cloud? 
We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi. 
Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country? 
So we looked at the modem, an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity, yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury. 
We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality. 
What if we could have connectivity with less friction? 
This is the BRCK. 
It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out, it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network. 
Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive. 
It's actually everywhere. 
Most towns at least have a 3G connection. 
So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this. 
The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working, you can continue being productive, and let's just say you are less stressed. 
And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection. 
The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks, and whenever you switch on the backup, you pick on the fastest network, so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs, and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on, and if the up time on that is not very good, then you hop onto the next one. 
The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere. 
With load balancing, this can be possible. 
The other interesting thing for us — we like sensors — is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things. 
Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this. 
It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas. 
Out of adversity can come innovation, and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure? 
And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya. 
It is not without challenge. 
Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents. 
"What are you carrying?" 
And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects. 
So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins. 
I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity, and it can reduce the cost of connecting, and hopefully collaboration within African countries. 
The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship. 
The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected, and to help them drive the global digital revolution. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. 
And I'm not a trained academic. 
Neither am I a veteran social worker. 
I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. 
And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. 
The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. 
You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. 
We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. 
We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. 
We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. 
We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep. 
We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. 
We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. 
Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. 
And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year. 
Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, "" When will you start? How many schools will you start? 
How many children will you get? 
How are you going to scale? 
How are you going to replicate? "" It was very difficult not to get scared, not to get daunted. 
But we dug our heels and said, "" We're not in the number game. 
We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job. "" So, we started Parikrma. 
The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. 
Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. 
And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. 
That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. 
Indian academic year begins in June. 
So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. 
My God! What a bonding exercise that was. 
And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. 
Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. 
In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages. 
(Applause) Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. 
Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. 
And so all our schools are English medium schools. 
But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. 
No one in their family has spoken English. 
No one in their generation has spoken English. 
But how wrong it is. 
Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear] and Hardy Boys. 
Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. 
The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. 
I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. 
Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it. 
Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. 
I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter) Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. 
And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. 
But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course, but he has done a lot of research through Google search. 
You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. 
And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, "" Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. 
They'll never be able to cope. "" Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. 
You should just come across to see how well our children do. 
There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. 
That's absolute hogwash. 
All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible. 
Video: (Hindi) SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. 
Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. 
Fathers have started to attend. 
It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. 
Now they have started writing their signature. 
The children have taught them. 
It's amazing how much children can teach. 
We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, "" You know, we want to learn how to read and write. 
Can you teach us? "" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. 
We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. 
We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools. 
Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. 
So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. 
We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. 
We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. 
We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. 
We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children. 
They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. 
More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. 
We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. 
Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school. 
There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. 
Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad. 
Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. 
Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. 
And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. 
There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. 
I mingled with almost everyone. 
They were very friendly. 
I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. 
Even now we are in touch through Facebook. 
After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. 
Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. 
I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. 
My accent with English improved a lot. 
And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. 
And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here. 
Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. 
I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, "" Yes ma'am, what you want? "" It was so good to hear! 
(Laughter) (Applause) SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. 
And today she wants to be a neurologist. 
Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. 
They are really excelling. 
There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city. 
We've got the best school award for three years successively. 
And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. 
Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. 
We also have our very own dream team. 
Why is this happening? Why this confidence? 
Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. 
Art, music are considered therapy and mediums of expression. 
We also believe that it's the content that is more important. 
It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. 
Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education. 
When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. 
We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. 
But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child complete the circle of life, and unleash his total potential. 
We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. 
We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. 
But we began with the idea of one child at a time. 
This is five-year-old Parusharam. 
He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. 
He's in kindergarten. 
He has learned how to speak English. 
We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. 
He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. 
And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, "" I like sleeping. 
I like eating. I like playing. "" And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, "" I want to horsing. "" Now, "" horsing "" is going for a horse ride. 
So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. 
He comes for a tummy rub, because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter) When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world. 
But today I have been transformed. 
I have been changed with my children. 
I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. 
Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. 
I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life, which is be an educator, change lives, and spark magic. Right now there is an aspiring teacher 
in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible. Right now 
there's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards, who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately, while at the same time saying to herself over and over again, "Don't smile till November," because that's what she was taught in her teacher education program. 
Right now there's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he's very, very sick and can't make it to school tomorrow. 
On the other hand, right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information, information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge. 
Right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention, a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before, but if they close their eyes tightly enough, they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling. 
Right now there's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says, "Put them down." 
Right now. 
So people will then say, "" Well, Chris, you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you're also describing these powerful educators. 
If you're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular, these guys will probably cancel each other out, and then we'll be okay. "" The reality is, the folks I described as the master teachers, the master narrative builders, the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms. 
The folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience don't even know what teacher certification means. 
They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education. 
And that to me is sad. 
It's sad because the people who I described, they were very disinterested in the learning process, want to be effective teachers, but they have no models. 
I'm going to paraphrase Mark Twain. 
Mark Twain says that proper preparation, or teaching, is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good, it can turn awful practices into powerful ones, it can change men and transform them into angels. 
The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching, not in any college or university, but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage. 
Guess where those places are? 
Barber shops, rap concerts, and most importantly, in the black church. 
And I've been framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy. 
Who here has been to a black church? 
We got a couple of hands. 
You go to a black church, their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience, so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes, and then he takes a pause, and he says, "" Oh my gosh, they're not quite paying attention. "" So he says, "" Can I get an amen? "" Audience: Amen. 
Chris Emdin: So I can I get an amen? Audience: Amen. 
CE: And all of a sudden, everybody's reawoken. 
That preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention. 
He drops his voice at a very, very low volume when he wants people to key into him, and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers. 
So why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills, that magic that you need to engage an audience, to engage a student? 
So I make the argument that we reframe teacher education, that we could focus on content, and that's fine, and we could focus on theories, and that's fine, but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing. 
Now people oftentimes say, "" Well, magic is just magic. "" There are teachers who, despite all their challenges, who have those skills, get into those schools and are able to engage an audience, and the administrator walks by and says, "Wow, he's so good, I wish all my teachers could be that good." 
And when they try to describe what that is, they just say, "" He has that magic. "" But I'm here to tell you that magic can be taught. 
Magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. 
Now, how do you teach it? You teach it by allowing people 
to go into those spaces where the magic is happening. 
If you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education, you've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood. 
You've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop, you've got to attend that black church, and you've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do. 
At our teacher education classes at my university, I've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts. 
They watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands. 
They study the way that he walks proudly across that stage. 
They listen to his metaphors and analogies, and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic. 
They learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch, you don't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more. 
And if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof! we could make dead classes come alive, we could reignite imaginations, and we can change education. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science, one that is still speculative but hugely exciting, and certainly one that's growing very rapidly. 
Quantum biology asks a very simple question: Does quantum mechanics — that weird and wonderful and powerful theory of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules that underpins so much of modern physics and chemistry — also play a role inside the living cell? 
In other words: Are there processes, mechanisms, phenomena in living organisms that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics? 
Now, quantum biology isn't new; it's been around since the early 1930s. 
But it's only in the last decade or so that careful experiments — in biochemistry labs, using spectroscopy — have shown very clear, firm evidence that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics to explain them. 
Quantum biology brings together quantum physicists, biochemists, molecular biologists — it's a very interdisciplinary field. 
I come from quantum physics, so I'm a nuclear physicist. 
I've spent more than three decades trying to get my head around quantum mechanics. 
One of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, said, If you're not astonished by it, then you haven't understood it. 
So I sort of feel happy that I'm still astonished by it. 
That's a good thing. 
But it means I study the very smallest structures in the universe — the building blocks of reality. 
If we think about the scale of size, start with an everyday object like the tennis ball, and just go down orders of magnitude in size — from the eye of a needle down to a cell, down to a bacterium, down to an enzyme — you eventually reach the nano-world. 
Now, nanotechnology may be a term you've heard of. 
A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. 
My area is the atomic nucleus, which is the tiny dot inside an atom. 
It's even smaller in scale. 
This is the domain of quantum mechanics, and physicists and chemists have had a long time to try and get used to it. 
Biologists, on the other hand, have got off lightly, in my view. 
They are very happy with their balls-and-sticks models of molecules. 
(Laughter) The balls are the atoms, the sticks are the bonds between the atoms. 
And when they can't build them physically in the lab, nowadays, they have very powerful computers that will simulate a huge molecule. 
This is a protein made up of 100,000 atoms. 
It doesn't really require much in the way of quantum mechanics to explain it. 
Quantum mechanics was developed in the 1920s. 
It is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas that explain the world of the very small. 
And it's a world that's very different from our everyday world, made up of trillions of atoms. 
It's a world built on probability and chance. 
It's a fuzzy world. 
It's a world of phantoms, where particles can also behave like spread-out waves. 
If we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics, then, as the fundamental foundation of reality itself, then it's not surprising that we say quantum physics underpins organic chemistry. 
After all, it gives us the rules that tell us how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules. 
Organic chemistry, scaled up in complexity, gives us molecular biology, which of course leads to life itself. 
So in a way, it's sort of not surprising. 
It's almost trivial. 
You say, "" Well, of course life ultimately must depend of quantum mechanics. "" But so does everything else. 
So does all inanimate matter, made up of trillions of atoms. 
Ultimately, there's a quantum level where we have to delve into this weirdness. 
But in everyday life, we can forget about it. 
Because once you put together trillions of atoms, that quantum weirdness just dissolves away. 
Quantum biology isn't about this. 
Quantum biology isn't this obvious. 
Of course quantum mechanics underpins life at some molecular level. 
Quantum biology is about looking for the non-trivial — the counterintuitive ideas in quantum mechanics — and to see if they do, indeed, play an important role in describing the processes of life. 
Here is my perfect example of the counterintuitiveness of the quantum world. 
This is the quantum skier. 
He seems to be intact, he seems to be perfectly healthy, and yet, he seems to have gone around both sides of that tree at the same time. 
Well, if you saw tracks like that you'd guess it was some sort of stunt, of course. 
But in the quantum world, this happens all the time. 
Particles can multitask, they can be in two places at once. 
They can do more than one thing at the same time. 
Particles can behave like spread-out waves. 
It's almost like magic. 
Physicists and chemists have had nearly a century of trying to get used to this weirdness. 
I don't blame the biologists for not having to or wanting to learn quantum mechanics. 
You see, this weirdness is very delicate; and we physicists work very hard to maintain it in our labs. 
We cool our system down to near absolute zero, we carry out our experiments in vacuums, we try and isolate it from any external disturbance. 
That's very different from the warm, messy, noisy environment of a living cell. 
Biology itself, if you think of molecular biology, seems to have done very well in describing all the processes of life in terms of chemistry — chemical reactions. 
And these are reductionist, deterministic chemical reactions, showing that, essentially, life is made of the same stuff as everything else, and if we can forget about quantum mechanics in the macro world, then we should be able to forget about it in biology, as well. 
Well, one man begged to differ with this idea. 
Erwin Schrödinger, of Schrödinger's Cat fame, was an Austrian physicist. 
He was one of the founders of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. 
In 1944, he wrote a book called "" What is Life? "" It was tremendously influential. 
It influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, the discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA. 
To paraphrase a description in the book, he says: At the molecular level, living organisms have a certain order, a structure to them that's very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. 
In fact, living matter seems to behave in this order, in a structure, just like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero, where quantum effects play a very important role. 
There's something special about the structure — the order — inside a living cell. 
So, Schrödinger speculated that maybe quantum mechanics plays a role in life. 
It's a very speculative, far-reaching idea, and it didn't really go very far. 
But as I mentioned at the start, in the last 10 years, there have been experiments emerging, showing where some of these certain phenomena in biology do seem to require quantum mechanics. 
I want to share with you just a few of the exciting ones. 
This is one of the best-known phenomena in the quantum world, quantum tunneling. 
The box on the left shows the wavelike, spread-out distribution of a quantum entity — a particle, like an electron, which is not a little ball bouncing off a wall. 
It's a wave that has a certain probability of being able to permeate through a solid wall, like a phantom leaping through to the other side. 
You can see a faint smudge of light in the right-hand box. 
Quantum tunneling suggests that a particle can hit an impenetrable barrier, and yet somehow, as though by magic, disappear from one side and reappear on the other. 
The nicest way of explaining it is if you want to throw a ball over a wall, you have to give it enough energy to get over the top of the wall. 
In the quantum world, you don't have to throw it over the wall, you can throw it at the wall, and there's a certain non-zero probability that it'll disappear on your side, and reappear on the other. 
This isn't speculation, by the way. 
We're happy — well, "" happy "" is not the right word — (Laughter) we are familiar with this. (Laughter) 
Quantum tunneling takes place all the time; in fact, it's the reason our Sun shines. 
The particles fuse together, and the Sun turns hydrogen into helium through quantum tunneling. 
Back in the 70s and 80s, it was discovered that quantum tunneling also takes place inside living cells. 
Enzymes, those workhorses of life, the catalysts of chemical reactions — enzymes are biomolecules that speed up chemical reactions in living cells, by many, many orders of magnitude. 
And it's always been a mystery how they do this. 
Well, it was discovered that one of the tricks that enzymes have evolved to make use of, is by transferring subatomic particles, like electrons and indeed protons, from one part of a molecule to another via quantum tunneling. 
It's efficient, it's fast, it can disappear — a proton can disappear from one place, and reappear on the other. 
Enzymes help this take place. 
This is research that's been carried out back in the 80s, particularly by a group in Berkeley, Judith Klinman. 
Other groups in the UK have now also confirmed that enzymes really do this. 
Research carried out by my group — so as I mentioned, I'm a nuclear physicist, but I've realized I've got these tools of using quantum mechanics in atomic nuclei, and so can apply those tools in other areas as well. 
One question we asked is whether quantum tunneling plays a role in mutations in DNA. 
Again, this is not a new idea; it goes all the way back to the early 60s. 
The two strands of DNA, the double-helix structure, are held together by rungs; it's like a twisted ladder. 
And those rungs of the ladder are hydrogen bonds — protons, that act as the glue between the two strands. 
So if you zoom in, what they're doing is holding these large molecules — nucleotides — together. 
Zoom in a bit more. 
So, this a computer simulation. 
The two white balls in the middle are protons, and you can see that it's a double hydrogen bond. 
One prefers to sit on one side; the other, on the other side of the two strands of the vertical lines going down, which you can't see. 
It can happen that these two protons can hop over. 
Watch the two white balls. 
They can jump over to the other side. 
If the two strands of DNA then separate, leading to the process of replication, and the two protons are in the wrong positions, this can lead to a mutation. 
This has been known for half a century. 
The question is: How likely are they to do that, and if they do, how do they do it? 
Do they jump across, like the ball going over the wall? 
Or can they quantum-tunnel across, even if they don't have enough energy? 
Early indications suggest that quantum tunneling can play a role here. 
We still don't know yet how important it is; this is still an open question. 
It's speculative, but it's one of those questions that is so important that if quantum mechanics plays a role in mutations, surely this must have big implications, to understand certain types of mutations, possibly even those that lead to turning a cell cancerous. 
Another example of quantum mechanics in biology is quantum coherence, in one of the most important processes in biology, photosynthesis: plants and bacteria taking sunlight, and using that energy to create biomass. 
Quantum coherence is the idea of quantum entities multitasking. 
It's the quantum skier. 
It's an object that behaves like a wave, so that it doesn't just move in one direction or the other, but can follow multiple pathways at the same time. 
Some years ago, the world of science was shocked when a paper was published showing experimental evidence that quantum coherence takes place inside bacteria, carrying out photosynthesis. 
The idea is that the photon, the particle of light, the sunlight, the quantum of light captured by a chlorophyll molecule, is then delivered to what's called the reaction center, where it can be turned into chemical energy. 
And in getting there, it doesn't just follow one route; it follows multiple pathways at once, to optimize the most efficient way of reaching the reaction center without dissipating as waste heat. 
Quantum coherence taking place inside a living cell. 
A remarkable idea, and yet evidence is growing almost weekly, with new papers coming out, confirming that this does indeed take place. 
My third and final example is the most beautiful, wonderful idea. 
It's also still very speculative, but I have to share it with you. 
The European robin migrates from Scandinavia down to the Mediterranean, every autumn, and like a lot of other marine animals and even insects, they navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field. 
Now, the Earth's magnetic field is very, very weak; it's 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet, and yet it affects the chemistry — somehow — within a living organism. 
That's not in doubt — a German couple of ornithologists, Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko, in the 1970s, confirmed that indeed, the robin does find its way by somehow sensing the Earth's magnetic field, to give it directional information — a built-in compass. 
The puzzle, the mystery was: How does it do it? 
Well, the only theory in town — we don't know if it's the correct theory, but the only theory in town — is that it does it via something called quantum entanglement. 
Inside the robin's retina — I kid you not — inside the robin's retina is a protein called cryptochrome, which is light-sensitive. 
Within cryptochrome, a pair of electrons are quantum-entangled. 
Now, quantum entanglement is when two particles are far apart, and yet somehow remain in contact with each other. 
Even Einstein hated this idea; he called it "" spooky action at a distance. "" (Laughter) So if Einstein doesn't like it, then we can all be uncomfortable with it. 
Two quantum-entangled electrons within a single molecule dance a delicate dance that is very sensitive to the direction the bird flies in the Earth's magnetic field. 
We don't know if it's the correct explanation, but wow, wouldn't it be exciting if quantum mechanics helps birds navigate? 
Quantum biology is still in it infancy. 
It's still speculative. 
But I believe it's built on solid science. 
I also think that in the coming decade or so, we're going to start to see that actually, it pervades life — that life has evolved tricks that utilize the quantum world. 
Watch this space. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Why grow homes? Because we can. 
Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma. 
And there's a cause for that, all right. 
We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses. 
As an architect, I have to confront something like this. 
So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses? 
Well, it's been around for 2,500 years. 
It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system. 
And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that. 
We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab. 
It fits into the environment. It is the environment. 
It is the landscape, right? 
And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon. 
They're perfect. 
You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment. 
Imagine pre-growing a village — it takes about seven to 10 years — and everything is green. 
So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one. 
So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab. 
And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs. 
We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry. 
We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed. 
It's victimless. It's meat from a test tube. 
So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes. 
So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows. 
(Laughter) And we know it's incredibly ugly. 
It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape. 
And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it. 
We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat. 
That's why we grow homes. Thanks very much. 
(Applause) 

So I'd like you to imagine for a moment that you're a soldier in the heat of battle. 
Maybe you're a Roman foot soldier or a medieval archer or maybe you're a Zulu warrior. 
Regardless of your time and place, there are some things that are constant. 
Your adrenaline is elevated, and your actions are stemming from these deeply ingrained reflexes, reflexes rooted in a need to protect yourself and your side and to defeat the enemy. 
So now, I'd like you to imagine playing a very different role, that of the scout. 
The scout's job is not to attack or defend. 
The scout's job is to understand. 
The scout is the one going out, mapping the terrain, identifying potential obstacles. 
And the scout may hope to learn that, say, there's a bridge in a convenient location across a river. 
But above all, the scout wants to know what's really there, as accurately as possible. 
And in a real, actual army, both the soldier and the scout are essential. 
But you can also think of each of these roles as a mindset — a metaphor for how all of us process information and ideas in our daily lives. 
What I'm going to argue today is that having good judgment, making accurate predictions, making good decisions, is mostly about which mindset you're in. 
To illustrate these mindsets in action, I'm going to take you back to 19th-century France, where this innocuous-looking piece of paper launched one of the biggest political scandals in history. 
It was discovered in 1894 by officers in the French general staff. 
It was torn up in a wastepaper basket, but when they pieced it back together, they discovered that someone in their ranks had been selling military secrets to Germany. 
So they launched a big investigation, and their suspicions quickly converged on this man, Alfred Dreyfus. 
He had a sterling record, no past history of wrongdoing, no motive as far as they could tell. 
But Dreyfus was the only Jewish officer at that rank in the army, and unfortunately at this time, the French Army was highly anti-Semitic. 
They compared Dreyfus's handwriting to that on the memo and concluded that it was a match, even though outside professional handwriting experts were much less confident in the similarity, but never mind that. 
They went and searched Dreyfus's apartment, looking for any signs of espionage. 
They went through his files, and they didn't find anything. 
This just convinced them more that Dreyfus was not only guilty, but sneaky as well, because clearly he had hidden all of the evidence before they had managed to get to it. 
Next, they went and looked through his personal history for any incriminating details. 
They talked to his teachers, they found that he had studied foreign languages in school, which clearly showed a desire to conspire with foreign governments later in life. 
His teachers also said that Dreyfus was known for having a good memory, which was highly suspicious, right? 
You know, because a spy has to remember a lot of things. 
So the case went to trial, and Dreyfus was found guilty. 
Afterwards, they took him out into this public square and ritualistically tore his insignia from his uniform and broke his sword in two. 
This was called the Degradation of Dreyfus. 
And they sentenced him to life imprisonment on the aptly named Devil's Island, which is this barren rock off the coast of South America. 
So there he went, and there he spent his days alone, writing letters and letters to the French government begging them to reopen his case so they could discover his innocence. 
But for the most part, France considered the matter closed. 
One thing that's really interesting to me about the Dreyfus Affair is this question of why the officers were so convinced that Dreyfus was guilty. 
I mean, you might even assume that they were setting him up, that they were intentionally framing him. 
But historians don't think that's what happened. 
As far as we can tell, the officers genuinely believed that the case against Dreyfus was strong. 
Which makes you wonder: What does it say about the human mind that we can find such paltry evidence to be compelling enough to convict a man? 
Well, this is a case of what scientists call "" motivated reasoning. "" It's this phenomenon in which our unconscious motivations, our desires and fears, shape the way we interpret information. 
Some information, some ideas, feel like our allies. 
We want them to win. We want to defend them. 
And other information or ideas are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down. 
So this is why I call motivated reasoning, "" soldier mindset. "" Probably most of you have never persecuted a French-Jewish officer for high treason, I assume, but maybe you've followed sports or politics, so you might have noticed that when the referee judges that your team committed a foul, for example, you're highly motivated to find reasons why he's wrong. 
But if he judges that the other team committed a foul — awesome! 
That's a good call, let's not examine it too closely. 
Or, maybe you've read an article or a study that examined some controversial policy, like capital punishment. 
And, as researchers have demonstrated, if you support capital punishment and the study shows that it's not effective, then you're highly motivated to find all the reasons why the study was poorly designed. 
But if it shows that capital punishment works, it's a good study. 
And vice versa: if you don't support capital punishment, same thing. 
Our judgment is strongly influenced, unconsciously, by which side we want to win. 
And this is ubiquitous. 
This shapes how we think about our health, our relationships, how we decide how to vote, what we consider fair or ethical. 
What's most scary to me about motivated reasoning or soldier mindset, is how unconscious it is. 
We can think we're being objective and fair-minded and still wind up ruining the life of an innocent man. 
However, fortunately for Dreyfus, his story is not over. 
This is Colonel Picquart. 
He's another high-ranking officer in the French Army, and like most people, he assumed Dreyfus was guilty. 
Also like most people in the army, he was at least casually anti-Semitic. 
But at a certain point, Picquart began to suspect: "What if we're all wrong about Dreyfus?" 
What happened was, he had discovered evidence that the spying for Germany had continued, even after Dreyfus was in prison. 
And he had also discovered that another officer in the army had handwriting that perfectly matched the memo, much closer than Dreyfus's handwriting. 
So he brought these discoveries to his superiors, but to his dismay, they either didn't care or came up with elaborate rationalizations to explain his findings, like, "" Well, all you've really shown, Picquart, is that there's another spy who learned how to mimic Dreyfus's handwriting, and he picked up the torch of spying after Dreyfus left. 
But Dreyfus is still guilty. "" Eventually, Picquart managed to get Dreyfus exonerated. 
But it took him 10 years, and for part of that time, he himself was in prison for the crime of disloyalty to the army. 
A lot of people feel like Picquart can't really be the hero of this story because he was an anti-Semite and that's bad, which I agree with. 
But personally, for me, the fact that Picquart was anti-Semitic actually makes his actions more admirable, because he had the same prejudices, the same reasons to be biased as his fellow officers, but his motivation to find the truth and uphold it trumped all of that. 
So to me, Picquart is a poster child for what I call "" scout mindset. "" It's the drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but just to see what's really there as honestly and accurately as you can, even if it's not pretty or convenient or pleasant. 
This mindset is what I'm personally passionate about. 
And I've spent the last few years examining and trying to figure out what causes scout mindset. 
Why are some people, sometimes at least, able to cut through their own prejudices and biases and motivations and just try to see the facts and the evidence as objectively as they can? 
And the answer is emotional. 
So, just as soldier mindset is rooted in emotions like defensiveness or tribalism, scout mindset is, too. 
It's just rooted in different emotions. 
For example, scouts are curious. 
They're more likely to say they feel pleasure when they learn new information or an itch to solve a puzzle. 
They're more likely to feel intrigued when they encounter something that contradicts their expectations. 
Scouts also have different values. 
They're more likely to say they think it's virtuous to test your own beliefs, and they're less likely to say that someone who changes his mind seems weak. 
And above all, scouts are grounded, which means their self-worth as a person isn't tied to how right or wrong they are about any particular topic. 
So they can believe that capital punishment works. 
If studies come out showing that it doesn't, they can say, "Huh. Looks like I might be wrong. Doesn't mean I'm bad or stupid." 
This cluster of traits is what researchers have found — and I've also found anecdotally — predicts good judgment. 
And the key takeaway I want to leave you with about those traits is that they're primarily not about how smart you are or about how much you know. 
In fact, they don't correlate very much with IQ at all. 
They're about how you feel. 
There's a quote that I keep coming back to, by Saint-Exupéry. 
He's the author of "" The Little Prince. "" He said, "" If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood and give orders and distribute the work. 
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. "" In other words, I claim, if we really want to improve our judgment as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics, even though those things are quite valuable. 
But what we most need to use those principles well is scout mindset. 
We need to change the way we feel. 
We need to learn how to feel proud instead of ashamed when we notice we might have been wrong about something. 
We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs. 
So the question I want to leave you with is: What do you most yearn for? 
Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? 
Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So it was the fall of 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt needed a little break from the White House, so he took a train to Mississippi to do a little black bear hunting outside of a town called Smedes. 
The first day of the hunt, they didn't see a single bear, so it was a big bummer for everyone, but the second day, the dogs cornered one after a really long chase, but by that point, the president had given up and gone back to camp for lunch, so his hunting guide cracked the animal on the top of the head with the butt of his rifle, and then tied it up to a tree and started tooting away on his bugle to call Roosevelt back so he could have the honor of shooting it. 
The bear was a female. 
It was dazed, injured, severely underweight, a little mangy-looking, and when Roosevelt saw this animal tied up to the tree, he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it. 
He felt like that would go against his code as a sportsman. 
A few days later, the scene was memorialized in a political cartoon back in Washington. 
It was called "" Drawing a Line in Mississippi, "" and it showed Roosevelt with his gun down and his arm out, sparing the bear's life, and the bear was sitting on its hind legs with these two big, frightened, wide eyes and little ears pricked up at the top of its head. 
It looked really helpless, like you just wanted to sweep it up into your arms and reassure it. 
It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time, but if you go looking for the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: It's a teddy bear. 
And this is how the teddy bear was born. 
Essentially, toymakers took the bear from the cartoon, turned it into a plush toy, and then named it after President Roosevelt — Teddy's bear. 
And I do feel a little ridiculous that I'm up here on this stage and I'm choosing to use my time to tell you about a 100-year-old story about the invention of a squishy kid's toy, but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear, inside that story is a more important story, a story about how dramatically our ideas about nature can change, and also about how, on the planet right now, the stories that we tell are dramatically changing nature. 
Because think about the teddy bear. 
For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit, because bears are so cute and cuddly, and who wouldn't want to give one to their kids to play with, but the truth is that in 1902, bears weren't cute and cuddly. 
I mean, they looked the same, but no one thought of them that way. 
In 1902, bears were monsters. 
Bears were something that frickin 'terrified kids. 
For generations at that point, the bear had been a shorthand for all the danger that people were encountering on the frontier, and the federal government was actually systematically exterminating bears and lots of other predators too, like coyotes and wolves. 
These animals, they were being demonized. 
They were called murderers because they killed people's livestock. 
One government biologist, he explained this war on animals like the bear by saying that they no longer had a place in our advancing civilization, and so we were just clearing them out of the way. 
In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolves had been slaughtered. 
The grizzly would soon be wiped out from 95 percent of its original territory, and whereas once there had been 30 million bison moving across the plains, and you would have these stories of trains having to stop for four or five hours so that these thick, living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks, now, by 1902, there were maybe less than 100 left in the wild. 
And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was born into the middle of this great spasm of extermination, and you can see it as a sign that maybe some people deep down were starting to feel conflicted about all that killing. 
America still hated the bear and feared it, but all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a great big hug. 
So this is something that I've been really curious about in the last few years. 
How do we imagine animals, how do we think and feel about them, and how do their reputations get written and then rewritten in our minds? 
We're here living in the eye of a great storm of extinction where half the species on the planet could be gone by the end of the century, and so why is it that we come to care about some of those species and not others? 
Well, there's a new field, a relatively new field of social science that started looking at these questions and trying to unpack the powerful and sometimes pretty schizophrenic relationships that we have to animals, and I spent a lot of time looking through their academic journals, and all I can really say is that their findings are astonishingly wide-ranging. 
So some of my favorites include that the more television a person watches in Upstate New York, the more he or she is afraid of being attacked by a black bear. 
If you show a tiger to an American, they're much more likely to assume that it's female and not male. 
In a study where a fake snake and a fake turtle were put on the side of the road, drivers hit the snake much more often than the turtle, and about three percent of drivers who hit the fake animals seemed to do it on purpose. 
Women are more likely than men to get a "" magical feeling "" when they see dolphins in the surf. 
Sixty-eight percent of mothers with "high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem" identified with the dancing cats in a commercial for Purina. (Laughter) Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons but also much, much stupider. 
Wild turkeys are seen as only slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs. 
So some of this is physical, right? 
We tend to sympathize more with animals that look like us, and especially that resemble human babies, so with big, forward-facing eyes and circular faces, kind of a roly-poly posture. 
This is why, if you get a Christmas card from, like, your great aunt in Minnesota, there's usually a fuzzy penguin chick on it, and not something like a Glacier Bay wolf spider. 
But it's not all physical, right? 
There's a cultural dimension to how we think about animals, and we're telling stories about these animals, and like all stories, they are shaped by the times and the places in which we're telling them. 
So think about that moment back in 1902 again where a ferocious bear became a teddy bear. 
What was the context? Well, America was urbanizing. 
For the first time, nearly a majority of people lived in cities, so there was a growing distance between us and nature. 
There was a safe space where we could reconsider the bear and romanticize it. 
Nature could only start to seem this pure and adorable because we didn't have to be afraid of it anymore. 
And you can see that cycle playing out again and again with all kinds of animals. 
It seems like we're always stuck between demonizing a species and wanting to wipe it out, and then when we get very close to doing that, empathizing with it as an underdog and wanting to show it compassion. 
So we exert our power, but then we're unsettled by how powerful we are. 
So for example, this is one of probably thousands of letters and drawings that kids sent to the Bush administration, begging it to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, and these were sent back in the mid-2000s, when awareness of climate change was suddenly surging. 
We kept seeing that image of a polar bear stranded on a little ice floe looking really morose. 
I spent days looking through these files. 
I really love them. This one's my favorite. 
If you can see, it's a polar bear that's drowning and then it's also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark. 
This one came from a kid named Fritz, and he's actually got a solution to climate change. 
He's got it all worked out to an ethanol-based solution. 
He says, "" I feel bad about the polar bears. 
I like polar bears. 
Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz. "" So 200 years ago, you would have Arctic explorers writing about polar bears leaping into their boats and trying to devour them, even if they lit the bear on fire, but these kids don't see the polar bear that way, and actually they don't even see the polar bear the way that I did back in the '80s. 
I mean, we thought of these animals as mysterious and terrifying lords of the Arctic. 
But look now how quickly that climate change has flipped the image of the animal in our minds. 
It's gone from that bloodthirsty man-killer to this delicate, drowning victim, and when you think about it, that's kind of the conclusion to the story that the teddy bear started telling back in 1902, because back then, America had more or less conquered its share of the continent. 
We were just getting around to polishing off these last wild predators. 
Now, society's reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world, and it's made even these, the most remote, the most powerful bears on the planet, seem like adorable and blameless victims. 
But you know, there's also a postscript to the teddy bear story that not a lot of people talk about. 
We're going to talk about it, because even though it didn't really take long after Roosevelt's hunt in 1902 for the toy to become a full-blown craze, most people figured it was a fad, it was a sort of silly political novelty item and it would go away once the president left office, and so by 1909, when Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, was getting ready to be inaugurated, the toy industry was on the hunt for the next big thing. 
They didn't do too well. 
That January, Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta, and for days in advance, the big news was the menu. 
They were going to be serving him a Southern specialty, a delicacy, really, called possum and taters. 
So you would have a whole opossum roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, and then sometimes they'd leave the big tail on it like a big, meaty noodle. 
The one brought to Taft's table weighed 18 pounds. 
So after dinner, the orchestra started to play, and the guests burst into song, and all of a sudden, Taft was surprised with the presentation of a gift from a group of local supporters, and this was a stuffed opossum toy, all beady-eyed and bald-eared, and it was a new product they were putting forward to be the William Taft presidency's answer to Teddy Roosevelt's teddy bear. 
They were calling it the "" billy possum. "" Within 24 hours, the Georgia Billy Possum Company was up and running, brokering deals for these things nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times announced, very confidently, "" The teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with billy possum. "" So from that point, there was a fit of opossum fever. 
There were billy possum postcards, billy possum pins, billy possum pitchers for your cream at coffee time. 
There were smaller billy possums on a stick that kids could wave around like flags. 
But even with all this marketing, the life of the billy possum turned out to be just pathetically brief. 
The toy was an absolute flop, and it was almost completely forgotten by the end of the year, and what that means is that the billy possum didn't even make it to Christmastime, which when you think about it is a special sort of tragedy for a toy. 
So we can explain that failure two ways. 
The first, well, it's pretty obvious. 
I'm going to go ahead and say it out loud anyway: Opossums are hideous. (Laughter) But maybe more importantly is that the story of the billy possum was all wrong, especially compared to the backstory of the teddy bear. 
Think about it: for most of human's evolutionary history, what's made bears impressive to us has been their complete independence from us. 
It's that they live these parallel lives as menaces and competitors. 
By the time Roosevelt went hunting in Mississippi, that stature was being crushed, and the animal that he had roped to a tree really was a symbol for all bears. 
Whether those animals lived or died now was entirely up to the compassion or the indifference of people. 
That said something really ominous about the future of bears, but it also said something very unsettling about who we'd become, if the survival of even an animal like that was up to us now. 
So now, a century later, if you're at all paying attention to what's happening in the environment, you feel that discomfort so much more intensely. 
We're living now in an age of what scientists have started to call "" conservation reliance, "" and what that term means is that we've disrupted so much that nature can't possibly stand on its own anymore, and most endangered species are only going to survive if we stay out there in the landscape riggging the world around them in their favor. 
So we've gone hands-on and we can't ever take our hands off, and that's a hell of a lot of work. 
Right now, we're training condors not to perch on power lines. 
We teach whooping cranes to migrate south for the winter behind little ultra-light airplanes. 
We're out there feeding plague vaccine to ferrets. 
We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones. 
So we've gone from annihilating species to micromanaging the survival of a lot of species indefinitely, and which ones? 
Well, the ones that we've told compelling stories about, the ones we've decided ought to stick around. 
The line between conservation and domestication is blurred. 
So what I've been saying is that the stories that we tell about wild animals are so subjective they can be irrational or romanticized or sensationalized. 
Sometimes they just have nothing to do with the facts. 
But in a world of conservation reliance, those stories have very real consequences, because now, how we feel about an animal affects its survival more than anything that you read about in ecology textbooks. 
Storytelling matters now. 
Emotion matters. 
Our imagination has become an ecological force. 
And so maybe the teddy bear worked in part because the legend of Roosevelt and that bear in Mississippi was kind of like an allegory of this great responsibility that society was just beginning to face up to back then. 
It would be another 71 years before the Endangered Species Act was passed, but really, here's its whole ethos boiled down into something like a scene you'd see in a stained glass window. 
The bear is a helpless victim tied to a tree, and the president of the United States decided to show it some mercy. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) [Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton] 

(Aquatic noises) So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo, about 60 feet below the surface. 
NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts, and last year, they invited us along for the ride. 
All the footage was taken from our open ROV, which is a robot that we built in our garage. 
So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle, which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside. 
It's open source, meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online, allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design. 
It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic. 
So ROVs aren't new. 
They've been around for decades. 
Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans. 
Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction. 
What we've built isn't unique. 
It's how we've built it that's really unique. 
So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started. 
So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras. 
We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery, and we wanted to go up there. 
Unfortunately, we didn't have any money and we didn't have any tools to do it. 
So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot, but we didn't have all the parts figured out, so we did what anybody would do in our situation: we asked the Internet for help. 
More specifically, we created this website, openROV.com, and shared our intentions and our plans For the first few months, it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums, but pretty soon, we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists, and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do. 
We kept working on it. We learned a lot. 
We kept prototyping, and eventually, we decided we wanted to go to the cave. We were ready. 
So about that time, our little expedition became quite a story, and it got picked up in The New York Times. 
And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves. 
So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter, and when we did, we raised our funding goal in about two hours, and all of a sudden, had this money to make these kits. 
But then we had to learn how to make them. 
I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing. 
So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation. 
But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made, thanks a lot to TechShop, which was a big help to us, and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year, so it was just a few months ago. 
But we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world, including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica. 
We've also learned the penguins love robots. 
(Laughter) So we're still publishing all the designs online, encouraging anyone to build these themselves. 
That's the only way that we could have done this. 
By being open source, we've created this distributed R & D network, and we're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart. 
But the actual robot is really only half the story. 
The real potential, the long term potential, is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe. 
What can we discover when there's thousands of these devices roaming the seas? 
So you're probably all wondering: the cave. 
Did you find the gold? 
Well, we didn't find any gold, but we decided that what we found was much more valuable. 
It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration. 
It's something that's not limited to the James Camerons of the world, but something that we're all participating in. 
It's an underwater world we're all exploring together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

This is a work in process, based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine. 
(Music) (Video) Narrator: On this planet, 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity, refrigeration or stored fuels. 
This is a problem. 
It impacts: the spread of disease, the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life. 
So here's the plan: inexpensive refrigeration that doesn't use electricity, propane, gas, kerosene or consumables. 
Time for some thermodynamics. 
And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator. 
Adam Grosser: So 29 years ago, I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration. 
It's one of those things that stuck in my head. 
It was a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. 
And it was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carre, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools of the time. 
This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall in 1928, and it was a really neat idea, and I'll get to why it didn't work, but here's how it works. 
There's two spheres and they're separated in distance. 
One has a working fluid, water and ammonia, and the other is a condenser. 
You heat up one side, the hot side. 
The ammonia evaporates and it re-condenses in the other side. 
You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia re-evaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side, it creates a powerful cooling effect. 
So, it was a great idea that didn't work at all: it blew up. 
Because using ammonia you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong. 
It topped 400 psi. The ammonia was toxic. It sprayed everywhere. 
But it was kind of an interesting thought. 
So, the great thing about 2006 is there's a lot of really great computational work you can do. 
So, we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved — a lot of computational fluid dynamics. 
We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong. 
We found some non-toxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. 
Brought in a team from the U.K. — there's a lot of great refrigeration people, it turned out, in the U.K. — and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low pressure, non-toxic refrigerator. 
So, this is the way it works. 
You put it on a cooking fire. 
Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood. 
It heats up for about 30 minutes, cools for an hour. 
Put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours. 
It looks like this. This is the fifth prototype. It's not quite done. 
Weighs about eight pounds, and this is the way it works. 
You put it into a 15-liter vessel, about three gallons, and it'll cool it down to just above freezing — three degrees above freezing — for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment. It's really cheap. 
We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars, in low volumes for about 40 dollars. 
And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have. 
Thank you. 

So my name is Taylor Wilson. 
I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am. 
And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point, that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to. 
So nuclear fusion is our energy future. 
And the second point, making the case that kids can really change the world. 
So you may ask — (Applause) You may ask me, well how do you know what our energy future is? 
Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old. 
That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor. 
I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old. 
I decided I wanted to make a star. 
Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion. 
I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy. 
Well it doesn't break even. 
It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in, but it still does some pretty cool stuff. 
And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno. 
And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it. 
So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun. 
And I'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together, and in the process it has some byproducts, and I utilize those byproducts. 
So this previous year, I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. 
I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has. 
For hundreds of dollars, I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
I built this in my garage. 
(Applause) And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes. 
Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes. 
So that's my fusion reactor in the background there. 
That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor. 
Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage, so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians. 
So maybe I don't want to admit to that. 
This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world. 
And this is me with President Obama, showing him my Homeland Security research. 
(Applause) So in about seven years of doing nuclear research, I started out with a dream to make a "" star in a jar, "" a star in my garage, and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world, and I think other kids can too. 
So thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world. 
(Laughter) Now I know that seems ludicrous. I know that seems ludicrous. 
So I went back to the store and said to the owner, "I love the shoes, but I hate the laces." 
As it turns out — (Laughter) there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form. 
If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe. 
Pull the knot. 
Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out — something you already know — that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else. 

I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense — a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. 
And some of you may argue, "Well, don't today's cell phones do that already?" 
When you meet someone here at TED — and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year — you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, "" Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you? "" Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make. 
So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. 
And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. 
And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far, which is still very much a work in process. 
I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf — and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time. 
And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. 
And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. 
But if you want a more stylish version, you could also paint your nails in different colors. 
And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. 
And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures. 
And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. 
But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk up to any surface, including your hand, if nothing else is available, and interact with this projected data. 
The device is completely portable, and can be — (Applause) (Applause ends) So, one important difference is that it's totally mobile. 
Another even more important difference is that in mass production, this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging — could look a lot more stylish than this version that I'm wearing around my neck. 
So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper towels. 
Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically responsible choice. 
This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. 
And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book — reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. 
If he turns to a particular page, he finds an annotation by maybe an expert or a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. 
(Laughter) You can get video annotations of the events that you're reading about. 
(Laughter) As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. 
And, if you need to know what the current time is, it's as simple as drawing a watch — (Laughter) (Applause) on your arm. 
So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. 
(Applause and cheering) (Applause ends) He does deserve a lot of applause, because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. 
Thank you. 

The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages. 
It, however, is enormous in both scale and importance. 
Look, you all are very well traveled; this is TEDGlobal after all. 
But I do hope to take you to some places you've never been to before. 
So, let's start off in China. 
This photo was taken two weeks ago. 
Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband's shoulders has just graduated from high school. 
(Laughter) But this is Tiananmen Square. 
Many of you have been there. It's not the real China. 
Let me take you to the real China. 
This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. 
Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. 
She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. 
They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. 
And they share this great splendor with a very large pig. 
Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, "" We're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. 
You're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. 
Why would we waste this money on you? "" This is what happens to girls in remote areas. 
Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. 
She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors. 
We wrote about her in The New York Times. 
We got a flood of donations — mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 — really nice guy. 
We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. 
He was delighted. 
He thought, "" Oh, I can renovate the school. 
I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. 
So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. 
She went to high school. 
She went to vocational school for accounting. 
She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. 
She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. 
She sent money back to her family. 
They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig. 
What we saw was a natural experiment. 
It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls' education. 
And over the years, as we followed Dai Manju, we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. 
She not only changed her own dynamic, she changed her household, she changed her family, her village. 
The village became a real standout. 
Of course, most of China was flourishing at the time, but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China. 
And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of "" Half the Sky. "" And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity. 
In the 19th century, it was slavery. 
In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. 
The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender. 
So some of you may be thinking, "" Gosh, that's hyperbole. 
She's exaggerating. "" Well, let me ask you this question. 
How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world? 
Let me take a poll. How many of you think there are more males in the world? 
Hands up, please. 
How many of you think — a few — how many of you there are more females in the world? 
Okay, most of you. 
Well, you know this latter group, you're wrong. 
There are, true enough, in Europe and the West, when women and men have equal access to food and health care, there are more women, we live longer. 
But in most of the rest of the world, that's not the case. 
In fact, demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population. 
And, you know, it happens for several reasons. 
For instance, in the last half-century, more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century. 
Sometimes it's also because of the sonogram. 
Girls get aborted before they're even born when there are scarce resources. 
This girl here, for instance, is in a feeding center in Ethiopia. 
The entire center was filled with girls like her. 
What's remarkable is that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. 
In India, in the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast, and the breast shows no son preference. 
From one to five, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India. 
The second tenet of "" Half the Sky "" is that, let's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all, and just on a purely practical level, we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force. 
Poverty, for instance. 
There are three reasons why this is the case. 
For one, overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty. 
And you know, when you educate a boy, his family tends to have fewer kids, but only slightly. 
When you educate a girl, she tends to have significantly fewer kids. 
The second reason is it has to do with spending. 
It's kind of like the dirty, little secret of poverty, which is that, not only do poor people take in very little income, but also, the income that they take in, they don't spend it very wisely, and unfortunately, most of that spending is done by men. 
So research has shown, if you look at people who live under two dollars a day — one metric of poverty — two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here, in education. 
20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks — and prostitution and festivals. 
If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket, you would have a transformative effect. 
The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution, not the problem. 
You need to use scarce resources. 
It's a waste of resources if you don't use someone like Dai Manju. 
Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia. 
He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves. 
However, two-thirds of the way there was a barrier. 
On this side was men, and then the barrier, and this side was women. 
And someone from this side of the room got up and said, "" Mr. Gates, we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology. 
Do you think we'll make it? "" So Bill Gates, as he was staring out at the audience, he said, "" If you're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country, there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10. "" So here is Bill of Arabia. 
(Laughter) So what would some of the specific challenges look like? 
I would say, on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking. 
And I'll just say two things about this. 
The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. 
Now, modern slavery: according to State Department rough statistics, there are about 800,000 — 10 times the number — that are trafficked across international borders. 
And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders, which is a substantial portion. 
And if you look at another factor, another contrast, a slave back then is worth about $40,000 in today's money. 
Today, you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars, which means she's actually more disposable. 
But you know, there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand. 
We don't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed. 
The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality. 
You know, childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event. 
In Niger, one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth. 
Around the world, one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth. 
You know, it's not as though we don't have the technological solution, but these women have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are rural and they are female. 
You know, for every woman who does die, there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury. 
And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula. 
It's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent. 
Let me tell you about Mahabuba. 
She lives in Ethiopia. 
She was married against her will at age 13. 
She got pregnant, ran to the bush to have the baby, but you know, her body was very immature, and she ended up having obstructed labor. 
The baby died, and she ended up with a fistula. 
So that meant she was incontinent; she couldn't control her wastes. 
In a word, she stank. 
The villagers thought she was cursed; they didn't know what to do with her. 
So finally, they put her at the edge of the village in a hut. 
They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night. 
That night, there was a stick in the hut. 
She fought off the hyenas with that stick. 
And the next morning, she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary, she would be saved. 
Because she had some damage to her nerves, she crawled all the way — 30 miles — to that doorstep, half dead. 
The foreign missionary opened the door, knew exactly what had happened, took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation. 
The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor, she was really clever, and they made her a nurse. 
So now, Mahabuba, she is saving the lives of hundreds, thousands, of women. 
She has become part of the solution, not the problem. 
She's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. 
I've talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. 
I've hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. 
So of course, when you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. 
With economic opportunity, it can be transformative. 
Let me tell you about Saima. 
She lives in a small village outside Lahore, Pakistan. 
And at the time, she was miserable. 
She was beaten every single day by her husband, who was unemployed. 
He was kind of a gambler type — and unemployable, therefore — and took his frustrations out on her. 
Well, when she had her second daughter, her mother in-law told her son, "" I think you'd better get a second wife. 
Saima's not going to produce you a son. "" This is when she had her second daughter. 
At the time, there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan. 
Saima took that money, and she started an embroidery business. 
The merchants liked her embroidery; it sold very well, and they kept asking for more. 
And when she couldn't produce enough, she hired other women in the village. 
Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business. 
And then, when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace, she needed someone to help her do the transport, so she hired her husband. 
So now they're in it together. 
He does the transportation and distribution, and she does the production and sourcing. 
And now they have a third daughter, and the daughters, all of them, are being tutored in education because Saima knows what's really important. 
Which brings me to the final element, which is education. 
Larry Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, once said that, "" It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls' education. "" Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira. 
Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border, and like Dai Manju, she didn't go to school. 
Actually, she had never been to school, not to a lick, one day. 
Her parents, again, said, "" Why should we spend the money on her? 
She's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth. "" Well, it just so happens, at that time, there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut. 
They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International. 
Heifer sent two goats to Africa. 
One of them ended up with Beatrice's parents, and that goat had twins. 
The twins started producing milk. 
They sold the milk for cash. 
The cash started accumulating, and pretty soon the parents said, "You know, we've got enough money. Let's send Beatrice to school." 
So at nine years of age, Beatrice started in first grade — after all, she'd never been to a lick of school — with a six year-old. 
No matter, she was just delighted to be in school. 
She rocketed to the top of her class. 
She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village, ever, to come to the United States on scholarship. 
Two years ago, she graduated from Connecticut College. 
On the day of her graduation, she said, "" I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat. "" (Laughter) And that goat was $120. 
So you see how transformative little bits of help can be. 
But I want to give you a reality check. 
Look: U.S. aid, helping people is not easy, and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid. 
There's Bill Easterly's book. 
There's a book called "" Dead Aid. "" You know, the criticism is fair; it isn't easy. 
You know, people say how half of all water well projects, a year later, are failed. 
When I was in Zimbabwe, we were touring a place with the village chief — he wanted to raise money for a secondary school — and there was some construction a few yards away, and I said, "" What's that? "" He sort of mumbled. 
Turns out that it's a failed irrigation project. 
A few yards away was a failed chicken coop. 
One year, all the chickens died, and no one wanted to put the chickens in there. 
It's true, but we think that you don't through the baby out with the bathwater; you actually improve. 
You learn from your mistakes, and you continuously improve. 
We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement. 
And a movement of men and women is what's needed to bring about social change, change that will address this great moral challenge. 
So then, I ask, what's in it for you? 
You're probably asking that. Why should you care? 
I will just leave you with two things. 
One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of — which most of us, all of us, here in this room do — research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. 
One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself. 
And the second thing, it's an anecdote that I'll leave you with. 
And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur. 
Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur, seeing things that no human being should see. 
Throughout her time there, she was strong, she was steadfast. 
She never broke down. 
And then she came back to the United States and was on break, Christmas break. 
She was in her grandmother's backyard, and she saw something that made her break down in tears. 
What that was was a bird feeder. 
And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted, where we not only can feed, clothe and house ourselves, but also provide for wild birds so they don't go hungry in the winter. 
And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility. 
And so, like her, you, me, we have all won the lottery of life. 
And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? 
So, here's the cause. 
Join the movement. 
Feel happier and help save the world. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos. 
It's true. 
So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters. 
We all want to be stars — celebrities, singers, comedians — and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do. 
But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture. 
Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday. 
But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 
And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment. 
So how does it happen? 
Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness. 
All right, let's go. 
(Video) Bear Vasquez: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 
Oh, my God! 
Wooo! 
Ohhhhh, wowwww! 
KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park. 
In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times. 
(Laughter) This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer. 
But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear. 
He just wanted to share a rainbow. 
Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear. 
(Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact. 
And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January. 
So what happened here? 
Jimmy Kimmel actually. 
Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become. 
Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience. 
(Video) Rebecca Black: ♫ It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. ♫ ♫ Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. ♫ ♫ Friday, Friday. Gettin 'down on Friday. ♫ KA: So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope. 
Rebecca Black's "" Friday "" is one of the most popular videos of the year. 
It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year. 
This is a chart of what it looked like. 
And similar to "" Double Rainbow, "" it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere. 
So what happened on this day? 
Well it was a Friday, this is true. 
And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays. 
(Laughter) But what about this day, this one particular Friday? 
Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about. 
Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter. 
But what's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience, accelerating the process. 
And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it. 
And now there are 10,000 parodies of "" Friday "" on YouTube. 
Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week. 
(Laughter) Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon — either by spreading it or by doing something new with it. 
(Music) So "" Nyan Cat "" is a looped animation with looped music. 
It's this, just like this. 
It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year. 
And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times. 
(Laughter) Even cats were watching this video. (Laughter) 
Cats were watching other cats watch this video. (Laughter) 
But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture. 
There were remixes. 
(Laughter) Someone made an old timey version. (Laughter) 
And then it went international. (Laughter) 
An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of. 
Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate. 
And who could have predicted any of this? 
Who could have predicted "" Double Rainbow "" or Rebecca Black or "" Nyan Cat? "" What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it? 
In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have. 
When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested. 
(Video) Casey Niestat: So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane. 
(Laughter) KA: By being totally surprising and humorous, Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times. 
And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively. 
And so it all brings us to one big question... 
(Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean? 
Ohhhh. 
(Laughter) KA: What does it mean? 
Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity. 
I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube. 
No one has to green-light your idea. 
And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture. 
And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. 
As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "" I collect bad wines. "" Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. 
The second thing I learned that day — and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot — (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. 
In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. 
I'm saying, "" Please blow up. "" I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. 
And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. 
It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. 
I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane — and please don't — but imagine, and how would you change? 

As a software developer and technologist, I've worked on a number of civic technology projects over the years. 
Civic tech is sometimes referred to as tech for good, using technology to solve humanitarian problems. 
This is in 2010 in Uganda, working on a solution that allowed local populations to avoid government surveillance on their mobile phones for expressing dissent. 
That same technology was deployed later in North Africa for similar purposes to help activists stay connected when governments were deliberately shutting off connectivity as a means of population control. 
But over the years, as I have thought about these technologies and the things that I work on, a question kind of nags in the back of my mind, which is, what if we're wrong about the virtues of technology, and if it sometimes actively hurts the communities that we're intending to help? 
The tech industry around the world tends to operate under similar assumptions that if we build great things, it will positively affect everyone. 
Eventually, these innovations will get out and find everyone. 
But that's not always the case. 
I like to call this blind championing of technology "" trickle-down techonomics, "" to borrow a phrase. (Laughter) We tend to think that if we design things for the select few, eventually those technologies will reach everyone, and that's not always the case. 
Technology and innovation behaves a lot like wealth and capital. 
They tend to consolidate in the hands of the few, and sometimes they find their way out into the hands of the many. 
And so most of you aren't tackling oppressive regimes on the weekends, so I wanted to think of a few examples that might be a little bit more relatable. 
In the world of wearables and smartphones and apps, there's a big movement to track people's personal health with applications that track the number of calories that you burn or whether you're sitting too much or walking enough. 
These technologies make patient intake in medical facilities much more efficient, and in turn, these medical facilities are starting to expect these types of efficiencies. 
As these digital tools find their way into medical rooms, and they become digitally ready, what happens to the digitally invisible? 
What does the medical experience look like for someone who doesn't have the $400 phone or watch tracking their every movement? 
In the world of finance, Bitcoin and crypto-currencies are revolutionizing the way we move money around the world, but the challenge with these technologies is the barrier to entry is incredibly high, right? 
And so the question that I ask myself is, what happens to the last community using paper notes when the rest of the world moves to digital currency? 
You can check out books from home, you can research on the way to school or from school, but these are really two big assumptions, that one, you have access at home, and two, that you have access to a mobile phone, and in Philadelphia, many kids do not. 
A final example from across the world in East Africa: there's been a huge movement to digitize land ownership rights, for a number of reasons. 
Migrant communities, older generations dying off, and ultimately poor record-keeping have led to conflicts over who owns what. 
And so there was a big movement to put all this information online, to track all the ownership of these plots of land, put them in the cloud, and give them to the communities. 
But actually, the unintended consequence of this has been that venture capitalists, investors, real estate developers, have swooped in and they've begun buying up these plots of land right out from under these communities, because they have access to the technologies and the connectivity that makes that possible. 
So that's the common thread that connects these examples, the unintended consequences of the tools and the technologies that we make. 
As engineers, as technologists, we sometimes prefer efficiency over efficacy. 
We think more about doing things than the outcomes of what we are doing. 
This needs to change. 
We have a responsibility to think about the outcomes of the technologies we build, especially as they increasingly control the world in which we live. 
In the late '90s, there was a big push for ethics in the world of investment and banking. 
I think in 2014, we're long overdue for a similar movement in the area of tech and technology. 
So, I just encourage you, as you are all thinking about the next big thing, as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as engineers, as makers, that you think about the unintended consequences of the things that you're building, because the real innovation is in finding ways to include everyone. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Today I'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle, that you can carry with you anywhere, that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes, and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity. 
But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day. 
But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts. 
So we built something. 
I've got some of the pieces in my pocket here. 
So this is the motor. 
This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour, about 30 kilometers an hour, and this battery, this battery right here has about six miles of range, or 10 kilometers, which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone. 
But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store. 
These are from remote control airplanes. 
And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently, you can really change things. 
So today we're going to show you one example of how you can use this. 
Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is, but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco. 
(Music) [6 Mile Range] [Top Speed Near 20mph] [Uphill Climbing] [Regenerative Braking] (Applause) (Cheers) So we're going to show you what this thing can do. 
It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking. 
It's incredible just how light this thing is. 
I mean, this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go. 
So I'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles. 
This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car, which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation. 
So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city, now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation. 
So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I ’ m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I ’ m talking about is Darwin ’ s strange inversion of reasoning. 
Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you. 
"" In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. 
This proposition will be found on careful examination to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin ’ s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill. "" Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. 
A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: "" Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn ’ t have a builder? Yes / No. 
Do you know of any painting that didn ’ t have a painter? Yes / No. 
Do you know of any car that didn ’ t have a maker? Yes / No. 
If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details. "" A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. 
You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. 
But Darwin shows that it ’ s just false. 
Today, though, I ’ m going to talk about Darwin ’ s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. 
It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. 
Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. 
We adore babies because they ’ re so cute. 
And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. 
This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. 
Let ’ s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it ’ s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that ’ s why we like sugar. 
Honey is sweet because we like it, not "" we like it because honey is sweet. "" There ’ s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. 
If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn ’ t see why they tasted sweet. 
You have to look in our brains to understand why they ’ re sweet. 
So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you ’ ve got it backwards; that ’ s just wrong. It ’ s the other way round. 
Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved. 
And there ’ s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. 
And it ’ s a good thing that there isn ’ t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? 
Now you might think, ah, there ’ s a solution: hallucinations. 
That would be one way of doing it, but there ’ s a quicker way. 
Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. 
That ’ s all there is to it. 
Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. 
We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn ’ t. 
If we hadn ’ t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness. 
Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. 
It wasn ’ t designed for chocolate cake. 
Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. 
The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull ’ s beak — if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. 
It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. 
What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it ’ s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. 
And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. 
There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness. 
And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here ’ s a pretty good example. 
It ’ s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. 
So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. 
And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. 
So nature works on many levels here. 
But now, if babies didn ’ t look the way they do — if babies looked like this, that ’ s what we would find adorable, that ’ s what we would find — we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. 
This is the strange inversion. 
Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it ’ s the same story, the same story. 
This is the hard one, the one that isn ’ t obvious. That ’ s why I leave it to the end. 
And I won ’ t be able to say too much about it. 
But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done — it ’ s dirty work, somebody ’ s got to do it — is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. 
Now, I think we've found the answer — I and a few of my colleagues. 
It ’ s a neural system that ’ s wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. 
Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. 
Now I ’ m not going to have time to spell it all out, but I ’ ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. 
And what we ’ re doing is we ’ re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke — now it ’ s not funny... oh, now it ’ s funnier... 
now we ’ ll turn a little bit more... now it ’ s not funny — in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain. 
Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. 
He ’ s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we ’ re putting this together into a book. 
Thank you very much. 

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. 
So allow me to tell you about it. 
So I have a brother, Gavin. 
When this whole shebang happened, he was four. 
He loved to cook. 
He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. 
He wanted to be a chef really badly. 
And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? 
I mean, we all had those when we were little. 
And he wanted one so badly. 
But then he started to realize something. 
In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. 
And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? 
So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. 
And this discouraged my brother a lot. 
He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. 
Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. 
And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. 
And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. 
Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. 
And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. 
So this petition started to take off — humongously fast, you have no idea. 
I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. 
In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, needless to say, it was crazy. 
Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. 
It was literally one of the best moments of my life. 
It was like "" Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "" That thing was amazing. 
What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. 
I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. 
People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. 
And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? 
So, let's see. 
From user name Liquidsore29 — interesting user names we have here — "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." 
Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. 
How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." 
From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." 
So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. 
It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? 
But then I started to realize something. 
Haters gonna hate. 
Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. 
So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. 
I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. 
And you can make that change. 
You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. 
And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. 
Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. 
It takes guts to stand out like that. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. 
Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts — three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. 
So a movement must be public. 
Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. 
Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. 
(Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. 
So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. 
The biggest lesson, if you noticed — did you catch it? — is that leadership is over-glorified. 
And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. 
And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. 
(Applause) 

Humanity takes center stage at TED, but I would like to add a voice for the animals, whose bodies and minds and spirits shaped us. 
Some years ago, it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver. 
His name is Jimmy Smith, and he shared a story with me that is told among his people, who call themselves the Kwikwasut'inuxw. 
Once upon a time, he told me, all animals on Earth were one. 
Even though they look different on the outside, inside, they're all the same, and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity. 
When they arrived, they would all take off their skins. 
Raven shed his feathers, bear his fur, and salmon her scales, and then, they would dance. 
But one day, a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand. 
Embarrassed, the animals fled, and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way. 
The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities, all animals are one, has been a powerful inspiration to me. 
I like to get past the fur, the feathers and the scales. 
I want to get under the skin. 
No matter whether I'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog, my goal is to connect us with them, eye to eye. 
You may wonder, do I ever photograph people? 
Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions. 
You just have to learn how to look past their disguise. 
As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. 
When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are. 
As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. 
As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life. 
But as humans with hearts, we can all rejoice in the unity of life, and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave. 
Let's find a way to join the dance. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to show you how terrorism actually interacts with our daily life. 
15 years ago I received a phone call from a friend. 
At the time he was looking after the rights of political prisoners in Italian jails. 
He asked me if I wanted to interview the Red Brigades. 
Now, as many of you may remember, the Red Brigades was a terrorist, Marxist organization which was very active in Italy from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. 
As part of their strategy the Red Brigades never spoke with anybody, not even with their lawyers. 
They sat in silence through their trails, waving occasionally at family and friends. 
In 1993 they declared the end of the armed struggle. 
And they drew a list of people with whom they would talk, and tell their story. 
And I was one of those people. 
When I asked my friend why the Red Brigades want to talk to me, he said that the female members of the organization had actually supported my name. 
In particular, one person had put it forward. 
She was my childhood friend. 
She had joined the Red Brigades and became a leader of the organization. 
Naturally, I didn't know that until the day she was arrested. 
In fact, I read it in the newspaper. 
At the time of the phone call I just had a baby, I successfully completed a management buyout to the company I was working with, and the last thing I wanted to do was to go back home and touring the high-security prisons. 
But this is exactly what I did because I wanted to know what had turned my best friend into a terrorist, and why she'd never tried to recruit me. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So, this is exactly what I did. 
Now, I found the answer very quickly. 
I actually had failed the psychological profiling of a terrorist. 
The center committee of the Red Brigades had judged me too single-minded and too opinionated to become a good terrorist. 
My friend, on the other hand, she was a good terrorist because she was very good at following orders. 
She also embraced violence. 
Because she believed that the only way to unblock what, at the time, was known as a blocked democracy, Italy, a country run by the same party for 35 years was the arms struggle. 
At the same time, while I was interviewing the Red Brigades, I also discovered that their life was not ruled by politics or ideology, but actually was ruled by economics. 
They were constantly short of cash. 
They were constantly searching for cash. 
Now, contrary to what many people believe, terrorism is actually a very expensive business. 
I'll give you an idea. 
In the 1970s, the turnover of the Red Brigades on a yearly basis was seven million dollars. 
This is roughly between 100 and 150 million, today. 
Now, you know, if you live underground it's really hard to produce this amount of money. 
But this also explains why, when I was interviewing the Red Brigades, and then, later on, other arms organizations, including members of al-Zarqawi group in the Middle East, everybody was extremely reluctant to talk about ideology, or politics. 
Because they had no idea. 
The political vision of a terrorist organization is decided by the leadership, which, generally, is never more than five to seven people. 
All the others do, day in and day out, is search for money. 
Once, for example, I was interviewing this part-timer from the Red Brigades. 
It was a psychiatrist. He loved sailing. 
He was a really keen sailor. And he had this beautiful boat. 
And he told me that the best time of his life was when he was a member of the Red Brigades and he went sailing, every summer, back and forth from Lebanon, where he would pick up Soviet weapons from the PLO, and then carry them all the way to Sardinia where the other arms organization from Europe would go and take their share of the arms. 
For that service the Red Brigades were actually paid a fee, which went to fund their organization. 
So, because I am a trained economist and I think in economic terms, all of the sudden I thought, maybe there is something here. 
Maybe there is a link, a commercial link, between one organization and another one. 
But it was only when I interviewed Mario Moretti, the head of the Red Brigades, the man who kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, Italian former prime minister, that I finally realized that terrorism is actually business. 
I was having lunch with him in a high-security prison in Italy. 
And as we were eating, I had the distinct feeling that I was back in the city of London, having lunch with a fellow banker or an economist. 
This guy thought in the same way I did. 
So, I decided that I wanted to investigate the economics of terrorism. 
Naturally, nobody wanted to fund my research. 
In fact, I think many people thought that I was a bit crazy. 
You know, that woman that goes around to foundations asking for money, thinking about the economics of terrorism. 
So, in the end, I took a decision that, in retrospect, did change my life. 
I sold my company, and funded the research myself. 
And what I discovered is this parallel reality, another international economic system, which runs parallel to our own, which has been created by arms organizations since the end of World War II. 
And what is even more shocking is that this system has followed, step by step, the evolution of our own system, of our Western capitalism. 
And there are three main stages. 
The first one is the state sponsor of terrorism. 
The second one is the privatization of terrorism. 
And the third, of course, is the globalization of terrorism. 
So, state sponsor of terrorism, feature of the Cold War. 
This is when the two superpowers were fighting a war by proxy, along the periphery of the sphere of influence, fully funding arms organizations. 
A mix of legal and illegal activities is used. 
So, the link between crime and terror is established very early on. 
And here is the best example, the Contras in Nicaragua, created by the CIA, legally funded by the U.S. Congress, illegally funded by the Reagan administration via covert operation, for example, the Iran-Contra Affair. 
Then comes the late 1970s, early '80s, and some groups successfully carry out the privatization of terrorism. 
So, they gain independence from the sponsor, and start funding themselves. 
Now, again we see a mix of legal and illegal activities. 
So, Arafat used to get a percentage of the smuggling of hashish from Bekáa Valley, which is the valley between Lebanon and Syria. 
And the IRA, which control the private transportation system in Northern Ireland, did exactly the same thing. 
So, every single time that somebody got into a taxi in Belfast without knowing, actually, was funding the IRA. 
But the great change came, of course, with globalization and deregulation. 
This is when arms organization were able to link up, also financially, with each other. 
But above all, they started to do serious business with the world of crime. 
And together they money-laundered their dirty business through the same channel. 
This is when we see the birth of the transnational arms organization Al Qaeda. 
This is an organization that can raise money across border. 
But also that is able to carry out attacks in more than one country. 
Now, deregulation also brought back rogue economics. 
So what is rogue economics? 
Rogue economics is a force which is constantly lurking in the background of history. 
It comes back at times of great transformation, globalization being one of those transformations. 
It is at this times in which politics actually loses control of the economy, and the economy becomes a rogue force working against us. 
It has happened before in history. 
It has happened with the fall of the Roman Empire. 
It has happened with Industrial Revolution. 
And it actually happened again, with the fall of the Berlin wall. 
Now, I calculated how big was this international economic system composed by crime, terror, and illegal economy, before 9-11. 
And it is a staggering 1.5 trillion dollars. 
It is trillions, it's not billions. 
This is about twice the GDP of the United Kingdom, soon will be more, considering where this country is going. 
(Laughter) Now, until 9-11, the bulk of all this money flew into the U.S. economy because the bulk of the money was denominated in U.S. dollars and the money laundering was taking place inside the United States. 
The entry point, of course, of most of this money were the off-shore facilities. 
So, this was a vital injection of cash into the U.S. economy. 
Now, when I went to look at the figures of the U.S. money supply, the U.S. money supply is the amount of dollars that the Federal Reserve prints every year in order to satisfy the increase in the demand for dollars, which, of course, reflects the growth of the economy. 
So, when I went to look at those figures, I noted that since the late 1960s a growing number of these dollars was actually leaving the United States, never to come back. 
These were money taken out in suitcases or in containers, in cash of course. 
These were money taken out by criminals and money launderers. 
These were money taken out to fund the growth of the terror, illegal and criminal economy. 
So, you see, what is the relationship? 
The United States actually is a country that is the reserve currency of the world. 
What does it mean? That means that it has a privilege that other countries do not have. 
It can borrow against the total amount of dollars in circulation in the world. 
This privilege is called seigniorage. 
No other country can do that. 
All the other countries, for example the United Kingdom, can borrow only against the amount of money in circulation inside its own borders. 
So, here is the implication of the relationship between the worlds of crime, terror, and illegal economy, and our economy. 
The U.S. in the 1990s was borrowing against the growth of the terror, illegal and criminal economy. 
This is how close we are with this world. 
Now, this situation changed, of course, after 9-11, because George Bush launched the War on Terror. 
Part of the War on Terror was the introduction of the Patriot Act. 
Now, many of you know that the Patriot Act is a legislation that greatly reduces the liberties of Americans in order to protect them against terrorism. 
But there is a section of the Patriot Act which refers specifically to finance. 
And it is, in fact, an anti-money-laundering legislation. 
What the Patriot Act did was to prohibit U.S. bank, and U.S.-registered foreign banks from doing any businesses with off-shore facilities. 
It closed that door between the money laundering in dollars, and the U.S. economy. 
It also gave the U.S. monetary authorities the right to monitor any dollar transaction taking place anywhere in the world. 
Now, you can imagine what was the reaction of the international finance and banking. 
All the bankers said to their clients, "Get out of the dollars and go and invest somewhere else." 
Now, the Euro was a newly born currency of great opportunity for business, and, of course, for investment. 
And this is what people did. 
Nobody wants the U.S. monetary authority to check their relationship, to monitor their relationship with their clientele. 
The same thing happened, of course, in the world of crime and terror. 
People simply moved their money-laundering activities away from the United States into Europe. 
Why did this happen? This happened because the Patriot Act was a unilateral legislation. 
It was introduced only in the United States. 
And it was introduced only for the U.S. dollars. 
In Europe, a similar legislation was not introduced. 
So, within six months Europe became the epicenter of the money-laundering activities of the world. 
So, this is how incredible are the relationship between the world of crime and the world of terror, and our own life. 
So, why did I tell you this story? 
I told you this story because you must understand that there is a world that goes well beyond the headlines of the newspapers, including the personal relationship that you have with friends and family. 
You got to question everything that is told to you, including what I just told you today. 
(Laughter) This is the only way for you to step into the dark side, and have a look at it. 
And believe me, it's going to be scary. 
It's going to be frightful, but it's going to enlighten you. 
And, above all, it's not going to be boring. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

I want you guys to imagine that you're a soldier running through the battlefield. 
Now, you're shot in the leg with a bullet, which severs your femoral artery. 
Now, this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less than three minutes. 
Unfortunately, by the time that a medic actually gets to you, what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more, with the application of pressure, to stop that type of bleed. 
Now, this problem is not only a huge problem for the military, but it's also a huge problem that's epidemic throughout the entire medical field, which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body? 
So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally. 
So now, before we do this, we have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work. 
So now, everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells. 
So the cell is the most basic unit of life. 
But not many people know what else. 
But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix. 
So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. 
It allows them to feel what they're doing, where they are, and tells them how to act and how to behave. 
And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body. 
So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different parts of the same organ actually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do. 
So now, for example, think of the rainforest. 
You have the canopy, you have the understory, and you have the forest floor. 
Now, all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants, and different animals call them home. 
So just like that, the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. 
On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix. 
So now, behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix. 
So as you see, your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. 
So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself. 
So when I was a freshman at NYU, what I discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. 
So if you have a bleeding wound like the one behind me, you can actually put our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. 
So that means if you put it onto liver, it turns into something that looks like liver, and if you put it onto skin, it turns into something that looks just like skin. 
So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles into this local tissue. 
So now, this has a whole bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble into it immediately. 
Now, this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure. 
So now, this type of bleed is incredibly traumatic, and like I said before, would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop. 
Now, in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself, our material is able to stop that bleed, and it's because it actually goes on and works with the body to heal, so it reassembles into this piece of meat, and then the blood actually recognizes that that's happening, and produces fibrin, producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds. 
So now this technology — Thank you. 
(Applause) So now this technology, by January, will be in the hands of veterinarians, and we're working very diligently to try to get it into the hands of doctors, hopefully within the next year. 
But really, once again, I want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running through a battlefield. 
Now, you get hit in the leg with a bullet, and instead of bleeding out in three minutes, you pull a small pack of gel out of your belt, and with the press of a button, you're able to stop your own bleed and you're on your way to recovery. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. 
Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles — (Laughter) thinking we were moving to America, but anyway — (Laughter) It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. (Laughter) 
I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "" Americans don't get irony. "" (Laughter) Have you come across this idea? 
We've invaded every country we've encountered. 
(Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. 
You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence. 
(Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "" No Child Left Behind. "" (Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony. (Laughter) 
(Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind. 
Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left Behind." 
(Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. 
In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. 
If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. 
It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. 
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. 
What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. 
America spends more money on education than most other countries. 
Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. 
And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. 
The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. 
There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. 
How about two children or more? Right. 
And the rest of you have seen such children. 
(Laughter) Small people wandering about. (Laughter) 
I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. 
If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. 
Aren't they? 
(Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? 
Like, "" Which one are you? Remind me. "" (Laughter) "" Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused. "" Education under "" No Child Left Behind "" is based on not diversity but conformity. 
What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. 
One of the effects of "" No Child Left Behind "" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. 
I'm not here to argue against science and math. 
A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. 
An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. 
ADHD. 
If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. 
(Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. 
Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. 
And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. 
The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. 
It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. 
Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. 
Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. 
An old friend of mine — actually very old, he's dead. 
(Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. (Laughter) 
He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. 
You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. 
There he is. He's dieting. 
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. 
And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. 
They should be diagnostic. They should help. 
So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. 
Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. 
We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. 
I mean, you may have a dog. 
You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? 
(Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter) 
We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. 
Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. 
That's one of the problems of the test. 
They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts. 
I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks. 
The third thing — and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?" 
And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "" Well, we don't have one. 
If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them. "" Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." 
No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. 
Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. 
I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. 
(Laughter) Really. Really. 
(Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. 
One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. 
The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. 
They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. 
It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. 
You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education — That's what happens in some systems. 
The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. 
It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. 
(Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. 
But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. 
It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. 
And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. 
It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. 
It's a human system. 
Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. 
They may find it boring. 
I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. 
They're very personalized. 
And they work. 
We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. 
We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. 
Culture is an organic term, isn't it? 
In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. 
Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. 
The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. 
Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. 
You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life. 
Great leaders know that. 
The real role of leadership in education — and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level — is not and should not be command and control. 
The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. 
And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. 
"" There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen. "" And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. 
And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 

I'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view, and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion. 
The truth of the matter is otherwise. 
Our holy book, the Koran, consists of 114 chapters, and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala, the saying of "" In the name of God, the all compassionate, the all merciful, "" or, as Sir Richard Burton — not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the Sir Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature — translates it. "" In the name of God, the compassionating, the compassionate. "" And in a saying of the Koran, which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity, God says to his prophet Muhammad — 
whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets, beginning with Adam, including Noah, including Moses, including Abraham, including Jesus Christ, and ending with Muhammad — that, "" We have not sent you, O Muhammad, except as a 'rahmah,' except as a source of compassion to humanity. "" For us human beings, and certainly for us as Muslims, whose mission, and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet. 
And the prophet, in one of his sayings, said, "Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God." 
And because God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion — in fact, the Koran says that "" God decreed upon himself compassion, "" or, "" reigned himself in by compassion "" — therefore, our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion, activators of compassion, actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion. 
That is all well and good, but where do we go wrong, and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world? 
For the answer to this, we turn to our spiritual path. 
In every religious tradition, there is the outer path and the inner path, or the exoteric path and the esoteric path. 
The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism, or "" tasawwuf "" in Arabic. 
And these doctors or these masters, these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition, refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies. 
In one of the battles that the prophet waged, he told his followers, "" We are returning from the lesser war to the greater war, to the greater battle. "" And they said, "" Messenger of God, we are battle-weary. 
How can we go to a greater battle? "" He said, "" That is the battle of the self, the battle of the ego. "" The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, "" I. "" The famous Sufi master Rumi, who is very well known to most of you, has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend, and he knocks on the door, and a voice answers, "" Who's there? "" "It's me," or, more grammatically correctly, "It is I," as we might say in English. 
The voice says, "" Go away. "" After many years of training, of disciplining, of search and struggle, he comes back. 
With much greater humility, he knocks again on the door. 
The voice asks, "" Who is there? "" He said, "" It is you, O heartbreaker. "" The door swings open, and the voice says, "Come in, for there is no room in this house for two I's," — two capital I's, not these eyes — "" for two egos. "" And Rumi's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path. 
In the presence of God, there is no room for more than one "" I, "" and that is the "" I "" of divinity. 
In a teaching — called a "" hadith qudsi "" in our tradition — God says that, "" My servant, "" or "" My creature, my human creature, does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do. "" And those of you who are employers know exactly what I mean. 
You want your employees to do what you ask them to do, and if they've done that, then they can do extra. 
But don't ignore what you've asked them to do. 
"" And, "" God says, "" my servant continues to get nearer to me, by doing more of what I've asked them to do "" — extra credit, we might call it — "" until I love him or love her. 
And when I love my servant, "" God says, "" I become the eyes by which he or she sees, the ears by which he or she listens, the hand by which he or she grasps, and the foot by which he or she walks, and the heart by which he or she understands. "" It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions. 
Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism, the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path. 
When he says, "" I am the spirit, and I am the way, "" and when the prophet Muhammad said, "" Whoever has seen me has seen God, "" it is because they became so much an instrument of God, they became part of God's team — so that God's will was manifest through them, and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos. 
Compassion on earth is given, it is in us. 
All we have to do is to get our egos out of the way, get our egotism out of the way. 
I'm sure, probably all of you here, or certainly the very vast majority of you, have had what you might call a spiritual experience, a moment in your lives when, for a few seconds, a minute perhaps, the boundaries of your ego dissolved. 
And at that minute, you felt at one with the universe — one with that jug of water, one with every human being, one with the Creator — and you felt you were in the presence of power, of awe, of the deepest love, the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives. 
That is a moment which is a gift of God to us — a gift when, for a moment, he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on "" I, I, I, me, me, me, "" and instead, like the person in Rumi's story, we say, "" Oh, this is all you. 
This is all you. And this is all us. 
And us, and I, and us are all part of you. 
O, Creator! O, the Objective! The source of our being and the end of our journey, you are also the breaker of our hearts. 
You are the one whom we should all be towards, for whose purpose we live, and for whose purpose we shall die, and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings. "" Our message today, and our purpose today, and those of you who are here today, and the purpose of this charter of compassion, is to remind. 
For the Koran always urges us to remember, to remind each other, because the knowledge of truth is within every human being. 
We know it all. 
We have access to it all. 
Jung may have called it "" the subconscious. "" Through our subconscious, in your dreams — the Koran calls our state of sleep "" the lesser death, "" "" the temporary death "" — in our state of sleep we have dreams, we have visions, we travel even outside of our bodies, for many of us, and we see wonderful things. 
We travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it, and beyond the limitations of time as we know it. 
But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating, the compassionate. 
God, Bokh, whatever name you want to call him with, Allah, Ram, Om, whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity, it is the locus of absolute being, absolute love and mercy and compassion, and absolute knowledge and wisdom, what Hindus call "" satchidananda. "" The language differs, but the objective is the same. 
Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and — and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. 
One is asking for angur — one is, say, an Englishman — one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. 
And they have a fight and an argument because — "" I want grapes. "" "" I want eneb. "" I want angur. "" — not knowing that the word that they're using refers to the same reality in different languages. 
There's only one absolute reality by definition, one absolute being by definition, because absolute is, by definition, single, and absolute and singular. 
There's this absolute concentration of being, the absolute concentration of consciousness, awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity. 
And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human. 
For what defines humanity, perhaps biologically, is our physiology, but God defines humanity by our spirituality, by our nature. 
And the Koran says, He speaks to the angels and says, "" When I have finished the formation of Adam from clay, and breathed into him of my spirit, then, fall in prostration to him. "" The angels prostrate, not before the human body, but before the human soul. 
Why? Because the soul, the human soul, embodies a piece of the divine breath, a piece of the divine soul. 
This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image. 
What is the imagery of God? 
The imagery of God is absolute being, absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love. 
And therefore, for us to be human — in the greatest sense of what it means to be human, in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human — means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us, and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being, of being alive, of beingness; the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, of awareness; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings. 
This is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform on which we must all stand, and when we stand on this platform as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. 
And I believe, personally, that we're on the verge and that, with the presence and help of people like you here, we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah. 
For he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore. 
We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option: we must, we must lower our egos, control our egos — whether it is individual ego, personal ego, family ego, national ego — and let all be for the glorification of the one. 
Thank you, and God bless you. 
(Applause) 

Why do so many people reach success and then fail? 
One of the big reasons is, we think success is a one-way street. 
So we do everything that leads up to success, but then we get there. We figure we've made it, we sit back in our comfort zone, and we actually stop doing everything that made us successful. 
And it doesn't take long to go downhill. 
And I can tell you this happens, because it happened to me. 
Reaching success, I worked hard, I pushed myself. 
But then I stopped, because I figured, "" Oh, you know, I made it. 
I can just sit back and relax. "" Reaching success, I always tried to improve and do good work. 
But then I stopped because I figured, "" Hey, I'm good enough. 
I don't need to improve any more. "" Reaching success, I was pretty good at coming up with good ideas. 
Because I did all these simple things that led to ideas. 
But then I stopped, because I figured I was this hot-shot guy and I shouldn't have to work at ideas, they should just come like magic. 
And the only thing that came was creative block. 
I couldn't come up with any ideas. 
Reaching success, I always focused on clients and projects, and ignored the money. Then all this money started pouring in. 
And I got distracted by it. 
And suddenly I was on the phone to my stockbroker and my real estate agent, when I should have been talking to my clients. 
And reaching success, I always did what I loved. 
But then I got into stuff that I didn't love, like management. I am the world's worst manager, but I figured I should be doing it, because I was, after all, the president of the company. 
Well, soon a black cloud formed over my head and here I was, outwardly very successful, but inwardly very depressed. 
But I'm a guy; I knew how to fix it. 
I bought a fast car. 
(Laughter) It didn't help. 
I was faster but just as depressed. 
So I went to my doctor. I said, "" Doc, I can buy anything I want. But I'm not happy. I'm depressed. 
It's true what they say, and I didn't believe it until it happened to me. 
But money can't buy happiness. "" He said, "" No. But it can buy Prozac. "" And he put me on anti-depressants. 
And yeah, the black cloud faded a little bit, but so did all the work, because I was just floating along. I couldn't care less if clients ever called. 
(Laughter) And clients didn't call. (Laughter) 
Because they could see I was no longer serving them, I was only serving myself. 
So they took their money and their projects to others who would serve them better. 
Well, it didn't take long for business to drop like a rock. 
My partner and I, Thom, we had to let all our employees go. 
It was down to just the two of us, and we were about to go under. 
And that was great. 
Because with no employees, there was nobody for me to manage. 
So I went back to doing the projects I loved. 
I had fun again, I worked harder and, to cut a long story short, did all the things that took me back up to success. 
But it wasn't a quick trip. 
It took seven years. 
But in the end, business grew bigger than ever. 
And when I went back to following these eight principles, the black cloud over my head disappeared altogether. 
And I woke up one day and I said, "I don't need Prozac anymore." 
And I threw it away and haven't needed it since. 
I learned that success isn't a one-way street. 
It doesn't look like this; it really looks more like this. 
It's a continuous journey. 
And if we want to avoid "" success-to-failure-syndrome, "" we just keep following these eight principles, because that is not only how we achieve success, it's how we sustain it. 
So here is to your continued success. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy. 
And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel. 
And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it, and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn't understand it at all. 
Ancient Palestine had a — along its eastern border, there's a mountain range. 
Still same is true of Israel today. 
And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region, so Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. 
And then there's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean, where Tel Aviv is now. 
And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah, which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west, and you can follow the Shephelah, go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains. 
And the Shephelah, if you've been to Israel, you'll know it's just about the most beautiful part of Israel. 
It's gorgeous, with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards. 
But more importantly, though, in the history of that region, it's served, it's had a real strategic function, and that is, it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way, get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains. 
And 3,000 years ago, that's exactly what happens. 
The Philistines, who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel, are living in the coastal plain. 
They're originally from Crete. They're a seafaring people. 
And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two. 
And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah. 
And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge, and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge, and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other, because they're deadlocked. 
Neither can attack the other, because to attack the other side you've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side, and you're completely exposed. 
So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, "" Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us. "" This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat. 
It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle. 
And the Philistine who is sent down, their mighty warrior, is a giant. 
He's 6 foot 9. 
He's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor, and he's got a sword and he's got a javelin and he's got his spear. He is absolutely terrifying. 
And he's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him. 
It's a death wish, right? There's no way they think they can take him. 
And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy, and he goes up to Saul and he says, "" I'll fight him. "" And Saul says, "" You can't fight him. That's ridiculous. 
You're this kid. This is this mighty warrior. "" But the shepherd is adamant. He says, "" No, no, no, you don't understand, I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years. I think I can do it. "" And Saul has no choice. He's got no one else who's come forward. 
So he says, "" All right. "" And then he turns to the kid, and he says, "But you've got to wear this armor. You can't go as you are." 
So he tries to give the shepherd his armor, and the shepherd says, "" No. "" He says, "" I can't wear this stuff. "" The Biblical verse is, "" I cannot wear this for I have not proved it, "" meaning, "" I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy. "" So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant. 
And the giant sees this figure approaching, and calls out, "" Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field. "" He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him. 
And the shepherd draws closer and closer, and the giant sees that he's carrying a staff. 
That's all he's carrying. 
Instead of a weapon, just this shepherd's staff, and he says — he's insulted — "Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?" 
And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket, puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes — right here, in his most vulnerable spot — and he falls down either dead or unconscious, and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head, and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run. 
And of course, the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David, and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong. 
So David, in that story, is supposed to be the underdog, right? 
In fact, that term, David and Goliath, has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger. 
Now why do we call David an underdog? 
Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. 
We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior, and David is just a shepherd. 
But most importantly, we call him an underdog because all he has is — it's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry, this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear, and all David has is this sling. 
Well, let's start there with the phrase "All David has is this sling," because that's the first mistake that we make. 
In ancient warfare, there are three kinds of warriors. 
There's cavalry, men on horseback and with chariots. 
There's heavy infantry, which are foot soldiers, armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor. 
And there's artillery, and artillery are archers, but, more importantly, slingers. 
And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it, and they put a projectile, either a rock or a lead ball, inside the pouch, and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go, and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target. 
That's what David has, and it's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot. 
It's not this, right? It's not a child's toy. 
It's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon. 
When David rolls it around like this, he's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second, and that means that when the rock is released, it's going forward really fast, probably 35 meters per second. 
That's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers. 
More than that, the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks. They were barium sulphate, which are rocks twice the density of normal stones. 
If you do the calculations on the ballistics, on the stopping power of the rock fired from David's sling, it's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [.45 caliber] handgun. 
This is an incredibly devastating weapon. 
Accuracy, we know from historical records that slingers — experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards. 
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. 
They were incredibly accurate. 
When David lines up — and he's not 200 yards away from Goliath, he's quite close to Goliath — when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath, he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes. 
If you go back over the history of ancient warfare, you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another. 
So what's Goliath? He's heavy infantry, and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman. 
When he says, "" Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, "" the key phrase is "" Come to me. "" Come up to me because we're going to fight, hand to hand, like this. 
Saul has the same expectation. 
David says, "" I want to fight Goliath, "" and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, "" Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath,' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat,' infantry on infantry. "" But David has absolutely no expectation. 
He's not going to fight him that way. Why would he? 
He's a shepherd. He's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves. 
That's where his strength lies. 
So here he is, this shepherd, experienced in the use of a devastating weapon, up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat. 
Goliath is a sitting duck. He doesn't have a chance. 
So why do we keep calling David an underdog, and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable? 
There's a second piece of this that's important. 
It's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry. 
It's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath. 
Goliath is not what he seems to be. 
There's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text, things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don't square with his image as this mighty warrior. 
So to begin with, the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant. 
Now that is weird, right? 
Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat. 
Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy, presumably, to the point of combat? 
Secondly, the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves, another odd thing to say when you're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point. 
And then there's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David. 
So David's coming down the mountain, and he's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat. 
There is nothing about him that says, "I am about to fight you like this." 
He's not even carrying a sword. 
Why does Goliath not react to that? 
It's as if he's oblivious to what's going on that day. 
And then there's that strange comment he makes to David: "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" 
Sticks? David only has one stick. 
Well, it turns out that there's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath, an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies. 
There have been many articles written. 
The first one was in 1960 in the Indiana Medical Journal, and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath's height. 
So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era, and usually when someone is that far out of the norm, there's an explanation for it. 
So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. 
And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly. 
So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11. 
He had acromegaly. 
Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant? 
Famous. He had acromegaly. 
There's even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly. 
Anyone who's unusually tall, that's the first explanation we come up with. 
And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it, principally having to do with vision. 
The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted. 
So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath, they've said, "" Wait a minute, he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly. "" And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day. 
Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant? 
Because he can't make his way on his own. 
Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn't understand that David's not going to fight him until the very last moment? 
Because he can't see him. 
When he says, "" Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, "" the phrase "" come to me "" is a hint also of his vulnerability. 
Come to me because I can't see you. 
And then there's, "" Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks? "" He sees two sticks when David has only one. 
So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe. 
What they didn't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness. 
And there is, I think, in that, a very important lesson for all of us. 
Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. 
And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For years I've been feeling frustrated, because as a religious historian, I've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. 
Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what's been called the Golden Rule. 
Sometimes it comes in a positive version — "Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself." 
And equally important is the negative version — "Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you." 
Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. 
And people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. 
People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, "" all day and every day, "" not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism, but to do it all day and every day, you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself. 
And it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao. 
Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence. 
But you know you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. 
Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort. 
Often people don't really want to be compassionate. 
I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. 
And that of course defeats the object of the exercise. 
Now why was I so grateful to TED? 
Because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century, enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than I could have ever conceived. 
Because I feel an urgency about this. 
If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. 
The task of our time, one of the great tasks of our time, is to build a global society, as I said, where people can live together in peace. 
And the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem. 
And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule. 
This is the source of all morality, this imaginative act of empathy, putting yourself in the place of another. 
And so we have a choice, it seems to me. 
We can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith, or we can go back to the rabbis. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, who, when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, said, "" That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. 
That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary. "" And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate. 
And we need to revive that spirit. 
And it's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down. 
We have to make this happen, and we can do it with the modern communications that TED has introduced. 
Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners. 
In Singapore, we have a group going to use the Charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in Singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. 
In Malaysia, there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people, young people, and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. 
Throughout Europe, the Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, are discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths. 
But it can't stop there. It can't stop with the launch. 
Religious teaching, this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines. 
Religious teaching must always lead to action. 
And I intend to work on this till my dying day. 
And I want to continue with our partners to do two things — educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. 
Education because we've so dropped out of compassion. 
People often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody. 
But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it. 
You also have to do it. 
I want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another. 
The same applies to educators. 
I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. 
And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling. 
I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions. 
And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking, so that because people have this Charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech, disdainful remarks from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry. 
Because we can change the world, we have the ability. 
I would never have thought of putting the Charter online. 
I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. 
And TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas. 
Because that is what is so wonderful about TED. 
In this room, all this expertise, if we joined it all together, we could change the world. 
And of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable. 
But I'd just like to quote, finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author whom I don't quote very often, C.S. Lewis. 
But he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a schoolgirl. 
It's in his book "" The Four Loves. "" He said that he distinguished between erotic love, when two people gaze, spellbound, into each other's eyes. 
And then he compared that to friendship, when two people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal. 
We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. 
And I am convinced. 
I felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at Vevey, that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences melt away. 
And we learn amity. 
And we learn to live together and to get to know one another. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country. 
And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive. 
The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. 
And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. 
And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus. 
And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid... 
that the correct summit — that all of our students, every high school graduate should know — should be statistics: probability and statistics. 
(Applause) I mean, don't get me wrong. Calculus is an important subject. 
It's one of the great products of the human mind. 
The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus. 
And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college. 
But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day-to-day lives. 
On the other hand, statistics — that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis. Right? 
It's risk. It's reward. It's randomness. 
It's understanding data. 
I think if our students, if our high school students — if all of the American citizens — knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today. (Laughter) (Applause) Not only — thank you — not only that... 
but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun. 
I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling. 
It's analyzing trends. It's predicting the future. 
Look, the world has changed from analog to digital. 
And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital, from the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics — the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data — that being probability and statistics. 
In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means. And I mean it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. 
It was a beautiful day. 
The forest was sparkling. 
The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land. 
We got to our campsite. 
It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. 
Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. 
And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. 
The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? 
That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. 
Who cleans up after us? 
However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? 
Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? 
Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. 
I wanted to get to know them as individuals. 
I wanted to understand who takes the job. 
What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden? 
So I started a research project with them. 
I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. 
I needed to go deeper. 
So I took the job as a sanitation worker. 
I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. 
And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. 
It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education. 
Everyone asks about the smell. 
It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. 
The weight takes a long time to get used to. 
I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week. 
Then there's the danger. 
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. 
You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. 
It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. 
That's really bad for the worker. 
And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm. 
I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. 
When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. 
It never stops coming. 
It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. 
It must always be in motion. 
And then there's the stigma. 
You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. 
I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. 
They are the first guardians of public health. 
If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. 
Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. 
The economy needs them. 
If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. 
I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. 
And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. 
By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. 
We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. 
We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away. 
So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. 
Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. 
They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. 
They wear a uniform in many cities. 
You know when to expect them. 
And their work lets us do our work. 
They are almost a form of reassurance. 
The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what. 
On the day after September 11 in 2001, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. 
And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. 
And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, "" We're going to be okay. 
We're going to be okay. "" It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. 
His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends. 
I want to believe that Paulie was right. 
We are going to be okay. 
But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. 
And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 40 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. 
Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. 
It's a remarkable statistic. 
So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. 
Take a moment to say thank you. 
(Applause) 

You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. 
But in fact, here in the northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "" gardens watered by running streams. "" Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. 
But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? 
I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its "" otherness. "" The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran "" as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble. "" (Laughter) Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book — as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God — and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad — 
were just another author on the bestseller list. 
Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote — that is, to misquote. 
Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "" highlighter version, "" which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes. 
So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly — as properly as I could, that is. 
My Arabic's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side, verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic. 
Now I did have an advantage. 
My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a-Sunni split, and for that I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. 
I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran — an informed one, an experienced one even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading some else's holy book. 
(Laughter) So I read slowly. (Laughter) 
I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by "" hubris "" — (Laughter) — because it turned out to be three months. 
I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. 
But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran — that feeling of "" I get it now "" — it would slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land, and yet the terrain was very familiar. 
The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. 
So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. 
God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh — jealously insisting on no other gods. 
The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. 
And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. 
And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic. 
Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. 
It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. 
And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. 
The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. 
It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. 
So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation." 
But all is not lost in translation. 
As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises — a degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. 
And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine, the Koran includes women — talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women. 
Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. 
Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca where fighting was usually forbidden, and the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. 
Not "" You must kill unbelievers in Mecca, "" but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over and only if there's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. 
And even then — God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme — and so, essentially, better if you don't. 
(Laughter) This was perhaps the biggest surprise — how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. 
"" Some of these verses are definite in meaning, "" it says, "and others are ambiguous." 
The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. 
Only God knows the true meaning. 
The phrase "" God is subtle "" appears again and again, and indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. 
As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. 
Old-fashioned Orientalism comes into play here. 
The word used four times is Houris, rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. 
Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: Houris. 
Not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight. 
(Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "" pure beings "" — like in angels — or it may be like the Greek Kouros or Kórē, an eternal youth. 
But the truth is nobody really knows, and that's the point. 
Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise" and that you will be "" recreated in a form unknown to you, "" which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. 
(Laughter) And that number 72 never appears. 
There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. 
That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. 
Paradise is quite the opposite. 
It's not virginity; it's fecundity. 
It's plenty. 
It's gardens watered by running streams. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. 
And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it. 
On our planet, where there's water, there's life. 
So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. 
At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. 
Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. 
What I do picks up where their job ends. 
I model the possible climates of exoplanets. 
And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life. 
Take the planet Venus. 
It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. 
But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. 
The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. 
That's hot enough to melt lead. 
Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. 
It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. 
The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. 
From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life. 
We don't know what the atmospheres of these planets are like because the planets are so small and dim compared to their stars and so far away from us. 
For example, one of the closest planets that could support surface water — it's called Gliese 667 Cc — such a glamorous name, right, nice phone number for a name — it's 23 light years away. 
So that's more than 100 trillion miles. 
Trying to measure the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet passing in front of its host star is hard. 
It's like trying to see a fruit fly passing in front of a car's headlight. 
OK, now imagine that car is 100 trillion miles away, and you want to know the precise color of that fly. 
So I use computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need to have a suitable climate for water and life. 
Here's an artist's concept of the planet Kepler-62f, with the Earth for reference. 
It's 1,200 light years away, and just 40 percent larger than Earth. 
Our NSF-funded work found that it could be warm enough for open water from many types of atmospheres and orientations of its orbit. 
So I'd like future telescopes to follow up on this planet to look for signs of life. 
Ice on a planet's surface is also important for climate. 
Ice absorbs longer, redder wavelengths of light, and reflects shorter, bluer light. 
That's why the iceberg in this photo looks so blue. 
The redder light from the sun is absorbed on its way through the ice. 
Only the blue light makes it all the way to the bottom. 
Then it gets reflected back to up to our eyes and we see blue ice. 
My models show that planets orbiting cooler stars could actually be warmer than planets orbiting hotter stars. 
There's another contradiction — that ice absorbs the longer wavelength light from cooler stars, and that light, that energy, heats the ice. 
Using climate models to explore how these contradictions can affect planetary climate is vital to the search for life elsewhere. 
And it's no surprise that this is my specialty. 
I'm an African-American female astronomer and a classically trained actor who loves to wear makeup and read fashion magazines, so I am uniquely positioned to appreciate contradictions in nature — (Laughter) (Applause)... and how they can inform our search for the next planet where life exists. 
My organization, Rising Stargirls, teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. 
That's another contradiction — science and art don't often go together, but interweaving them can help these girls bring their whole selves to what they learn, and maybe one day join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions, and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe. 
Thank you. 

For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow. 
I'm mentioning all this — I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew — about our lives, about our careers — comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality. 
It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. 
I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. 
Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. 
One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. 
In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. 
The bad news is that's not true. 
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. 
(Laughter) Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. (Laughter) 
Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. 
Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love — not romantic love, though that may be something — but love in general, respect — they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy. 
And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. 
You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. 
I don't think we are particularly materialistic. 
Think, "" This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love. "" (Laughter) Feel sympathy, rather than contempt. 
There are other reasons — (Laughter) There are other reasons why it's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before. 
Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. 
There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. 
The closer two people are — in age, in background, in the process of identification — the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. 
So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation. 
It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. 
The first kind tells you, "" You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible! "" The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "" low self-esteem, "" or impolitely call, "" feeling very bad about yourself. "" There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. 
So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback. 
There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious — about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before. 
And it's, again, linked to something nice. 
And that makes failure seem much more crushing. 
You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an "" unfortunate "" — literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. 
Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a "" loser. "" There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. 
That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. 
There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. 
This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it's a crazy idea, completely crazy. 
But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic; it's an impossible dream. 
There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc. 
We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should. 
I'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in "" The City of God, "" where he says, "" It's a sin to judge any man by his post. "" In modern English that would mean it's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to, dependent on their business card. 
That is an unknown part of them, and we shouldn't behave as though it is known. 
Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. 
I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. 
And they wrote "" Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud. "" (Laughter) And then my favorite — they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys — my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding." (Laughter) 
(Applause) In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. 
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. 
We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. 
It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. 
And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. 
What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. 
So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. 
These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. 
When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. 
When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. 
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. 
We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. 
But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. 
But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. 
But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a "" loser, "" with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers? 
Alain De Botton: Yes, I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. 
That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic. 
Or do you think that you can't, but it doesn't matter that much that we're putting too much emphasis on that? 
AB: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. 
And it's a very hard line to make. 
We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option. 

I'm a blogger, a filmmaker and a butcher, and I'll explain how these identities come together. 
It started four years ago, when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City. 
Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets. 
It was an FBI agent's wet dream. (Laughter) But being a part of this community, we knew how welcoming this space was. 
For years, I'd seen photos of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith, much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience. 
Frustrated by this myopic view, my friend and I had this crazy idea: Let's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog. 
We called it "" 30 Mosques in 30 Days, "" and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities, ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina. 
What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America. 
The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities, but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey. 
There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so. 
And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world, I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film. 
My codirector, Omar, and I were at a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film. 
The movie is called "" These Birds Walk, "" and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family. 
We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord, but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film "" more relevant, "" essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols. 
Of course, we didn't listen to them, and instead, we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth. 
The agenda behind our cinematic immersion was only empathy, an emotion that's largely deficient from films that come from our region of the world. 
And as "" These Birds Walk "" played at film festivals and theaters internationally, I finally had my feet planted at home in New York, and with all the extra time and still no real money, my wife tasked me to cook more for us. 
And whenever I'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat, something felt off. 
For those that don't know, halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines. 
Unfortunately, the majority of halal meat in America doesn't rise to the standard that my faith calls for. 
The more I learned about these unethical practices, the more violated I felt, particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy. 
So, with emotions running high, and absolutely no experience in butchery, some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district. 
(Laughter) We call it Honest Chops, and we're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic, humanely raised animals, and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families. 
There's really nothing like it in America. 
The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim. 
For many, it is their first time interacting with Islam on such an intimate level. 
So all these disparate projects — (Laughter) — are the result of a restlessness. 
They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community, and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules. 
We must fight with an inventive approach. 
With the trust, with the access, with the love that only we can bring, we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image, in every cut of meat, because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal, not only will we fail, but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories. 
But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance. 
It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful. 
They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine. 
And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. 
And I asked myself, why? 
I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. 
And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? 
So, I decided to investigate. 
I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. 
And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them. 
But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. 
It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it. 
So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? 
I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. 
I know a woman who's good at this. 
She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids." 
And he goes, "" Oh, this is great, this is great. "" And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. 
And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. 
And she said, "" Why wouldn't I thank it, even though they're supposed to do it? "" So, the question is, why was I blocking it? 
Why were other people blocking it? 
Why can I say, "" I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes, "" but I won't say, "Would you praise me this way?" 
And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me. 
I'm telling you where I'm insecure. 
I'm telling you where I need your help. 
And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy. 
Because what can you do with that data? 
You could neglect me. 
You could abuse it. 
Or you could actually meet my need. 
And I took my bike into the bike store — I love this — same bike, and they'd do something called "" truing "" the wheels. 
The guy said, "" You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better. "" I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. 
So, I'm going to challenge all of you. 
I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. 
What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife — go ask her, what does she need? 
Go home to your husband — what does he need? 
Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you. 
And it's simple. 
And why should we care about this? 
We talk about world peace. 
How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? 
I think it starts household by household, under the same roof. 
So, let's make it right in our own backyard. 
And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. 
And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job. 
And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. 
The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. 
Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. 
That's Ken Sharpe over there. 
(Applause) So there is among many people — certainly me and most of the people I talk to — a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. 
Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them. 
Our doctors don't know who the hell we are, and they don't have enough time for us. 
We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers. 
They almost brought the entire financial system down. 
And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. 
So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart. 
Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. 
They don't understand us. 
They don't have the time to get to know us. 
There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. 
If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. 
Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. 
Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment. 
Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. 
Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. 
More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with. 
Or — or maybe and — in addition to rules, let's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don't particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest — the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. 
So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems. 
Rules and incentives — "sticks" and "carrots." 
We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. 
There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. 
Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. 
We'll see. 
In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. 
So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing — as I said — selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff. 
And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. 
If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that. 
But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. 
Why? Because bankers are smart people. 
And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. 
You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system "" almost-collapse "" can't happen again. 
It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. 
So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that. 
What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. 
We need character. 
We need people who want to do the right thing. 
And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom." 
Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. 
So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. 
And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems — problems that they hadn't anticipated. 
So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. 
Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. 
So what do they do? 
They fashion a novel solution to the problem. 
They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure — a flexible rule, a rule that bends. 
And Aristotle said, "" Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule. "" And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules. 
Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. 
Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. 
Wise people know how to improvise. 
The way my co-author, Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. 
The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. 
So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. 
And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. 
A wise person knows when to bend the rules. 
A wise person knows when to improvise. 
And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. 
If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. 
So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. 
And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. 
Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue. 
So I'll give you an example of wise practice in action. 
It's the case of Michael. 
Michael's a young guy. 
He had a pretty low-wage job. 
He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school. 
Then he lost his job. 
He panicked about being able to support his family. 
One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver — stole 50 dollars. 
He robbed him at gunpoint. 
It was a toy gun. 
He got caught. He got tried. 
He got convicted. 
The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. 
The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense. 
He had never committed a crime before. 
He was a responsible husband and father. 
He had been faced with desperate circumstances. 
All this would do is wreck a family. 
And so she improvised a sentence — 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work. 
Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. 
He did. He served out his sentence. 
He made restitution and found himself a new job. 
And the family was united. 
And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life — a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. 
But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. 
And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. 
He did after all have a toy gun. 
The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. 
He won the appeal. 
Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. 
Judge Forer had to follow the law. 
And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. 
Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. 
And Michael disappeared. 
So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better. 
Now consider Ms. Dewey. 
Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school. 
She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. 
All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. 
So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. 
Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do. 
Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. 
Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called "" bubble kids "" — kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. 
So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. 
It's like they were about to go play a football game. 
For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher. 
Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. 
You need to have incentives. 
People have to make a living. 
But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. 
First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. 
Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. 
And second, they demoralize the activity itself. 
The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. 
It creates people — when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing — it creates people who are addicted to incentives. 
That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives. 
Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. 
Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. 
We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. 
If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what's in the books and only care about how long they are. 
If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. 
If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures — which is the current system — they would do more. 
If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. 
What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason — namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. 
Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists. 
And it doesn't have to be this way. 
We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. 
We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. 
These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. 
So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. 
And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. 
So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down. 
So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. 
More hopeful are people we call system-changers. 
These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. 
One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. 
And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill. 
Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. 
He was married, he had a third kid on the way, he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. 
He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. 
So he started selling marijuana. 
He was busted in a drug sweep. 
His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids. 
Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. 
But Judge Russell did have an alternative. 
And that's because he was in a special court. 
He was in a court called the Veterans' Court. 
In the Veterans' Court — this was the first of its kind in the United States. 
Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court. 
It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. 
And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. 
No one wanted non-violent offenders — and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot — to be thrown into prison. 
They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. 
And what the Veterans' Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn't forget about them once the judgment was made. 
Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump. 
There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this. 
Why has the idea spread? 
Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. 
None. None. 
Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. 
So here's is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching. 
There's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers — I know this is hard to believe — encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. 
The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. 
Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. 
The bank was profitable. 
The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. 
They didn't make loans and then sell the loans. 
They serviced the loans. 
They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. 
Banking hasn't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. 
Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. 
Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. 
So there are examples like this in medicine — doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. 
And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. 
So the patients are not organ systems, and they're not diseases; they're people, people with lives. 
And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. 
In addition to which there's an enormous amount of back and forth, mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation — we hope — of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. 
We'll see. 
So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. 
Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission — what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. 
And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. 
People want to be allowed to be virtuous. 
They want to have permission to do the right thing. 
They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work. 
Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. 
There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study — I know this will come as a shock to all of you — the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. 
Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. 
Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. 
If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else. 
Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. 
Rules and incentives don't tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives 
are no substitutes for wisdom. 
Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. 
And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. 
In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? 
1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "" substitution. "" 1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 
1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. 
Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. 
But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. 
You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. 
More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. 
Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. 
Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. 
In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation. 
Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. 
Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. 
Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. 
Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't. 
What did get me moving was a social interaction. 
Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?" 
It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, "I have to be the one to ask the next question," because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. 
And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. 
So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. 
It's changed my life. 
But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. 
So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things. 
First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. 
Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works. 
And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. 
And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. 
Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable. 
So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. 
Walk the talk. 
You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And I started in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. 
And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: "Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?" 
And these were the results of the Swedish students. 
That means that there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. 
(Laughter) But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. 
(Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. 
Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, "What do you really think about the world?" 
We have very good data since 1962 — 1960 about — on the size of families in all countries. 
And 1962, there was really a group of countries here that was industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. 
They move up into that corner. 
And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries and all the rest of them move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 
And this is what happens: the data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. 
If we don't look in the data, I think we all underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economical change. 
Let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of the income. 
And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent the world's annual income. 
We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. 
And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. 
And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. 
And when it burst, the size of its country bubble is the size of the population. 
Here in Uganda, development aid. 
I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. 
But a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. 
There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. 
This is Mao Tse-tung. He brought health to China. 
And if we move back again, here, and we put on trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less in the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. 
And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. 
They came from here, a mineral country. 
So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past. 
If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. 
Everything in this world exists in Africa. 
Because the data is hidden down in the databases. 
All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics. 
There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. 
(Laughter) And this won't work. 
Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world, but what we really need is, of course, a search function. 
A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. 
He only says, "" We can't do it. "" (Laughter) And that's a quite clever guy, huh? (Laughter) 
So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. 
We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. 
This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. 
Almost like a ghost, isn't it? 
(Laughter) It's pretty scary. (Laughter) 
And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the Internet users per 1,000. 
It takes some time to change for this, but on the axises, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. 
And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. 
Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. 
I end now with the world. 
(Applause) 

I'm a tourism entrepreneur and a peacebuilder, but this is not how I started. 
When I was seven years old, I remember watching television and seeing people throwing rocks, and thinking, this must be a fun thing to do. 
So I got out to the street and threw rocks, not realizing I was supposed to throw rocks at Israeli cars. 
Instead, I ended up stoning my neighbors' cars. (Laughter) They were not enthusiastic about my patriotism. 
This is my picture with my brother. 
This is me, the little one, and I know what you're thinking: "You used to look cute, what the heck happened to you?" 
But my brother, who is older than me, was arrested when he was 18, taken to prison on charges of throwing stones. 
He was beaten up when he refused to confess that he threw stones, and as a result, had internal injuries that caused his death soon after he was released from prison. 
I was angry, I was bitter, and all I wanted was revenge. 
But that changed when I was 18. 
I decided that I needed Hebrew to get a job, and going to study Hebrew in that classroom was the first time I ever met Jews who were not soldiers. 
And we connected over really small things, like the fact that I love country music, which is really strange for Palestinians. 
But it was then that I realized also that we have a wall of anger, of hatred and of ignorance that separates us. 
I decided that it doesn't matter what happens to me. 
What really matters is how I deal with it. 
And therefore, I decided to dedicate my life to bringing down the walls that separate people. 
I do so through many ways. 
Tourism is one of them, but also media and education, and you might be wondering, really, can tourism change things? 
Can it bring down walls? Yes. 
Tourism is the best sustainable way to bring down those walls and to create a sustainable way of connecting with each other and creating friendships. 
In 2009, I cofounded Mejdi Tours, a social enterprise that aims to connect people, with two Jewish friends, by the way, and what we'll do, the model we did, for example, in Jerusalem, we would have two tour guides, one Israeli and one Palestinian, guiding the trips together, telling history and narrative and archaeology and conflict from totally different perspectives. 
I remember running a trip together with a friend named Kobi — Jewish congregation from Chicago, the trip was in Jerusalem — and we took them to a refugee camp, a Palestinian refugee camp, and there we had this amazing food. 
By the way, this is my mother. She's cool. 
And that's the Palestinian food called maqluba. 
It means "" upside-down. "" You cook it with rice and chicken, and you flip it upside-down. 
It's the best meal ever. 
And we'll eat together. 
Then we had a joint band, Israeli and Palestinian musicians, and we did some belly-dancing. 
If you don't know any, I'll teach you later. 
But when we left, both sides, they were crying because they did not want to leave. 
Three years later, those relationships still exist. 
Imagine with me if the one billion people who travel internationally every year travel like this, not being taken in the bus from one side to another, from one hotel to another, taking pictures from the windows of their buses of people and cultures, but actually connecting with people. 
You know, I remember having a Muslim group from the U.K. 
going to the house of an Orthodox Jewish family, and having their first Friday night dinners, that Sabbath dinner, and eating together hamin, which is a Jewish food, a stew, just having the connection of realizing, after a while, that a hundred years ago, their families came out of the same place in Northern Africa. 
This is not a photo profile for your Facebook. 
This is not disaster tourism. 
This is the future of travel, and I invite you to join me to do that, to change your travel. 
We're doing it all over the world now, from Ireland to Iran to Turkey, and we see ourselves going everywhere to change the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I haven't told many people this, but in my head, I've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time. 
I am also autistic. 
People tend to diagnose autism with really specific check-box descriptions, but in reality, it's a whole variation as to what we're like. 
For instance, my little brother, he's very severely autistic. 
He's nonverbal. He can't talk at all. 
But I love to talk. 
People often associate autism with liking maths and science and nothing else, but I know so many autistic people who love being creative. 
But that is a stereotype, and the stereotypes of things are often, if not always, wrong. 
That's the common belief, that every single autistic person is Dustin Hoffman, and that's not true. 
But that's not just with autistic people, either. 
I've seen it with LGBTQ people, with women, with POC people. 

From all outward appearances, John had everything going for him. 
He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit, and he'd only owned it for five years. 
The school where he graduated from with his master's had just offered him a teaching appointment, which meant not only a salary, but benefits for the first time in ages. 
And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression. 
On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below. 
Remarkably — no, miraculously — he lived. 
The fall shattered his right arm, broke every rib that he had, punctured his lung, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry, where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain, contacted the boat's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital. 
And that's actually where our story begins. 
Because once John committed himself to putting his life back together — first physically, then emotionally, and then spiritually — he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did. 
Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail. 
But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time. 
This truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them. 
And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life, because of our taboos around suicide, we're not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing. 
And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in. 
I know John's story very well because I'm John. 
And this is, today, the first time in any sort of public setting I've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on. 
But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide, and sitting last year at TEDActive, I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading — and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help. 
As the Trevor Project says, it gets better. 
It gets way better. 
And I'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you, to urge you, that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide, or you know somebody who has, talk about it; get help. 
It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun. "" Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." (Laughter) 
TEDster Bill Gates says, "" I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company. "" I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. 

To understand the business of mythology and what a Chief Belief Officer is supposed to do, you have to hear a story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers, and his brother, the athletic warlord of the gods, Kartikeya. 
The two brothers one day decided to go on a race, three times around the world. 
Kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans. 
He went around once, he went around twice, he went around thrice. 
But his brother, Ganesha, simply walked around his parents once, twice, thrice, and said, "" I won. "" "" How come? "" said Kartikeya. 
And Ganesha said, "" You went around 'the world.' I went around 'my world.' "" What matters more? 
If you understand the difference between 'the world' and 'my world,' you understand the difference between logos and mythos. 
'The world 'is objective, logical, universal, factual, scientific. 
'My world 'is subjective. 
It's emotional. It's personal. 
It's perceptions, thoughts, feelings, dreams. 
It is the belief system that we carry. 
It's the myth that we live in. 
'The world 'tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. 
'My world 'tells us why the sun rises, why we were born. 
Every culture is trying to understand itself: "Why do we exist?" 
And every culture comes up with its own understanding of life, its own customized version of mythology. 
Culture is a reaction to nature, and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals, which are always indifferent to rationality. 
And so, when you study it, you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world. 
Different people see things differently — different viewpoints. 
There is my world and there is your world, and my world is always better than your world, because my world, you see, is rational and yours is superstition. 
Yours is faith. 
Yours is illogical. 
This is the root of the clash of civilizations. 
It took place, once, in 326 B.C. 
on the banks of a river called the Indus, now in Pakistan. 
This river lends itself to India's name. 
India. Indus. 
Alexander, a young Macedonian, met there what he called a "" gymnosophist, "" which means "" the naked, wise man. "" We don't know who he was. 
Perhaps he was a Jain monk, like Bahubali over here, the Gomateshwara Bahubali whose image is not far from Mysore. 
Or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock, staring at the sky and the sun and the moon. 
Alexander asked, "" What are you doing? "" and the gymnosophist answered, "I'm experiencing nothingness." 
Then the gymnosophist asked, "What are you doing?" 
and Alexander said, "" I am conquering the world. "" And they both laughed. 
Each one thought that the other was a fool. 
The gymnosophist said, "" Why is he conquering the world? 
It's pointless. "" And Alexander thought, "" Why is he sitting around, doing nothing? 
What a waste of a life. "" To understand this difference in viewpoints, we have to understand the subjective truth of Alexander — his myth, and the mythology that constructed it. 
Alexander's mother, his parents, his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer's "" Iliad. "" They told him of a great hero called Achilles, who, when he participated in battle, victory was assured, but when he withdrew from the battle, defeat was inevitable. 
"" Achilles was a man who could shape history, a man of destiny, and this is what you should be, Alexander. "" That's what he heard. 
"" What should you not be? 
You should not be Sisyphus, who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night. 
Don't live a life which is monotonous, mediocre, meaningless. 
Be spectacular! — like the Greek heroes, like Jason, who went across the sea with the Argonauts and fetched the Golden Fleece. 
Be spectacular like Theseus, who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed Minotaur. 
When you play in a race, win! — because when you win, the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods. "" Because, you see, the Greeks believed you live only once, and when you die, you have to cross the River Styx. 
And if you have lived an extraordinary life, you will be welcomed to Elysium, or what the French call "" Champs-Élysées "" — (Laughter) — the heaven of the heroes. 
But these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard. 
He heard a very different story. 
He heard of a man called Bharat, after whom India is called Bhārata. 
Bharat also conquered the world. 
And then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called Meru. 
And he wanted to hoist his flag to say, "I was here first." 
But when he reached the mountain peak, he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him, each one claiming "" 'I was here first'... 
that's what I thought until I came here. "" And suddenly, in this canvas of infinity, Bharat felt insignificant. 
This was the mythology of the gymnosophist. 
You see, he had heroes, like Ram — Raghupati Ram and Krishna, Govinda Hari. 
But they were not two characters on two different adventures. 
They were two lifetimes of the same hero. 
When the Ramayana ends the Mahabharata begins. 
When Ram dies, Krishna is born. 
When Krishna dies, eventually he will be back as Ram. 
You see, the Indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. 
But you don't cross it once. 
You go to and fro endlessly. 
It was called the Vaitarani. 
You go again and again and again. 
Because, you see, nothing lasts forever in India, not even death. 
And so, you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days... 
And what do you do at the end of 10 days? 
You dunk it in the river. 
Because it has to end. 
And next year, she will come back. 
What goes around always comes around, and this rule applies not just to man, but also the gods. 
You see, the gods have to come back again and again and again as Ram, as Krishna. 
Not only do they live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all. 
"Groundhog Day." 
(Laughter) Two different mythologies. 
Which is right? 
Two different mythologies, two different ways of looking at the world. 
One linear, one cyclical. 
One believes this is the one and only life. 
The other believes this is one of many lives. 
And so, the denominator of Alexander's life was one. 
So, the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements. 
The denominator of the gymnosophist's life was infinity. 
So, no matter what he did, it was always zero. 
And I believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired Indian mathematicians to discover the number zero. 
Who knows? 
And that brings us to the mythology of business. 
If Alexander's belief influenced his behavior, if the gymnosophist's belief influences his behavior, then it was bound to influence the business they were in. 
You see, what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves? 
And if you look at cultures around the world, all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business. 
Take a look. 
If you live only once, in one-life cultures around the world, you will see an obsession with binary logic, absolute truth, standardization, absoluteness, linear patterns in design. 
But if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives, you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic, with opinion, with contextual thinking, with everything is relative, sort of — (Laughter) mostly. (Laughter) 
You look at art. Look at the ballerina, how linear she is in her performance. 
And then look at the Indian classical dancer, the Kuchipudi dancer, the Bharatanatyam dancer, curvaceous. 
(Laughter) And then look at business. 
Standard business model: vision, mission, values, processes. 
Sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land, with the commandments held by the leader. 
And if you comply, you will go to heaven. 
But in India there is no "" the "" promised land. 
There are many promised lands, depending on your station in society, depending on your stage of life. 
You see, businesses are not run as institutions, by the idiosyncrasies of individuals. 
It's always about taste. 
It's always about my taste. 
You see, Indian music, for example, does not have the concept of harmony. 
There is no orchestra conductor. 
There is one performer standing there, and everybody follows. 
And you can never replicate that performance twice. 
It is not about documentation and contract. 
It's about conversation and faith. 
It's not about compliance. It's about setting, getting the job done, by bending or breaking the rules — just look at your Indian people around here, you'll see them smile; they know what it is. 
(Laughter) And then look at people who have done business in India, you'll see the exasperation on their faces. (Laughter) 
(Applause) You see, this is what India is today. The ground reality is based on a cyclical world view. 
So, it's rapidly changing, highly diverse, chaotic, ambiguous, unpredictable. 
And people are okay with it. 
And then globalization is taking place. 
The demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in. 
Which is rooted in one-life culture. 
And a clash is going to take place, like on the banks of the Indus. 
It is bound to happen. 
I have personally experienced it. I'm trained as a medical doctor. 
I did not want to study surgery. Don't ask me why. 
I love mythology too much. 
I wanted to learn mythology. But there is nowhere you can study. 
So, I had to teach it to myself. 
And mythology does not pay, well, until now. 
(Laughter) So, I had to take up a job. And I worked in the pharma industry. 
And I worked in the healthcare industry. 
And I worked as a marketing guy, and a sales guy, and a knowledge guy, and a content guy, and a training guy. 
I even was a business consultant, doing strategies and tactics. 
And I would see the exasperation between my American and European colleagues, when they were dealing with India. 
Example: Please tell us the process to invoice hospitals. 
Step A. Step B. Step C. Mostly. 
(Laughter) How do you parameterize "" mostly ""? 
How do you put it in a nice little software? You can't. 
I would give my viewpoints to people. 
But nobody was interested in listening to it, you see, until I met Kishore Biyani of the Future group. 
You see, he has established the largest retail chain, called Big Bazaar. 
And there are more than 200 formats, across 50 cities and towns of India. 
And he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets. 
And he knew very intuitively, that best practices, developed in Japan and China and Europe and America will not work in India. 
He knew that institutional thinking doesn't work in India. Individual thinking does. 
He had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of India. 
So, he had asked me to be the Chief Belief Officer, and said, "All I want to do is align belief." 
Sounds so simple. 
But belief is not measurable. 
You can't measure it. You can't manage it. 
So, how do you construct belief? 
How do you enhance the sensitivity of people to Indian-ness. 
Even if you are Indian, it is not very explicit, it is not very obvious. 
So, I tried to work on the standard model of culture, which is, develop stories, symbols and rituals. 
And I will share one of the rituals with you. 
You see it is based on the Hindu ritual of Darshan. 
Hindus don't have the concept of commandments. 
So, there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life. 
So, you're not really sure how you stand in front of God. 
So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God. 
You want to see God. 
And you want God to see you, and hence the gods have very large eyes, large unblinking eyes, sometimes made of silver, so they look at you. 
Because you don't know whether you're right or wrong, and so all you seek is divine empathy. 
"Just know where I came from, why I did the Jugaad." 
(Laughter) "" Why did I do the setting, why I don't care for the processes. Just understand me, please. "" And based on this, we created a ritual for leaders. 
After a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store, we blindfold him, we surround him with the stakeholders, the customer, his family, his team, his boss. 
You read out his KRA, his KPI, you give him the keys, and then you remove the blindfold. 
And invariably, you see a tear, because the penny has dropped. 
He realizes that to succeed, he does not have to be a "" professional, "" he does not have to cut out his emotions, he has to include all these people in his world to succeed, to make them happy, to make the boss happy, to make everyone happy. 
The customer is happy, because the customer is God. 
That sensitivity is what we need. Once this belief enters, behavior will happen, business will happen. 
And it has. 
So, then we come back to Alexander and to the gymnosophist. 
And everybody asks me, "" Which is the better way, this way or that way? "" And it's a very dangerous question, because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence. 
So, I will not answer the question. 
What I will give you is an Indian answer, the Indian head-shake. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm. 
You see, because both the paradigms are human constructions. 
They are cultural creations, not natural phenomena. 
And so the next time you meet someone, a stranger, one request: Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does he. 
Understand it. 
And when you understand it you will discover something spectacular. 
You will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth. 
Who sees it all? 
Varuna has but a thousand eyes. 
Indra, a hundred. 
You and I, only two. 
Thank you. Namaste. 
(Applause) 

I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean? 
So often, we look at dollar terms — people making less than a dollar or two or three a day. 
And yet the complexity of poverty really has to look at income as only one variable. 
Because really, it's a condition about choice, and the lack of freedom. 
And I had an experience that really deepened and elucidated for me the understanding that I have. 
It was in Kenya, and I want to share it with you. 
I was with my friend Susan Meiselas, the photographer, in the Mathare Valley slums. 
Now, Mathare Valley is one of the oldest slums in Africa. 
It's about three miles out of Nairobi, and it's a mile long and about two-tenths of a mile wide, where over half a million people live crammed in these little tin shacks, generation after generation, renting them, often eight or 10 people to a room. 
And it's known for prostitution, violence, drugs: a hard place to grow up. 
And when we were walking through the narrow alleys, it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. 
But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there: women washing their babies, washing their clothes, hanging them out to dry. 
I met this woman, Mama Rose, who has rented that little tin shack for 32 years, where she lives with her seven children. 
Four sleep in one twin bed, and three sleep on the mud and linoleum floor. 
And she keeps them all in school by selling water from that kiosk, and from selling soap and bread from the little store inside. 
It was also the day after the inauguration, and I was reminded how Mathare is still connected to the globe. 
And I would see kids on the street corners, and they'd say "" Obama, he's our brother! "" And I'd say "" Well, Obama's my brother, so that makes you my brother too. "" And they would look quizzically, and then be like, "" High five! "" And it was here that I met Jane. 
I was struck immediately by the kindness and the gentleness in her face, and I asked her to tell me her story. 
She started off by telling me her dream. She said, "" I had two. 
My first dream was to be a doctor, and the second was to marry a good man who would stay with me and my family, because my mother was a single mom, and couldn't afford to pay for school fees. 
So I had to give up the first dream, and I focused on the second. "" She got married when she was 18, had a baby right away. 
And when she turned 20, found herself pregnant with a second child, her mom died and her husband left her — married another woman. 
So she was again in Mathare, with no income, no skill set, no money. 
And so she ultimately turned to prostitution. 
It wasn't organized in the way we often think of it. 
She would go into the city at night with about 20 girls, look for work, and sometimes come back with a few shillings, or sometimes with nothing. 
And she said, "" You know, the poverty wasn't so bad. It was the humiliation and the embarrassment of it all. "" In 2001, her life changed. 
She had a girlfriend who had heard about this organization, Jamii Bora, that would lend money to people no matter how poor you were, as long as you provided a commensurate amount in savings. 
And so she spent a year to save 50 dollars, and started borrowing, and over time she was able to buy a sewing machine. 
She started tailoring. 
And that turned into what she does now, which is to go into the secondhand clothing markets, and for about three dollars and 25 cents she buys an old ball gown. 
Some of them might be ones you gave. 
And she repurposes them with frills and ribbons, and makes these frothy confections that she sells to women for their daughter's Sweet 16 or first Holy Communion — those milestones in a life that people want to celebrate all along the economic spectrum. 
And she does really good business. In fact, I watched her walk through the streets hawking. And before you knew it, there was a crowd of women around her, buying these dresses. 
And I reflected, as I was watching her sell the dresses, and also the jewelry that she makes, that now Jane makes more than four dollars a day. 
And by many definitions she is no longer poor. 
But she still lives in Mathare Valley. 
And so she can't move out. 
She lives with all of that insecurity, and in fact, in January, during the ethnic riots, she was chased from her home and had to find a new shack in which she would live. 
Jamii Bora understands that and understands that when we're talking about poverty, we've got to look at people all along the economic spectrum. 
And so with patient capital from Acumen and other organizations, loans and investments that will go the long term with them, they built a low-cost housing development, about an hour outside Nairobi central. 
And they designed it from the perspective of customers like Jane herself, insisting on responsibility and accountability. 
So she has to give 10 percent of the mortgage — of the total value, or about 400 dollars in savings. 
And then they match her mortgage to what she paid in rent for her little shanty. 
And in the next couple of weeks, she's going to be among the first 200 families to move into this development. 
When I asked her if she feared anything, or whether she would miss anything from Mathare, she said, "" What would I fear that I haven't confronted already? 
I'm HIV positive. I've dealt with it all. "" And she said, "" What would I miss? 
You think I will miss the violence or the drugs? The lack of privacy? 
Do you think I'll miss not knowing if my children are going to come home at the end of the day? "" She said "" If you gave me 10 minutes my bags would be packed. "" I said, "" Well what about your dreams? "" And she said, "" Well, you know, my dreams don't look exactly like I thought they would when I was a little girl. 
But if I think about it, I thought I wanted a husband, but what I really wanted was a family that was loving. And I fiercely love my children, and they love me back. "" She said, "" I thought that I wanted to be a doctor, but what I really wanted to be was somebody who served and healed and cured. 
And so I feel so blessed with everything that I have, that two days a week I go and I counsel HIV patients. 
And I say, 'Look at me. You are not dead. 
You are still alive. And if you are still alive you have to serve. '"" And she said, "" I'm not a doctor who gives out pills. 
But maybe me, I give out something better because I give them hope. "" And in the middle of this economic crisis, where so many of us are inclined to pull in with fear, I think we're well suited to take a cue from Jane and reach out, recognizing that being poor doesn't mean being ordinary. 
Because when systems are broken, like the ones that we're seeing around the world, it's an opportunity for invention and for innovation. 
It's an opportunity to truly build a world where we can extend services and products to all human beings, so that they can make decisions and choices for themselves. 
I truly believe it's where dignity starts. 
We owe it to the Janes of the world. 
And just as important, we owe it to ourselves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. 
And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. 
I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. 
For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. 
Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars... 
(Laughter)... if we use pennies. 
Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. 
But it's also a morally important one. 
Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. 
This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum — whatever sorghum is — losing sorghum. 
But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. 
Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene. 
So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. 
But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. 
And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. 
Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. 
So this small missing chunk here is puzzling. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms — one that didn't exist in the 90's. 
What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. 
(Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times. (Laughter) 
It's true. 
(Applause) I have Excel. 
(Laughter) The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. 
Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. 
And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. 
And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. 
And some people think that string theory is tough. 
(Laughter) Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit. 
It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. 
Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law. 
Some people think this number's a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year. 
Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. 
And it was a big Christmas hit. 
Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket. 
(Laughter) (Applause) These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media. (Applause) 
Or about 75,000 jobs. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts. 
So that's it for now. 
I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 

This is a map of New York State that was made in 1937 by the General Drafting Company. 
It's an extremely famous map among cartography nerds, because down here at the bottom of the Catskill Mountains, there is a little town called Roscoe — actually, this will go easier if I just put it up here — There's Roscoe, and then right above Roscoe is Rockland, New York, and then right above that is the tiny town of Agloe, New York. 
Agloe, New York, is very famous to cartographers, because it's a paper town. 
It's also known as a copyright trap. 
Mapmakers — because my map of New York and your map of New York are going to look very similar, on account of the shape of New York — often, mapmakers will insert fake places onto their maps, in order to protect their copyright. 
Because then, if my fake place shows up on your map, I can be well and truly sure that you have robbed me. 
Agloe is a scrabblization of the initials of the two guys who made this map, Ernest Alpers and Otto [G.] Lindberg, and they released this map in 1937. 
Decades later, Rand McNally releases a map with Agloe, New York, on it, at the same exact intersection of two dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. 
Well, you can imagine the delight over at General Drafting. 
They immediately call Rand McNally, and they say, "" We've caught you! We made Agloe, New York, up. 
It is a fake place. It's a paper town. 
We're going to sue your pants off! "" And Rand McNally says, "" No, no, no, no, Agloe is real. "" Because people kept going to that intersection of two dirt roads — (Laughter) in the middle of nowhere, expecting there to be a place called Agloe — someone built a place called Agloe, New York. (Laughter) 
It had a gas station, a general store, two houses at its peak. (Laughter) 
And this is of course a completely irresistible metaphor to a novelist, because we would all like to believe that the stuff that we write down on paper can change the actual world in which we're actually living, which is why my third book is called "" Paper Towns "". 
But what interests me ultimately more than the medium in which this happened, is the phenomenon itself. 
It's easy enough to say that the world shapes our maps of the world, right? 
Like the overall shape of the world is obviously going to affect our maps. 
But what I find a lot more interesting is the way that the manner in which we map the world changes the world. 
Because the world would truly be a different place if North were down. 
And the world would be a truly different place if Alaska and Russia weren't on opposite sides of the map. 
And the world would be a different place if we projected Europe to show it in its actual size. 
The world is changed by our maps of the world. 
The way that we choose — sort of, our personal cartographic enterprise, also shapes the map of our lives, and that in turn shapes our lives. 
I believe that what we map changes the life we lead. 
And I don't mean that in some, like, secret-y Oprah's Angels network, like, you-can-think-your-way- out-of-cancer sense. 
But I do believe that while maps don't show you where you will go in your life, they show you where you might go. 
You very rarely go to a place that isn't on your personal map. 
So I was a really terrible student when I was a kid. 
My GPA was consistently in the low 2s. 
And I think the reason that I was such a terrible student is that I felt like education was just a series of hurdles that had been erected before me, and I had to jump over in order to achieve adulthood. 
And I didn't really want to jump over these hurdles, because they seemed completely arbitrary, so I often wouldn't, and then people would threaten me, you know, they'd threaten me with this "" going on [my] permanent record, "" or "" You'll never get a good job. "" I didn't want a good job! 
As far as I could tell at eleven or twelve years old, like, people with good jobs woke up very early in the morning, (Laughter) and the men who had good jobs, one of the first things they did was tie a strangulation item of clothing around their necks. 
They literally put nooses on themselves, and then they went off to their jobs, whatever they were. 
That's not a recipe for a happy life. 
These people — in my, symbol-obsessed, twelve year-old imagination — these people who are strangling themselves as one of the first things they do each morning, they can't possibly be happy. 
Why would I want to jump over all of these hurdles and have that be the end? 
That's a terrible end! 
And then, when I was in tenth grade, I went to this school, Indian Springs School, a small boarding school, outside of Birmingham, Alabama. 
And all at once I became a learner. 
And I became a learner, because I found myself in a community of learners. 
I found myself surrounded by people who celebrated intellectualism and engagement, and who thought that my ironic oh-so-cool disengagement wasn't clever, or funny, but, like, it was a simple and unspectacular response to very complicated and compelling problems. 
And so I started to learn, because learning was cool. 
I learned that some infinite sets are bigger than other infinite sets, and I learned that iambic pentameter is and why it sounds so good to human ears. 
I learned that the Civil War was a nationalizing conflict, I learned some physics, I learned that correlation shouldn't be confused with causation — all of these things, by the way, enriched my life on a literally daily basis. 
And it's true that I don't use most of them for my "" job, "" but that's not what it's about for me. 
It's about cartography. 
What is the process of cartography? 
It's, you know, sailing upon some land, and thinking, "I think I'll draw that bit of land," and then wondering, "" Maybe there's some more land to draw. "" And that's when learning really began for me. 
It's true that I had teachers that didn't give up on me, and I was very fortunate to have those teachers, because I often gave them cause to think there was no reason to invest in me. 
But a lot of the learning that I did in high school wasn't about what happened inside the classroom, it was about what happened outside of the classroom. 
For instance, I can tell you that "" There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons — That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes — "" not because I memorized Emily Dickinson in school when I was in high school, but because there was a girl when I was in high school, and her name was Amanda, and I had a crush on her, and she liked Emily Dickinson poetry. 
The reason I can tell you what opportunity cost is, is because one day when I was playing Super Mario Kart on my couch, my friend Emmet walked in, and he said, "How long have you been playing Super Mario Kart?" 
And I said, "" I don't know, like, six hours? "" and he said, "" Do you realize that if you'd worked at Baskin-Robbins those six hours, you could have made 30 dollars, so in some ways, you just paid thirty dollars to play Super Mario Kart. "" And I was, like, "" I'll take that deal. "" (Laughter) But I learned what opportunity cost is. 
And along the way, the map of my life got better. 
It got bigger; it contained more places. 
There were more things that might happen, more futures I might have. 
It wasn't a formal, organized learning process, and I'm happy to admit that. 
It was spotty, it was inconsistent, there was a lot I didn't know. 
I might know, you know, Cantor's idea that some infinite sets are larger than other infinite sets, but I didn't really understand the calculus behind that idea. 
I might know the idea of opportunity cost, but I didn't know the law of diminishing returns. 
But the great thing about imagining learning as cartography, instead of imagining it as arbitrary hurdles that you have to jump over, is that you see a bit of coastline, and that makes you want to see more. 
And so now I do know at least some of the calculus that underlies all of that stuff. 
So, I had one learning community in high school, then I went to another for college, and then I went to another, when I started working at a magazine called "" Booklist, "" where I was an assistant, surrounded by astonishingly well-read people. 
And then I wrote a book. 
And like all authors dream of doing, I promptly quit my job. 
(Laughter) And for the first time since high school, I found myself without a learning community, and it was miserable. 
I hated it. 
I read many, many books during this two-year period. 
I read books about Stalin, and books about how the Uzbek people came to identify as Muslims, and I read books about how to make atomic bombs, but it just felt like I was creating my own hurdles, and then jumping over them myself, instead of feeling the excitement of being part of a community of learners, a community of people who are engaged together in the cartographic enterprise of trying to better understand and map the world around us. 
And then, in 2006, I met that guy. 
His name is Ze Frank. 
I didn't actually meet him, just on the Internet. 
Ze Frank was running, at the time, a show called "" The Show with Ze Frank, "" and I discovered the show, and that was my way back into being a community learner again. 
Here's Ze talking about Las Vegas: (Video) Ze Frank: Las Vegas was built in the middle of a huge, hot desert. 
Almost everything here was brought from somewhere else — the sort of rocks, the trees, the waterfalls. 
These fish are almost as out of place as my pig that flew. 
Contrasted to the scorching desert that surrounds this place, so are these people. 
Things from all over the world have been rebuilt here, away from their histories, and away from the people that experience them differently. 
Sometimes improvements were made — even the Sphinx got a nose job. 
Here, there's no reason to feel like you're missing anything. 
This New York means the same to me as it does to everyone else. 
Everything is out of context, and that means context allows for everything: Self Parking, Events Center, Shark Reef. 
This fabrication of place could be one of the world's greatest achievements, because no one belongs here; everyone does. 
As I walked around this morning, I noticed most of the buildings were huge mirrors reflecting the sun back into the desert. 
But unlike most mirrors, which present you with an outside view of yourself embedded in a place, these mirrors come back empty. 
John Green: Makes me nostalgic for the days when you could see the pixels in online video. 
(Laughter) Ze isn't just a great public intellectual, he's also a brilliant community builder, and the community of people that built up around these videos was in many ways a community of learners. 
So we played Ze Frank at chess collaboratively, and we beat him. 
We organized ourselves to take a young man on a road trip across the United States. 
We turned the Earth into a sandwich, by having one person hold a piece of bread at one point on the Earth, and on the exact opposite point of the Earth, have another person holding a piece of bread. 
I realize that these are silly ideas, but they are also "" learny "" ideas, and that was what was so exciting to me, and if you go online, you can find communities like this all over the place. 
Follow the calculus tag on Tumblr, and yes, you will see people complaining about calculus, but you'll also see people re-blogging those complaints, making the argument that calculus is interesting and beautiful, and here's a way in to thinking about the problem that you find unsolvable. 
You can go to places like Reddit, and find sub-Reddits, like "" Ask a Historian "" or "" Ask Science, "" where you can ask people who are in these fields a wide range of questions, from very serious ones to very silly ones. 
But to me, the most interesting communities of learners that are growing up on the Internet right now are on YouTube, and admittedly, I am biased. 
But I think in a lot of ways, the YouTube page resembles a classroom. 
Look for instance at "" Minute Physics, "" a guy who's teaching the world about physics: (Video) Let's cut to the chase. 
As of July 4, 2012, the Higgs boson is the last fundamental piece of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered experimentally. 
But, you might ask, why was the Higgs boson included in the standard model, alongside well-known particles like electrons and photons and quarks, if it hadn't been discovered back then in the 1970s? 
Good question. There are two main reasons. 
First, just like the electron is an excitation in the electron field, the Higgs boson is simply a particle which is an excitation of the everywhere-permeating Higgs field. 
The Higgs field in turn plays an integral role in our model for the weak nuclear force. 
In particular, the Higgs field helps explain why it's so weak. 
We'll talk more about this in a later video, but even though weak nuclear theory was confirmed in the 1980s, in the equations, the Higgs field is so inextricably jumbled with the weak force, that until now we've been unable to confirm its actual and independent existence. 
JG: Or here's a video that I made as part of my show "" Crash Course, "" talking about World War I: (Video) The immediate cause was of course the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. 
Quick aside: It's worth noting that the first big war of the twentieth century began with an act of terrorism. 
So Franz Ferdinand wasn't particularly well-liked by his uncle, the emperor Franz Joseph — now that is a mustache! 
But even so, the assassination led Austria to issue an ultimatum to Serbia, whereupon Serbia accepted some, but not all, of Austria's demands, leading Austria to declare war against Serbia. 
And then Russia, due to its alliance with the Serbs, mobilized its army. 
Germany, because it had an alliance with Austria, told Russia to stop mobilizing, which Russia failed to do, so then Germany mobilized its own army, declared war on Russia, cemented an alliance with the Ottomans, and then declared war on France, because, you know, France. 
(Laughter) And it's not just physics and world history that people are choosing to learn through YouTube. 
Here's a video about abstract mathematics. 
(Video) So you're me, and you're in math class yet again, because they make you go every single day. 
And you're learning about, I don't know, the sums of infinite series. 
That's a high school topic, right? 
Which is odd, because it's a cool topic, but they somehow manage to ruin it anyway. 
So I guess that's why they allow infinite series in the curriculum. 
So, in a quite understandable need for distraction, you're doodling and thinking more about what the plural of "" series "" should be than about the topic at hand: "" serieses, "" "" seriese, "" "" seriesen, "" and "" serii? "" Or is it that the singular should be changed: one "" serie, "" or "" serum, "" just like the singular of "" sheep "" should be "" shoop. "" But the whole concept of things like 1 / 2 + 1 / 4 + 1 / 8 + 1 / 16 and so on approaches one, is useful if, say, you want to draw a line of elephants, each holding the tail of the next one: normal elephant, young elephant, baby elephant, dog-sized elephant, 
puppy-sized elephant, all the way down to Mr. Tusks and beyond. 
Which is at least a tiny bit awesome, because you can get an infinite number of elephants in a line, and still have it fit across a single notebook page. 
JG: And lastly, here's Destin, from "" Smarter Every Day, "" talking about the conservation of angular momentum, and, since it's YouTube, cats: (Video) Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to "" Smarter Every Day. "" So you've probably observed that cats almost always land on their feet. 
Today's question is: why? 
Like most simple questions, there's a very complex answer. 
For instance, let me reword this question: How does a cat go from feet-up to feet-down in a falling reference frame, without violating the conservation of angular momentum? 
(Laughter) JG: So, here's something all four of these videos have in common: They all have more than half a million views on YouTube. 
And those are people watching not in classrooms, but because they are part of the communities of learning that are being set up by these channels. 
And I said earlier that YouTube is like a classroom to me, and in many ways it is, because here is the instructor — it's like the old-fashioned classroom: here's the instructor, and then beneath the instructor are the students, and they're all having a conversation. 
And I know that YouTube comments have a very bad reputation in the world of the Internet, but in fact, if you go on comments for these channels, what you'll find is people engaging the subject matter, asking difficult, complicated questions that are about the subject matter, and then other people answering those questions. 
And because the YouTube page is set up so that the page in which I'm talking to you is on the exact — the place where I'm talking to you is on the exact same page as your comments, you are participating in a live and real and active way in the conversation. 
And because I'm in comments usually, I get to participate with you. 
And you find this whether it's world history, or mathematics, or science, or whatever it is. 
You also see young people using the tools and the sort of genres of the Internet in order to create places for intellectual engagement, instead of the ironic detachment that maybe most of us associate with memes and other Internet conventions — you know, "" Got bored. Invented calculus. "" Or, here's Honey Boo Boo criticizing industrial capitalism: ["" Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. 
Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. ""] In case you can't see what she says... yeah. 
I really believe that these spaces, these communities, have become for a new generation of learners, the kind of communities, the kind of cartographic communities that I had when I was in high school, and then again when I was in college. 
And as an adult, re-finding these communities has re-introduced me to a community of learners, and has encouraged me to continue to be a learner even in my adulthood, so that I no longer feel like learning is something reserved for the young. 
Vi Hart and "" Minute Physics "" introduced me to all kinds of things that I didn't know before. 
And I know that we all hearken back to the days of the Parisian salon in the Enlightenment, or to the Algonquin Round Table, and wish, "" Oh, I wish I could have been a part of that, I wish I could have laughed at Dorothy Parker's jokes. "" But I'm here to tell you that these places exist, they still exist. 
They exist in corners of the Internet, where old men fear to tread. 
(Laughter) And I truly, truly believe that when we invented Agloe, New York, in the 1960s, when we made Agloe real, we were just getting started. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My name is Joshua Walters. 
I'm a performer. 
(Beatboxing) (Laughter) (Applause) But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. 
I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. 
When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. 
Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ. 
(Laughter) I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) 
There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. 
They're just practicing. 
One day they'll get here. 
Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. 
"" Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some — why don't we give you some Zyprexa. 
Okay? Mmhmm? 
At least that's what it says on my pen. "" (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. 
I can feel your noise. 
The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. 
The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. 
When I got out I had a choice. 
I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness. 
(Bugle sound) There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive — at least the hypomanic edge part of it. 
Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. 
Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. 
You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible. 
And there's a book — John Gartner. 
John Gartner wrote this book called "" The Hypomanic Edge "" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. 
A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "" Touched With Fire "" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. 
Some of them committed suicide. 
So it wasn't all the good side of the illness. 
Now recently, there's been development in this field. 
And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." 
Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum — you know what I'm talking about — not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum — where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. 
(Laughter) Your call. Your call. 
And everyone's somewhere in the middle. 
Everyone's somewhere in the middle. 
So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. 
But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. 
Maybe no one's really crazy. 
Everyone is just a little bit mad. 
How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much 
depends on how lucky you are. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

If you're here today — and I'm very happy that you are — you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. 
When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. 
Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. 
Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. 
And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. 
And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? 
Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. 
Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions — which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. 
But I'll tell you later, if you want to know. 
I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. 
However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. 
Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. 

I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people, and that was in 1960. 
I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future, but I will not use digital technology, as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. 
Instead, I have progressed, and I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box. 
This box contains one billion people. 
And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion people. 
In the developing world, she said, they had two billion people. 
And they lived away then. 
There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. 
In the industrialized world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. 
And their aspiration was to buy a car. 
And in 1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. 
This was the economic level at which Sweden was. 
But in contrast to this, in the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day. 
They were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. 
There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up. 
And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about "" the West "" and "" the Developing World. "" But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it. 
And that's what I'm going to show you, because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. 
Just look how many. 
The world population has doubled since I went to school. 
And of course, there's been economic growth in the West. 
A lot of companies have happened to grow the economy, so the Western population moved over to here. 
And now their aspiration is not only to have a car. 
Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly. 
So this is where they are today. 
And the most successful of the developing countries, they have moved on, you know, and they have become emerging economies, we call them. 
They are now buying cars. 
And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company, and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world. 
(Laughter) So there they are. 
And the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes, they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago. 
The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions, the three billions here, which are also becoming emerging economies, because they are quite healthy, relatively well-educated, and they already also have two to three children per woman, as those [richer also] have. 
And their aspiration now is, of course, to buy a bicycle, and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also. 
But this is the world we have today, no longer any gap. 
But the distance from the poorest here, the very poorest, to the very richest over here is wider than ever. 
But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying — there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle. 
This is the new world we have today in 2010. 
And what will happen in the future? 
Well, I'm going to project into 2050. 
I was in Shanghai recently, and I listened to what's happening in China, and it's pretty sure that they will catch up, just as Japan did. 
All the projections [say that] this one [billion] will [only] grow with one to two or three percent. 
[But this second] grows with seven, eight percent, and then they will end up here. 
They will start flying. 
And these lower or middle income countries, the emerging income countries, they will also forge forwards economically. 
And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology — so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap — then they will move all the way up here. 
And they will start to buy electric cars. 
This is what we will find there. 
So what about the poorest two billion? 
What about the poorest two billion here? 
Will they move on? 
Well, here population [growth] comes in because there [among emerging economies] we already have two to three children per woman, family planning is widely used, and population growth is coming to an end. 
Here [among the poorest], population is growing. 
So these [poorest] two billion will, in the next decades, increase to three billion, and they will thereafter increase to four billion. 
There is nothing — but a nuclear war of a kind we've never seen — that can stop this [growth] from happening. 
Because we already have this [growth] in process. 
But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [to live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050. 
We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth. 
And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. 
Here I have on the screen my country bubbles. 
Every bubble is a country. The size is population. 
The colors show the continent. 
The yellow on there is the Americas; dark blue is Africa; brown is Europe; green is the Middle East and this light blue is South Asia. 
That's India and this is China. Size is population. 
Here I have children per woman: two children, four children, six children, eight children — big families, small families. 
The year is 1960. 
And down here, child survival, the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school: 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90, and almost 100 percent, as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries. 
But look, this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960: one billion Western world here — high child-survival, small families — and all the rest, the rainbow of developing countries, with very large families and poor child survival. 
What has happened? I start the world. Here we go. 
Can you see, as the years pass by, child survival is increasing? 
They get soap, hygiene, education, vaccination, penicillin and then family planning. Family size is decreasing. 
[When] they get up to 90-percent child survival, then families decrease, and most of the Arab countries in the Middle East is falling down there [to small families]. 
Look, Bangladesh catching up with India. 
The whole emerging world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size, but we still have the poorest billion. 
Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? 
They are still up here. 
And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to the next generation. 
And the population will double in one generation. 
So the only way of really getting world population [growth] to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent. 
That's why investments by Gates Foundation, UNICEF and aid organizations, together with national government in the poorest countries, are so good; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world. 
We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things. 
Child survival is the new green. 
It's only by child survival that we will stop population growth. 
And will it happen? 
Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. 
I'm a very serious "" possibilist. "" It's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work analytically with the world. 
It can be done. 
We can have a much more just world. 
With green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty, and global governance, the world can become like this. 
And look at the position of the old West. 
Remember when this blue box was all alone, leading the world, living its own life. 
This will not happen [again]. 
The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world — nothing more, nothing less. 
But it's a very important role. 
Do it well and get used to it. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. 
And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are. 
Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. 
It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. 
To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture. 
We've done something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. 
We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution — much higher than in an ordinary ad — and we've embedded extra content. 
If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here. 
Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this. 
And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. 
So let's pull up, now, something else. 
This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out. 
This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies. 
One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W. 
The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots — all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies — all these shots were taken. 
I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. 
And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way. 
We can just navigate in this very simple way. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. 
(Laughter) I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. 
If I can find some of the sort of weird ones — So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. 
Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered. 
If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. 
And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory. 
It's doing that based on the content inside the images. 

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. 
And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. 
And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. 
You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. 
And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. 
(Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) 
Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. 
And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. 
And it went like this: "" R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. 
Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie. "" (Laughter) Yeah. 
So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. 
(Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. 
And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. 
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. 
But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. 
Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. 
I could have told you 50 others just like it — all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. 
And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. 
But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. 
And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. 
And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. 
Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. 
And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. 
Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. 
A third to a half of the population are introverts — a third to a half. 
So that's one out of every two or three people you know. 
So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now — all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. 
We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing. 
Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. 
It's different from being shy. 
Shyness is about fear of social judgment. 
Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. 
So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. 
So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. 
But now here's where the bias comes in. 
Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. 
And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. 
So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. 
We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. 
But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks — four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. 
And kids are working in countless group assignments. 
Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. 
And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. 
And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. 
(Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. 
Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. 
And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks — which is something we might all favor nowadays. 
And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. 
Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. 
Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. 
And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. 
I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. 
And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert / extrovert spectrum. 
Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. 
And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert / extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. 
And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. 
And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. 
This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. 
And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. 
So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. 
Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. 
And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. 
Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. 
Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating — and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer — but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. 
And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. 
It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. 
If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. 
This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. 
It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. 
Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. 
And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. 
So — (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. 
And do you really want to leave it up to chance? 
Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. 
Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? 
Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? 
Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the "" man "" of contemplation. 
But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. 
And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." 
And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." 
But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. 
And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. 
So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. 
And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "" How to Win Friends and Influence People. "" And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. 
So that's the world we're living in today. 
Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. 
The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. 
And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. 
So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. 
Guess what? 
Books. 
I have a suitcase full of books. 
Here's Margaret Atwood, "" Cat's Eye. "" Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. 
And here's "" The Guide for the Perplexed "" by Maimonides. 
But these are not exactly my books. 
I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. 
My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. 
I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. 
Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. 
But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. 
He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. 
Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted — so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. 
And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. 
But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. 
So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. 
And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. 
It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. 
But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. 
(Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. 
So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. 
I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. 
And I call this my "" year of speaking dangerously. "" (Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. 
But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. 
And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. 
Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. 
Just stop it. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
(Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions — you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. 
It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. 
We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. 
Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. 
I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. 
Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. 
So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. 
Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. 
But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. 
But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. 
So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 

A few years ago, my eyes were opened to the dark side of the construction industry. 
In 2006, young Qatari students took me to go and see the migrant worker camps. 
And since then I've followed the unfolding issue of worker rights. 
In the last six months, more than 300 skyscrapers in the UAE have been put on hold or canceled. 
Behind the headlines that lay behind these buildings is the fate of the often-indentured construction worker. 
1.1 million of them. 
Mainly Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Nepalese, these laborers risk everything to make money for their families back home. 
They pay a middle-man thousands of dollars to be there. 
And when they arrive, they find themselves in labor camps with no water, no air conditioning, and their passports taken away. 
While it's easy to point the finger at local officials and higher authorities, 99 percent of these people are hired by the private sector, and so therefore we're equally, if not more, accountable. 
Groups like Buildsafe UAE have emerged, but the numbers are simply overwhelming. 
In August 2008, UAE public officials noted that 40 percent of the country's 1,098 labor camps had violated minimum health and fire safety regulations. 
And last summer, more than 10,000 workers protested for the non-payment of wages, for the poor quality of food, and inadequate housing. 
And then the financial collapse happened. 
When the contractors have gone bust, as they've been overleveraged like everyone else, the difference is everything goes missing, documentation, passports, and tickets home for these workers. 
Currently, right now, thousands of workers are abandoned. 
There is no way back home. 
And there is no way, and no proof of arrival. 
These are the boom-and-bust refugees. 
The question is, as a building professional, as an architect, an engineer, as a developer, if you know this is going on, as we go to the sights every single week, are you complacent or complicit in the human rights violations? 
So let's forget your environmental footprint. 
Let's think about your ethical footprint. 
What good is it to build a zero-carbon, energy efficient complex, when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best? 
Now, recently I've been told I've been taking the high road. 
But, quite frankly, on this issue, there is no other road. 
So let's not forget who is really paying the price of this financial collapse. 
And that as we worry about our next job in the office, the next design that we can get, to keep our workers. 
Let's not forget these men, who are truly dying to work. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times. 
I'm giving a short slide show this morning that I'm giving for the very first time, so — well it's — I don't want or need to raise the bar, I'm actually trying to lower the bar. 
Because I've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session. 
And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief, but about behavior. 
Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. 
How dare we be optimistic? 
Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture. 
As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." 
And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word "" behavior "" is also, I think, sometimes misunderstood in this context. 
I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff. 
But, as important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws. 
And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. 
In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. 
And we have one. 
I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. 
I was reminded of that recently, by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her 70s, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction, also just staring at me. And so I said, "" How do you do? "" And she said, "" You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore. "" (Laughter) Many years ago, when I was a young congressman, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge 
of nuclear arms control — the nuclear arms race. 
And the military historians taught me, during that quest, that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global, world war — strategic conflicts. 
And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model. 
Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories, and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems, like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic, and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. 
And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. 
Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. 
We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources. 
Let me show you these slides here. 
I thought I would start with the logo. What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. 
Greenland remains. Twenty-eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap — the North Polar ice cap — looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox. 
This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory. 
This is what's happened in the last 28 years. 
To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. 
Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. 
The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically — doesn't look quite the same size — but it is exactly the same size as the United States, minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. 
The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. 
The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice — vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. 
That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland. 
Already, around the Arctic Circle — this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. 
The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California. 
"" They were the best of times, they were the worst of times "": the most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger, but essentially the same size. 
They have exactly the same amount of carbon. 
But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus, most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average. On Venus, it's 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, and putting it into the atmosphere. 
It's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. 
It's three times hotter than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. Now, briefly, here's an image you've seen, as one of the only old images, but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate. 
The global scientific community says: man-made global warming pollution, put into the atmosphere, thickening this, is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. 
You all know that. At the last IPCC summary, the scientists wanted to say, "How certain are you?" They wanted to answer that "99 percent." 
The Chinese objected, and so the compromise was "more than 90 percent." 
Now, the skeptics say, "" Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun. "" If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in. 
If it's more being trapped on the way out, then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the lower atmosphere. 
Here's the stratosphere: cooler. 
CSI: Climate. 
Now, here's the good news. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. 
What is missing is a sense of urgency. 
If you agree with the factual analysis, but you don't feel the sense of urgency, where does that leave you? 
Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with Current TV — who did this pro bono — did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. 
This is the winner. 
NBC — I'll show all of the networks here — the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates: two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions, two about the climate crisis. 
Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. 
From laughs to tears — this is one of the older tobacco commercials. 
So here's what we're doing. 
This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. 
But it's not just the developed nations. 
The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. 
If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. 
But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia — over thirty years. 
This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. 
'70s. '80s.' 90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. 
We have the technologies. 
We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution. 
People say, "" What's the solution? "" Here it is. 
Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck — and some things have changed since the 19th century. 
In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. 
Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis. 
But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. 
This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy plants, linked in a so-called "" supergrid "" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing countries — high-voltage DC currents. 
This is not pie in the sky; this can be done. 
We need to do it for our own economy. 
The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. 
And it is based on an old model. 
Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. 
I have a stake in these, so I'll have a disclaimer there. 
But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation. 
You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. 
The only two countries that didn't ratify — and now there's only one. Australia had an election. 
And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. 
And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. 
Lot of other things contributed to it, but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. 
This is Lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. 
We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture. 
Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S. 
are up to 780 — and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this — which is good news. 
Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. 
What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice — just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. 
We now have a culture of distraction. 
But we have a planetary emergency. 
And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission. 
I wish I could find the words to convey this. 
This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. 
Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. 
We can do this. Don't tell me that we don't have the capacity to do it. 
If we had just one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War, we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. 
We have the capacity to do it. 
One final point: I'm optimistic, because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. 
Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, "" Oh, this is so terrible. 
What a burden we have. "" I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? 
A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. 
Let's do that. Thank you very much. 
Chris Anderson: For so many people at TED, there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form — one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. 
That hurts. 
Al Gore: You have no idea. (Laughter) CA: When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now — I mean, there's — are you excited by their plans on global warming? 
AG: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee — certain nominee — John McCain, and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination — all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that — as illustrated by the questions — 
that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters, by the way, the analysis of all the questions — and, by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, "" Clean Coal. "" Has anybody noticed that? 
Every single debate has been sponsored by "" Clean Coal. "" "Now, even lower emissions!" 
The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. 
So they're saying the right things and they may — whichever of them is elected — may do the right thing, but let me tell you: when I came back from Kyoto in 1997, with a feeling of great happiness that we'd gotten that breakthrough there, and then confronted the United States Senate, only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm, to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say. 
This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization. 
CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. 
And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. 
So that's why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. 
Demand — change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. 
We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy — this — We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. 
Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. 
Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. 
Have a moratorium — we shouldn't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren't able to capture and store CO2, which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. 
Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible. 
This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign — grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper — with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen. 
We need help. We need help. 
CA: In terms of your own personal role going forward, Al, is there something more than that you would like to be doing? 
AG: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? 
Buckminster Fuller once wrote, "" If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? 
How would I be? "" It does depend on all of us, but again, not just with the light bulbs. 
We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. 
We can change things, but we have to actively change. 
What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness. 
And that's hard to — that's hard to create — but it is coming. 
There's an old African proverb that some of you know that says, "" If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. "" We have to go far, quickly. 
So we have to have a change in consciousness. 
A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. 
A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge. 
CA: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED. 
AG: Thank you. Thank you very much. 

The Great Recession ended when American GDP resumed its kind of slow, steady march upward, and some other economic indicators also started to rebound, and they got kind of healthy kind of quickly. 
And business investment in gear — in equipment and hardware and software — is at an all-time high. 
So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. 
I took the last 20 years of GDP growth and the last 20 years of labor-productivity growth and used those in a fairly straightforward way to try to project how many jobs the economy was going to need to keep growing, and this is the line that I came up with. 
So if these predictions are accurate, that gap is not going to close. 
In particular, I think my projection is way too optimistic, because when I did it, I was assuming that the future was kind of going to look like the past, with labor productivity growth, and that's actually not what I believe. 
Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that they never, ever had before, and that kind of eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living. 
Throughout all of history, if you wanted something translated from one language into another, you had to involve a human being. 
And what they do is sit on top of a very large body of expertise and knowledge and they use that to react on the fly to kind of unpredictable demands, and that's very, very hard to automate. "" One of the most impressive knowledge workers in recent memory is a guy named Ken Jennings. 
So I start to think a lot of knowledge work is going to be affected by this. 
But they're getting better quite quickly and DARPA, which is the investment arm of the Defense Department, is trying to accelerate their trajectory. 
But despite this challenge — personally, I'm still a huge digital optimist, and I am supremely confident that the digital technologies that we're developing now are going to take us into a Utopian future, not a dystopian future. 
(Laughter) There are some optimistic answers to this question, so some people will bring up the Age of Exploration and the opening up of the world. 
It's an endless debate and there's no conclusive, single answer to it. 
But if you're a geek like me, you say, "" Well, what do the data say? "" And you start to do things like graph things that we might be interested in — the total worldwide population, for example, or some measure of social development or the state of advancement of a society. 
So when you do this and when you plot the data, you pretty quickly come to some weird conclusions. 
The steam engine and the other associated technologies of the Industrial Revolution changed the world and influenced human history so much, that in the words of the historian Ian Morris, "... they made mockery out of all that had come before." 
Now, what we're in the middle of now is overcoming the limitations of our individual brains and infinitely multiplying our mental power. 
How can this not be as big a deal as overcoming the limitations of our muscles? 
(Laughter) We'd take them out of elite institutions, we'd put them into other elite institutions and we'd wait for the innovation. 
Now — (Laughter) as a white guy who spent his whole career at MIT and Harvard, I've got no problem with this. (Laughter) 
So here are the winners of a Topcoder programming challenge, and I assure you that nobody cares where these kids grew up, where they went to school, or what they look like. 
I hear once in a while, "" OK, I'll grant you that, but technology is still a tool for the rich world, and what's not happening, these digital tools are not improving the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid. "" And I want to say to that very clearly: nonsense. 
The economist Robert Jensen did this wonderful study a while back where he watched, in great detail, what happened to the fishing villages of Kerala, India, when they got mobile phones for the very first time. 
And the lives of both the buyers and the sellers in these villages measurably improved. "" Now, what I don't think is that Jensen got extremely lucky and happened to land in the one set of villages where technology made things better. 
Our technologies are great gifts, and we, right now, have the great good fortune to be living at a time when digital technology is flourishing, when it is broadening and deepening and becoming more profound all around the world. 
The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we're going to do, I am very confident, what we're going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world. 

For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
Now, what have kids done? 
Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
The traits the word "" childish "" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "" That won't benefit me. "" For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "" Don't do that, don't do this "" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 

So I'll be talking about the success of my campus, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, in educating students of all types, across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas. 
What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder — students of color, students underrepresented in selected areas. 
And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students, Latino students, students from low-income backgrounds, to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering. 
And so I begin with a story about my childhood. 
We all are products of our childhood experiences. 
It's hard for me to believe that it's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham, Alabama, a kid who loved getting A's, a kid who loved math, who loved to read, a kid who would say to the teacher — when the teacher said, "" Here are 10 problems, "" to the class, this little fat kid would say, "" Give us 10 more. "" And the whole class would say, "" Shut up, Freeman. "" And there was a designated kicker every day. 
And so I was always asking this question: "Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn?" 
And amazingly, one week in church, when I really didn't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems, I heard this man say this: "" If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham, we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education. "" And I looked up and said, "" Who is that man? "" And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King. 
And I said to my parents, "" I've got to go. 
I want to go. I want to be a part of this. "" And they said, "" Absolutely not. "" (Laughter) And we had a rough go of it. 
And at that time, quite frankly, you really did not talk back to your parents. 
And somehow I said, "" You know, you guys are hypocrites. 
You make me go to this. You make me listen. 
The man wants me to go, and now you say no. "" And they thought about it all night. 
And they came into my room the next morning. 
They had not slept. 
They had been literally crying and praying and thinking, "" Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail? "" And they decided to do it. 
And when they came in to tell me, I was at first elated. 
And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did. 
And one of the points I make to people all the time is that sometimes when people do things that are courageous, it doesn't really mean that they're that courageous. 
It simply means that they believe it's important to do it. 
I wanted a better education. 
I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books. 
I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers, but the resources we needed. 
And as a result of that experience, in the middle of the week, while I was there in jail, Dr. King came and said with our parents, "" What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born. "" I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963. 
And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 "" Lincoln "" movie: It's history. 
And the real question is, what lessons did we learn? 
Well amazingly, the most important for me was this: That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education. 
They can be taught to be passionate about wanting to learn and to love the idea of asking questions. 
And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963. 
And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South, as you know, and, quite frankly, it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there. 
And so we had black and white students and others who began to attend. 
And it has been for 50 years an experiment. 
The experiment is this: Is it possible to have institutions in our country, universities, where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience? 
Now what is especially important about that experience for me is this: We found that we could do a lot in the arts and humanities and social sciences. 
And so we began to work on that, for years in the '60s. 
And we produced a number of people in law, all the way to the humanities. 
We produced great artists. Beckett is our muse. 
A lot of our students get into theater. 
It's great work. 
The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face — that students in the sciences and engineering, black students were not succeeding. 
But when I looked at the data, what I found was that, quite frankly, students in general, large numbers were not making it. 
And as a result of that, we decided to do something that would help, first of all, the group at the bottom, African-American students, and then Hispanic students. 
And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, philanthropists, said, "" We'd like to help. "" Robert Meyerhoff said, "" Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys, if it's not about basketball, is not positive? 
I'd like to make a difference, to do something that's positive. "" We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program. 
And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things. 
And the question is this: How is it that now we lead the country in producing African-Americans who go on to complete Ph.D. 's in science and engineering and M.D. / Ph.D.' s? 
That's a big deal. Give me a hand for that. That's a big deal. 
That's a big deal. It really is. 
(Applause) You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering. 
Quite frankly, you're talking about Americans. 
If you don't know it, while 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics who begin with a major in science and engineering will actually graduate in science and engineering, only 32 percent of whites who begin with majors in those areas actually succeed and graduate in those areas, and only 42 percent of Asian-Americans. 
And so, the real question is, what is the challenge? 
Well a part of it, of course, is K-12. 
We need to strengthen K-12. 
But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses. 
Whether you know it or not, large numbers of students with high SAT's and large numbers of A.P. credits who go to the most prestigious universities in our country begin in pre-med or pre-engineering and engineering, and they end up changing their majors. 
And the number one reason, we find, quite frankly, is they did not do well in first year science courses. 
In fact, we call first year science and engineering, typically around America, weed-out courses or barrier courses. 
How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two? 
It's an American challenge. Half of you in the room. 
I know. I know. I know. 
And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it. 
We need to find ways of making it happen. 
So what are the four things we did to help minority students that now are helping students in general? 
Number one: high expectations. 
It takes an understanding of the academic preparation of students — their grades, the rigor of the course work, their test-taking skills, their attitude, the fire in their belly, the passion for the work, to make it. 
And so doing things to help students prepare to be in that position, very important. 
But equally important, it takes an understanding that it's hard work that makes the difference. 
I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are. 
Smart simply means you're ready to learn. 
You're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions. 
I. I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate, said that when he was growing up in New York, all of his friends' parents would ask them "" What did you learn in school? "" at the end of a day. 
And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?" 
And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious. 
And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel. 
Interestingly enough, an example: One young man who earned a C in the first course and wanted to go on to med school, we said, "" We need to have you retake the course, because you need a strong foundation if you're going to move to the next level. "" Every foundation makes the difference in the next level. 
He retook the course. 
That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D. / Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. 
He now works at Harvard. 
Nice story. Give him a hand for that too. 
(Applause) Secondly, it's not about test scores only. 
Test scores are important, but they're not the most important thing. 
One young woman had great grades, but test scores were not as high. 
But she had a factor that was very important. 
She never missed a day of school, K-12. 
There was fire in that belly. 
That young woman went on, and she is today with an M.D. / Ph.D. from Hopkins. 
She's on the faculty, tenure track in psychiatry, Ph.D. in neuroscience. 
She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients. 
Big hand for her. Big hand for her. 
(Applause) And so high expectations, very important. 
Secondly, the idea of building community among the students. 
You all know that so often in science and engineering we tend to think cutthroat. 
Students are not taught to work in groups. 
And that's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other, to build trust among them, to support each other, to learn how to ask good questions, but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity. 
As you know, it's one thing to earn an A yourself, it's another thing to help someone else do well. 
And so to feel that sense of responsibility makes all the difference in the world. 
So building community among those students, very important. 
Third, the idea of, it takes researchers to produce researchers. 
Whether you're talking about artists producing artists or you're talking about people getting into the social sciences, whatever the discipline — and especially in science and engineering, as in art, for example — you need scientists to pull the students into the work. 
And so our students are working in labs regularly. 
And one great example that you'll appreciate: During a snowstorm in Baltimore several years ago, the guy on our campus with this Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant literally came back to work in his lab after several days, and all these students had refused to leave the lab. 
They had food they had packed out. 
They were in the lab working, and they saw the work, not as schoolwork, but as their lives. 
They knew they were working on AIDS research. 
They were looking at this amazing protein design. 
And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work. 
And he said, "" It doesn't get any better than that. "" And then finally, if you've got the community and you've got the high expectations and you've got researchers producing researchers, you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students, even in the classroom. 
I'll never forget a faculty member calling the staff and saying, "" I've got this young man in class, a young black guy, and he seems like he's just not excited about the work. 
He's not taking notes. We need to talk to him. "" What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying, "" Let me see how I can work with them. 
Let me get the staff to help me out. "" It was that connecting. 
That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D. / Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke. 
Give him a big hand for that. 
(Applause) And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us, not only finally with evaluation, assessing what works. 
And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses. 
And so we redesigned chemistry, we redesigned physics. 
But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences. 
Because so many students are bored in class. 
Do you know that? 
Many students, K-12 and in universities, don't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk. 
They need to be engaged. 
And so we have done — if you look at our website at the Chemistry Discovery Center, you'll see people coming from all over the country to look at how we are redesigning courses, having an emphasis on collaboration, use of technology, using problems out of our biotech companies on our campus, and not giving students the theories, but having them struggle with those theories. 
And it's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland, more and more courses are being redesigned. 
It's called academic innovation. 
And what does all of that mean? 
It means that now, not just in science and engineering, we now have programs in the arts, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in teacher education, even particularly for women in I.T. 
If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000. 
And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work. 
And most important, giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work. 
Most important, if a student has a sense of self, it is amazing how the dreams and the values can make all the difference in the world. 
When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, "" I wonder what my future could be. "" I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world. 
Aristotle said, "" Excellence is never an accident. 
It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. 
It represents the wisest option among many alternatives. "" And then he said something that gives me goosebumps. 
He said, "" Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. "" Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values. 
Thank you all very much. 
(Applause) 

That splendid music, the coming-in music, "" The Elephant March "" from "" Aida, "" is the music I've chosen for my funeral. 
(Laughter) And you can see why. It's triumphal. 
I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here. 
The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth." 
(Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. 
In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. 
But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility — (Laughter) it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. 
The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it. 
If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside. 
(Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "" Intelligent Design, "" or ID. 
Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. 
It's just creationism under another name, rechristened — I choose the word advisedly — (Laughter) for tactical, political reasons. 
The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. 
There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. 
Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism: Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual "" pre-version. "" (Laughter) In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. 
People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "" godsend "" to the evolution lobby, (Laughter) because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. 
It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. 
(Laughter) I think they're right about one thing. 
I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. 
In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. 
No, what I want to urge upon you — (Laughter) Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. (Laughter) 
(Applause) But that's putting it too negatively. 
Statistical improbability in the direction of good design — "" complexity "" is another word for this. 
The standard creationist argument — there is only one; they're all reduced to this one — takes off from a statistical improbability. 
Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers — favor our side in a war — (Laughter) disapprove of our sex lives, and so on. (Laughter) 
Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. 
But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion, precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. 
The God theory is not just a bad theory. 
He begins this speech, which was tape recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died — he begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on. 
It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. 
You're just not. Why not? Because you're not. "" (Laughter) "" Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe — no, that's holy. 
"" Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things. 
In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. 
There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "" Last Chance to See. "" Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology. 
Now, the next one. 
"" The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. "" (Laughter) "" It has been privately revealed to Professor Huxtane that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. "" (Laughter) "" Professor Hordley was brought up to have total and unquestioning faith "" — (Laughter) — "that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." 
"" Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. "" (Laughter) That's inconceivable, of course. 
whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. 
Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. 
"" No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. 
This is one nation under God. "" Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. 
[In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty] Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison. 
(Applause) In practice, what is an atheist? 
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. 
As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. 
Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. 
The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. 
You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby — the state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote — while at the same time, consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. 
This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. 
Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle? 
[Them folks misunderestimated me] (Laughter) The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. 
But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. 
Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. 
And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote — "" Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief, and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. 
That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious. "" Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies, and I can't comment on that meta-analysis, but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. 
And I know that there are — if I could put a little plug here — there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up, for what it's worth. 
In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. 
About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists. 
Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. 
I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such as history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different. 
A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. 
If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it — the intelligentsia — unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. 
To put it bluntly: American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done. (Laughter) 
From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. 
(Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. 
In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists. 
On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. 
There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. 
I suspect that the word "" atheist "" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. 
I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind. "" He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. 
Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism — incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "" Das Kapital "" to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling. 
What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers, and a letter from Darwin saying, "" My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me, "" was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. 
It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse. 
(Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. 
Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "" tooth-fairy agnostic. "" He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "" agnostic "" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence. 
Hence the phrase, "" tooth-fairy agnostic. "" Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. 
You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence. 
If you want to believe one particular one of them — unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh — the onus is on you to say why. 
The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. 
We, who are atheists, are also a-fairyists and a-teapotists. 
This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. 
My problem with it is only its apparent anthropocentrism. 
(Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob, which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile. (Laughter) 
I think the best of the available alternatives for "" atheist "" is simply "" non-theist. "" It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth-fairy agnostics. 
When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "" God, "" they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. 
But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "" atheism "" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. 
As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "" How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! 
My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. 'A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. "" Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. 
But I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. 
If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself. 
(Applause) 

That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals. "" In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "" Mom, you should do that. "" And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. 
These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. 
They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them. 
Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. 
There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. 
And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. 
I've learned to respect the lightning. 
My hair used to be straight. 
(Laughter) I'm just kidding. (Laughter) 
What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. 
They become lovely monsters. 
When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. 
As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet. 
All my relations. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there. 
I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world. 
So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, "These are places where good teachers won't go." 
On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes. 
So we have an ironic problem — good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most. 
I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi. 
I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. 
The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English — they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. 
I connected high speed internet to it — it's about three feet off the ground — turned it on and left it there. 
After this, we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see. 
But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do. 
This is the first experiment that we did — eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse. 
This boy here in the middle of central India — this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. 
They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time. 
In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee. 
They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village. 
So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were. 
At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer. 
We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children — they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. 
I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. 
So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "" Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying. "" So I said, "" Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. 
Make yourself understood to the computer. "" So the children said, "" How do we do that. "" And I said, "I don't know, actually." 
(Laughter) And I left. (Laughter) 
Two months later — and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal — that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer. 
In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley. 
(Laughter) So they could do that on their own. 
After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own. 
I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, "" I want to see what's going on. "" And he couldn't travel, so I went over there. 
He said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." 
(Laughter) The second thing he said was that, "" If children have interest, then education happens. "" And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him. 
(Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them. 
And when you've got interest, then you have education. 
Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa. 
This is a 15 year-old boy. 
(Video) Boy:... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music. 
SM: And I asked him, "" Do you send emails? "" And he said, "" Yes, and they hop across the ocean. "" This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia — a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child would play inside the classroom or at home. 
They would, you know, throw it back at you. 
They'd say, "" This is very boring. "" If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do. 
This is what these children are doing. 
They are trying to multiply, I think. 
And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework. 
As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English — (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things. 
They said, "" They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth. 
(Laughter) And indeed they had. 
I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head? 
So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own. 
At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India. 
So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, "" I'll do it from Delhi. "" They said, "" There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi. "" So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle. 
I wanted to test the limits of the system. 
The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India. 
And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? 
And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero — I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them — they get another zero, I'll go back and say, "" Yes, we need teachers for certain things. "" I called in 26 children. 
They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. 
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. 
It's all in English, and I'm going. 
(Laughter) So I left them with it. 
I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. 
I said, "" Well, did you look at any of the stuff? "" They said, "" Yes, we did. "" "Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing." 
So I said, "" Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing? "" They said, "" We look at it every day. "" So I said, "" For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand? "" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "" Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else. "" (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) It took me three years to publish that. 
It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. 
One of the referees who refereed the paper said, "It's too good to be true," which was not very nice. 
Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher. 
And then that's her over there. 
Remember, they don't study English. 
I edited out the last bit when I asked, "" Where is the neuron? "" and she says, "" The neuron? The neuron, "" and then she looked and did this. 
Whatever the expression, it was not very nice. 
So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. 
But 30 percent is not a pass. 
So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. 
I asked that girl, "" Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass? "" And she said, "" How would I do that? I don't know the subject. "" I said, "" No, use the method of the grandmother. "" She said, "" What's that? "" I said, "" Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. 
Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. 
What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more? '"" She did that for two months. 
The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting. 
So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious. 
So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think of. 
(Laughter) Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. 
In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. 
I made them into groups of four. 
I said, "" You make your own groups of four. 
Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers. "" Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. 
"" You can exchange groups. 
You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. 
You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work. "" And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method. 
(Laughter) (Applause) The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?" 
I gave them six GCSE questions. 
The first group — the best one — solved everything in 20 minutes. 
The worst, in 45. 
They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. 
The teachers said, "" Is this deep learning? "" I said, "" Well, let's try it. 
I'll come back after two months. 
We'll give them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc. "" The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. 
When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. 
There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. 
A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. 
I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. 
Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further. 
Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment. 
Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers. 
200 of them volunteered immediately. 
(Laughter) The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time, sitting in their homes, one day in a week. 
So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud. 
The granny cloud sits over there. 
I can beam them to whichever school I want to. 
(Video) Teacher: You can't catch me. 
You say it. 
You can't catch me. 
Children: You can't catch me. 
Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man. 
Children: I'm the gingerbread man. 
Teacher: Well done. Very good... 
SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes. 
You know, stuff which I don't know anything about. 
Two children watch a TEDTalk. 
They wanted to be footballers before. 
After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci. 
(Laughter) (Applause) It's pretty simple stuff. 
This is what I'm building now — they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. 
The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. 
If they want, they can call the granny cloud. 
This is a SOLE in Newcastle. 
The mediator is from Pune, India. 
So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop. 
I went to Turin in May. 
I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students. 
I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate. 
I started writing English questions on the blackboard. 
The children looked at it and said, "" What? "" I said, "" Well, do it. "" They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google. 
Fifteen minutes later — next question: where is Calcutta? 
This one, they took only 10 minutes. 
I tried a really hard one then. 
Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do? 
There was silence for a while, then they said, "" You've spelled it wrong. 
It's Pitagora. "" And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens. 
This sent shivers up my spine. 
These are 10 year-olds. 
Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then? 
(Laughter) (Applause) SM: So you know what's happened? 
I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. 
A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. 
Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. 
Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. 
I think I can make a guess now — education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. 
It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try. 
But in the meanwhile, there is a method available. 
One billion children, we need 100 million mediators — there are many more than that on the planet — 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years. 
We could change everything. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. 
But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. 
The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. 
It expands in winter and contracts in summer. 
The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. 
The permanent ice is marked in red. 
As you see, it expands to the dark blue — that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. 
The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. 
In 25 years it's gone from this, to this. 
This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. 
Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. 
Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. 
Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. 
Video: Whoa! (Laughter) Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be. 
And one reason is, this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. 
This is an annual melting river. 
But the volumes are much larger than ever. 
This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. 
If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. 
These flows are increasing very rapidly. 
At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. 
Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. 
And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. 
That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland. 
In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. 
40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. 
In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. 
The flows have increased. 
But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. 
In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. 
This is hitting the reservoirs. 
And the predictions, as you've read, are serious. 
This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. 
And the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate. 
Four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. 
This is a completely unsustainable pattern. 
If you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing. 
In the last five years we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours — 25 million tons every day to the oceans. 
Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific, from the Americas, extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. 
The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. 
Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. 
The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. 
And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants. 
But we're beginning to see a sea change. 
Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed. 
(Applause) However there is a political battle in our country. 
And the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. 
That image reminded me of something. 
(Laughter) Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. 
You probably saw it on the news. 
This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America. 
This happened around Christmas. 
One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one. 
Video: ♪ ♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul. 
He's abundant here in America, and he helps our economy grow. 
Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday. 
He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay. 
Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. 
The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal. 
Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about. 
Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. 
This is one of them, part of one of them. 
Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious threat to our business. 
That's why we've made it our primary goal to spend a large sum of money on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate the truth about coal. 
The fact is, coal isn't dirty. 
We think it's clean — smells good, too. 
So don't worry about climate change. 
Leave that up to us. 
(Laughter) Video: Actor: Clean coal — you've heard a lot about it. 
So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility. 
Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud. 
But that's the sound of clean coal technology. 
And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. 
Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology. 
Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge. 
Video: Narrator: America is in crisis — the economy, national security, the climate crisis. 
The thread that links them all: our addiction to carbon based fuels, like dirty coal and foreign oil. 
But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess. 
Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. 
A plan to put America back to work, make us more secure, and help stop global warming. 
Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems. 
Repower America. Find out more. 
Al Gore: This is the last one. 
Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America. 
One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet. 
Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid. 
Man # 2: New investments to create high-paying jobs. 
Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real. 
Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says, "" If you want to go quickly, go alone. 
If you want to go far, go together. "" We need to go far, quickly. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So over the past few centuries, microscopes have revolutionized our world. 
They revealed to us a tiny world of objects, life and structures that are too small for us to see with our naked eyes. 
They are a tremendous contribution to science and technology. 
Today I'd like to introduce you to a new type of microscope, a microscope for changes. 
It doesn't use optics like a regular microscope to make small objects bigger, but instead it uses a video camera and image processing to reveal to us the tiniest motions and color changes in objects and people, changes that are impossible for us to see with our naked eyes. 
And it lets us look at our world in a completely new way. 
So what do I mean by color changes? 
Our skin, for example, changes its color very slightly when the blood flows under it. 
That change is incredibly subtle, which is why, when you look at other people, when you look at the person sitting next to you, you don't see their skin or their face changing color. 
When we look at this video of Steve here, it appears to us like a static picture, but once we look at this video through our new, special microscope, suddenly we see a completely different image. 
What you see here are small changes in the color of Steve's skin, magnified 100 times so that they become visible. 
We can actually see a human pulse. 
We can see how fast Steve's heart is beating, but we can also see the actual way that the blood flows in his face. 
And we can do that not just to visualize the pulse, but also to actually recover our heart rates, and measure our heart rates. 
And we can do it with regular cameras and without touching the patients. 
So here you see the pulse and heart rate we extracted from a neonatal baby from a video we took with a regular DSLR camera, and the heart rate measurement we get is as accurate as the one you'd get with a standard monitor in a hospital. 
And it doesn't even have to be a video we recorded. 
We can do it essentially with other videos as well. 
So I just took a short clip from "" Batman Begins "" here just to show Christian Bale's pulse. 
(Laughter) And you know, presumably he's wearing makeup, the lighting here is kind of challenging, but still, just from the video, we're able to extract his pulse and show it quite well. 
So how do we do all that? 
We basically analyze the changes in the light that are recorded at every pixel in the video over time, and then we crank up those changes. 
We make them bigger so that we can see them. 
The tricky part is that those signals, those changes that we're after, are extremely subtle, so we have to be very careful when you try to separate them from noise that always exists in videos. 
So we use some clever image processing techniques to get a very accurate measurement of the color at each pixel in the video, and then the way the color changes over time, and then we amplify those changes. 
We make them bigger to create those types of enhanced videos, or magnified videos, that actually show us those changes. 
But it turns out we can do that not just to show tiny changes in color, but also tiny motions, and that's because the light that gets recorded in our cameras will change not only if the color of the object changes, but also if the object moves. 
So this is my daughter when she was about two months old. 
It's a video I recorded about three years ago. 
And as new parents, we all want to make sure our babies are healthy, that they're breathing, that they're alive, of course. 
So I too got one of those baby monitors so that I could see my daughter when she was asleep. 
And this is pretty much what you'll see with a standard baby monitor. 
You can see the baby's sleeping, but there's not too much information there. 
There's not too much we can see. 
Wouldn't it be better, or more informative, or more useful, if instead we could look at the view like this. 
So here I took the motions and I magnified them 30 times, and then I could clearly see that my daughter was indeed alive and breathing. 
(Laughter) Here is a side-by-side comparison. 
So again, in the source video, in the original video, there's not too much we can see, but once we magnify the motions, the breathing becomes much more visible. 
And it turns out, there's a lot of phenomena we can reveal and magnify with our new motion microscope. 
We can see how our veins and arteries are pulsing in our bodies. 
We can see that our eyes are constantly moving in this wobbly motion. 
And that's actually my eye, and again this video was taken right after my daughter was born, so you can see I wasn't getting too much sleep. (Laughter) Even when a person is sitting still, there's a lot of information we can extract about their breathing patterns, small facial expressions. 
Maybe we could use those motions to tell us something about our thoughts or our emotions. 
We can also magnify small mechanical movements, like vibrations in engines, that can help engineers detect and diagnose machinery problems, or see how our buildings and structures sway in the wind and react to forces. 
Those are all things that our society knows how to measure in various ways, but measuring those motions is one thing, and actually seeing those motions as they happen is a whole different thing. 
And ever since we discovered this new technology, we made our code available online so that others could use and experiment with it. 
It's very simple to use. 
It can work on your own videos. 
Our collaborators at Quanta Research even created this nice website where you can upload your videos and process them online, so even if you don't have any experience in computer science or programming, you can still very easily experiment with this new microscope. 
And I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of what others have done with it. 
So this video was made by a YouTube user called Tamez85. 
I don't know who that user is, but he, or she, used our code to magnify small belly movements during pregnancy. 
It's kind of creepy. 
(Laughter) People have used it to magnify pulsing veins in their hands. 
And you know it's not real science unless you use guinea pigs, and apparently this guinea pig is called Tiffany, and this YouTube user claims it is the first rodent on Earth that was motion-magnified. 
You can also do some art with it. 
So this video was sent to me by a design student at Yale. 
She wanted to see if there's any difference in the way her classmates move. 
She made them all stand still, and then magnified their motions. 
It's like seeing still pictures come to life. 
And the nice thing with all those examples is that we had nothing to do with them. 
We just provided this new tool, a new way to look at the world, and then people find other interesting, new and creative ways of using it. 
But we didn't stop there. 
This tool not only allows us to look at the world in a new way, it also redefines what we can do and pushes the limits of what we can do with our cameras. 
So as scientists, we started wondering, what other types of physical phenomena produce tiny motions that we could now use our cameras to measure? 
And one such phenomenon that we focused on recently is sound. 
Sound, as we all know, is basically changes in air pressure that travel through the air. 
Those pressure waves hit objects and they create small vibrations in them, which is how we hear and how we record sound. 
But it turns out that sound also produces visual motions. 
Those are motions that are not visible to us but are visible to a camera with the right processing. 
So here are two examples. 
This is me demonstrating my great singing skills. 
(Singing) (Laughter) And I took a high-speed video of my throat while I was humming. 
Again, if you stare at that video, there's not too much you'll be able to see, but once we magnify the motions 100 times, we can see all the motions and ripples in the neck that are involved in producing the sound. 
That signal is there in that video. 
We also know that singers can break a wine glass if they hit the correct note. 
So here, we're going to play a note that's in the resonance frequency of that glass through a loudspeaker that's next to it. 
Once we play that note and magnify the motions 250 times, we can very clearly see how the glass vibrates and resonates in response to the sound. 
It's not something you're used to seeing every day. 
But this made us think. It gave us this crazy idea. 
Can we actually invert this process and recover sound from video by analyzing the tiny vibrations that sound waves create in objects, and essentially convert those back into the sounds that produced them. 
In this way, we can turn everyday objects into microphones. 
So that's exactly what we did. 
So here's an empty bag of chips that was lying on a table, and we're going to turn that bag of chips into a microphone by filming it with a video camera and analyzing the tiny motions that sound waves create in it. 
So here's the sound that we played in the room. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And this is a high-speed video we recorded of that bag of chips. 
Again it's playing. 
There's no chance you'll be able to see anything going on in that video just by looking at it, but here's the sound we were able to recover just by analyzing the tiny motions in that video. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") I call it — Thank you. 
(Applause) I call it the visual microphone. 
We actually extract audio signals from video signals. 
And just to give you a sense of the scale of the motions here, a pretty loud sound will cause that bag of chips to move less than a micrometer. 
That's one thousandth of a millimeter. 
That's how tiny the motions are that we are now able to pull out just by observing how light bounces off objects and gets recorded by our cameras. 
We can recover sounds from other objects, like plants. 
(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And we can recover speech as well. 
So here's a person speaking in a room. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
Michael Rubinstein: And here's that speech again recovered just from this video of that same bag of chips. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
MR: We used "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "" because those are said to be the first words that Thomas Edison spoke into his phonograph in 1877. 
It was one of the first sound recording devices in history. 
It basically directed the sounds onto a diaphragm that vibrated a needle that essentially engraved the sound on tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder. 
Here's a demonstration of recording and replaying sound with Edison's phonograph. 
(Video) Voice: Testing, testing, one two three. 
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
Testing, testing, one two three. 
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
MR: And now, 137 years later, we're able to get sound in pretty much similar quality but by just watching objects vibrate to sound with cameras, and we can even do that when the camera is 15 feet away from the object, behind soundproof glass. 
So this is the sound that we were able to recover in that case. 
Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
MR: And of course, surveillance is the first application that comes to mind. 
(Laughter) But it might actually be useful for other things as well. 
Maybe in the future, we'll be able to use it, for example, to recover sound across space, because sound can't travel in space, but light can. 
We've only just begun exploring other possible uses for this new technology. 
It lets us see physical processes that we know are there but that we've never been able to see with our own eyes until now. 
This is our team. 
Everything I showed you today is a result of a collaboration with this great group of people you see here, and I encourage you and welcome you to check out our website, try it out yourself, and join us in exploring this world of tiny motions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Let's just get started here. 
Okay, just a moment. 
(Whirring) All right. 
(Laughter) Oh, sorry. 
(Music) (Beatboxing) Thank you. 
(Applause)