From Migrant Worker to Activist
[Talking on the phone]:
It was caused by over contract.
The contract expired.
When coming home, it would be a problem if she doesn't get her rights.
She should come home bringing what she's entitled to, like her salary and others.
Hety was a migrant worker who faced abuses from her boss.
She had returned home and is now actively giving counseling and education to potential migrant workers in the village she resides.
She works in the Middle East and now she is asking for the help from SBMC (Migrant Workers Solidarity in Cianjur).
We asked her to write the chronology of her case.
After that we can meet up in the City of Cianjur.
If there is problem, such as her salary not being given, we will call the boss, to ask for her to be sent home.
Aside being sent home, she should also be entitled to her rights, like her salary.
If she comes home without bringing her salary, it would not be good.
Right?
They have been working for three years.
In Saudi Arabia.
Both husband and wife.
She's coming home tomorrow.
She flew out yesterday at 4 pm.
The first time it was only two months, and then she left again.
It has been three years now and she doesn't want to come home.
It might also be because her husband had passed away.
So she extended her contract for another two months.
Thank God, she becomes a successful migrant worker.
Once or twice a week, her father comes to clean the house.
Ah, she's already in Jakarta this afternoon.
That means she will be here tonight.
Ah, early morning tomorrow.
Those two houses belong to sisters.
That one belongs to the older sister whose husband passed away.
The one below is the younger sister's.
Both are migrant workers.
And thank God she is also a successful migrant worker.
So she could afford a house and send her kids to school.
But too bad her husband passed away.
They could not enjoy the result of their work together.
This is Mrs. Aad, and her daughter, Lusni. (Lusni) was a migrant worker from 2004 to 2007.
Then she went again in 2009 and came back in 2011.
Come and talk to us.
Ah, we're on camera.
Yes.
Thank God, she didn't have any problem when working as a migrant worker.
She brought home money and her salary was fully paid.
I work at home now.
I want to work if there is any job for me.
But there is no job.
I was married once, but it was short-lived.
Now, I am not married.
A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days.
The idea is actually pretty simple.
Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days.
It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life.
There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges.
The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable.
This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month.
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day.
I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew.
I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. For fun! (Laughter)
Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt.
Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.
I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges.
I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days.
Have you ever wanted to write a novel?
Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days.
It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month.
So I did.
By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day.
You might be sleep-deprived, but you'll finish your novel.
Now is my book the next great American novel?
No.
I wrote it in a month.
It's awful. (Laughter)
But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say,
"I'm a computer scientist."
No, no, if I want to, I can say, "I'm a novelist."
(Laughter)
So here's one last thing I'd like to mention.
I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick.
There's nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges.
In fact, they're a ton of fun.
But they're less likely to stick.
When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.
(Laughter)
So here's my question to you:
What are you waiting for?
I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot! For the next 30 days.
Thanks.
(Applause)
Growing together
Growing a better future
The Grow campaign is a global movement aimed at addressing the broken food system
The movement aims to put food on the table for the 1 billion people who go to bed hungry.
These people have little or no access to resources needed to produce food ... or they have no money to buy food at all.
The GROW movement pushes for better policies on agriculture, the environment ... and bring back the control over food production from the big agribusinesses ... to the hands of small farmers, fisherfolks, rural women and indigenous peoples.
Why join GROW?
In Southeast Asia, such movement is crucial.
Here, 6 out of 10 people go to bed hungry.
Majority of them are farmers, rural women, fisherfolks, and indigenous peoples.
They are also the planet's main food producers.
Women do both productive and reproductive work and make up half of the rural labor force.
But women have less access than men to resources and opportunities ... such as land, livestock, wages, education, financial services, and access to technology.
Other problems are making the situation worse.
Land grabs are endangering the region's food security.
Small scale farmers are pushed off their land by private sector investments in agriculture.
Southeast Asian countries are among the biggest destinations of such investments.
Extreme weather changes brought about by climate change is causing floods and droughts.
Rising food prices limits people's access to food.
And years of intensive chemical farming has destroyed lands, affecting the viability of future harvests.
What can we do to GROW?
Let's GROW our own movement here in Southeast Asia.
We can help women empower themselves so that they can have better access to produce food ... for their families and communities.
The FAO estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men ... yields can increase by 20 to 30%.
We can do this by supporting communities and peoples affected by land grabbing ... especially those who are pushed off by giant corporations.
We should call on government and companies to put a stop to land grabbing.
As individuals and groups ... we can push for regulation to help ensure that investments also benefit and do not harm communities.
We can also push for a global climate deal that demand huge emission cuts from developed countries.
Developed countries should also provide technology and finance ... to support adaptation projects of communities in the region.
We can call on governments in the region to invest in sustainable agricultural production using the communities local knowledge.
We can buy and consume locally produced food ... to also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, normally produced in shipping food.
We can plant and GROW our-own seed now.
For food, livelihood, community and the planet.
Let's try to solve a more involved equation.
So, let's say that we have 2x plus 3, 2x plus 3 is equal to is equal to 5x minus 2.
From Migrant Worker to Activist
[Talking on the phone]:
It was caused by over contract.
The contract expired.
When coming home, it would be a problem if she doesn't get her rights.
She should come home bringing what she's entitled to, like her salary and others.
Hety was a migrant worker who faced abuses from her boss.
She had returned home and is now actively giving counseling and education to potential migrant workers in the village she resides.
She works in the Middle East and now she is asking for the help from SBMC (Migrant Workers Solidarity in Cianjur).
We asked her to write the chronology of her case.
After that we can meet up in the City of Cianjur.
If there is problem, such as her salary not being given, we will call the boss, to ask for her to be sent home.
Aside being sent home, she should also be entitled to her rights, like her salary.
If she comes home without bringing her salary, it would not be good.
Right?
They have been working for three years.
In Saudi Arabia.
Both husband and wife.
She's coming home tomorrow.
She flew out yesterday at 4 pm.
The first time it was only two months, and then she left again.
It has been three years now and she doesn't want to come home.
It might also be because her husband had passed away.
So she extended her contract for another two months.
Thank God, she becomes a successful migrant worker.
Once or twice a week, her father comes to clean the house.
Ah, she's already in Jakarta this afternoon.
That means she will be here tonight.
Ah, early morning tomorrow.
Those two houses belong to sisters.
That one belongs to the older sister whose husband passed away.
The one below is the younger sister's.
Both are migrant workers.
And thank God she is also a successful migrant worker.
So she could afford a house and send her kids to school.
But too bad her husband passed away.
They could not enjoy the result of their work together.
This is Mrs. Aad, and her daughter, Lusni. (Lusni) was a migrant worker from 2004 to 2007.
Then she went again in 2009 and came back in 2011.
Come and talk to us.
Ah, we're on camera.
Yes.
Thank God, she didn't have any problem when working as a migrant worker.
She brought home money and her salary was fully paid.
I work at home now.
I want to work if there is any job for me.
But there is no job.
I was married once, but it was short-lived.
Now, I am not married.
Let's talk about manias.
Let's start with Beatlemania. (Recording of crowd roaring)
Hysterical teenagers, crying, screaming, pandemonium. (Recording of crowd roaring)
Sports mania: deafening crowds, all for one idea -- get the ball in the net.
(Recording) Goal!
Okay, religious mania: there's rapture, there's weeping, there's visions.
Manias can be good.
Manias can be alarming.
Or manias can be deadly. (Recording of crowd cheering)
The world has a new mania.
A mania for learning English.
Listen as Chinese students practice their English, by screaming it:
Teacher: ... change my life!
Students:
I want to change my life!
T: I don't want to let my parents down!
S: I don't want to let my parents down!
T:
I don't ever want to let my country down!
S: I don't ever want to let my country down!
T:
Most importantly...
S: Most importantly...
T: I don't want to let myself down!
S: I don't want to let myself down!
How many people are trying to learn English worldwide?
Two billion of them.
Students:
A t-shirt.
A dress.
In Latin America, in India, in Southeast Asia, and most of all, in China.
If you're a Chinese student, you start learning English in the third grade, by law.
That's why this year, China will become the world's largest English-speaking country.
(Laughter)
Why English?
In a single word: opportunity.
Opportunity for a better life, a job, to be able to pay for school, or put better food on the table.
Imagine a student taking a giant test for three full days.
Her score on this one test literally determines her future.
She studies 12 hours a day for three years to prepare.
Twenty-five percent of her grade is based on English.
It's called the gaokao, and 80 million high school Chinese students have already taken this grueling test.
The intensity to learn English is almost unimaginable, unless you witness it.
Teacher:
Perfect!
Students:
Perfect!
T: Perfect!
S:
Perfect!
T:
I want to speak perfect English!
S: I want to speak perfect English! T:
I want to speak ...
I want to speak ...
T: ... perfect English!
S: ... perfect English!
T (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life!
S (yelling more loudly):
I want to change my life!
JW: So is English mania good or bad?
Is English a tsunami, washing away other languages?
Not likely. English is the world's second language.
Your native language is your life.
But with English you can become part of a wider conversation -- a global conversation about global problems,
like climate change or poverty, or hunger or disease.
The world has other universal languages.
Mathematics is the language of science.
Music is the language of emotions.
And now English is becoming the language of problem-solving.
Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it.
So English mania is a turning point.
Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall,
English represents hope for a better future -- a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Meet Tony.
He's my student.
He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison.
When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment,
"It was mom's gun.
Just flash it, scare the guy.
He's a punk.
He took some money; we'll take his money.
That'll teach him.
Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this.
This is wrong.'
My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.'
I say, 'Let's do this.'"
And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop.
There's the punk on the ground, puddle of blood.
And that's felony murder -- 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky.
So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, "In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics,"
Tony interrupts me.
"What are you going to teach me about right and wrong?
I know what is wrong.
I have done wrong.
I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong.
If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name.
I'm a convict; I am branded 'wrong.'
What are you going to tell me about right and wrong?"
So I say to Tony,
"Sorry, but it's worse than you think.
You think you know right and wrong?
Then can you tell me what wrong is?
No, don't just give me an example.
I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong.
What is that idea?
What makes something wrong?
How do we know that it's wrong?
Maybe you and I disagree.
Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong.
Maybe it's you, maybe it's me -- but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion.
We are here for knowledge.
Our enemy is thoughtlessness.
This is philosophy."
And something changes for Tony.
"Could be I'm wrong.
I'm tired of being wrong.
I want to know what is wrong.
I want to know what I know."
What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder -- what Kant called "admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within."
What can creatures like us know of such things?
It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence -- what Heidegger called "the always already there."
It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it -- what Socrates called "the examined life."
Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing.
Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact.
So Tony starts doing his homework.
He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies.
Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle.
His body is in prison, but his mind is free.
Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous.
That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton.
So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, "I don't know.
Let us think about that."
Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there.
It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy.
And I say to Tony,
"Let's do this."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Let's say I've spent the last week collecting marbles and I've outdone myself.
I have several huge bags of marbles, and I need to put them into cans to essentially figure out how many marbles I have
So let's start doing it and then we'll try to see based on looking at the cans how many marbles we have.
So let's say I know that I have thousands or more than a thousand marbles, so I start filling out a thousand can.
So what color was our thousand can
It was green.
It's not always going to be green, but in the examples I'm doing, our thousand cans are green
So let's say I have a thousand can, a thousand can here
And I start pouring the marbles in and it fills up.
It fills up completely, all the way.
I filled it all the way up, and I still have a lot of marbles left in my collection bag, so I say I'm probably going to need another thousand can.
So let me get that other thousand can out.
So I have another thousand can here.
Right here. That's my other thousand can. And I start filling that one up.
And I fill it up and that one also fills up all the way to the rim.
So you can even say, "Well how many marbles have I put into cans so far?" Well this is a thousand and this is a thousand.
So, so far, I've filled up two thousand marbles.
Two thousand.
I've already outdone what I've done in the previous example, by a lot.
You can think about by how much. Right, so let me write that down.
So this is one thousand can. And this is another thousand can. One thousand here.
Thought I would do a video on Communism, just because I've been talking about it a bunch in the history videos, and I haven't given you a good definition of what it means or a good understanding of what it means.
To understand Communism, let me just draw you a spectrum here.
So, I'm just gonna start with Capitialism.
This is really just gonna be an overview.
People can do a whole PhD thesis on this type of thing.
Capitalism and then I'll get a little bit more. And then we can progress to Socialism.
And then we can go to Communism.
The modern versions of Communism are really kind of the brainchild of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Karl Marx was a German philosopher in the 1800's who in his communist manifesto and other writings, kind of created the philosophical underpinnings for Communism.
And Vladimir Lenin who led the Bolshevik revolution and created essentially the Soviet Union. He's the first person to make some of Karl Marx's ideas more concrete. And really every nation or every country which we view as communist has really followed the pattern of Vladimir Lenin.
First let's talk about the philosophical differences between these things and how you would move.
Karl Marx himself viewed Communism as kind of a progression from Capitalism through Socialism to Communism.
So, what he saw in Capitalism and at least this part of what he saw was right
You have private property, private ownership of land. That is the main aspect of Capitalism. This is the world that most of us live in today.
The problem that he saw with Capitalism is, he thought, well look, you know when you have private property, the people who start accumulating some capital and when we talk about capital, we can be talking about land we can be talking about factories we can be talking about any type of natural resources
So the people who start getting a little bit of them
Let me draw a little diagram here.
Let's say someone has a little bit of capital.
That capital could be a factory or it could be land.
Let me write capital.
So let's just say it's land.
So someone starts to own a little bit of land
And he owns more than everyone else.
So you just have a bunch of other people who don't own land, but they need it essentially.
Since this guy owns all the land they got to work on this guy's land.
They have to work on this guy's land.
And from Karl Marx's point of view, he said look, if all of these labourers who don't have as much capital, this guy has this capital. And so he can make these labourers work for a very small wage. And so any excess profits that come out from this arrangement, the owner of the capital will be able to get it, because these labourers won't be able to get their wages to go up, because there's so much competition for them to work on this guy's farm or to work on this guy's land.
Maybe you could have a reality where, maybe you could have a reality eventually you'd have a bunch of people with reasonable amount of capital. And you'd have a bunch of laborers. And the bunch of people would compete for the laborers.
Maybe the laborers could make their wages go up. And they could eventually accumulate their own capital. And they could eventually start their own small businesses.
He didn't really think about this reality too much over here.
He just saw this reality and to his defense, and I don't want to get into the habit of defending Karl Marx too much. To his defense, this is what was happening in the late 1800's.
Especially, you know, we have the industrial revolution.
Even in the United States you did have kind of Mark Twain called it the gilded age.
These industrialists who did accumulate huge amounts of capital they really did have a lot of the leverage relative to the laborers. And so Karl Marx says, look, if the guy with all the capital has all the leverage and this whole arrangement makes some profits, he is going to be able to keep the profits because he can keep all of these dudes' wages low.
So what is going to happen is the guy with the capital is just going to end up with more capital.
He is going to end up with more capital.
And he is going to have even more leverage. And he will be able to keep this people on a kind of a basic wage so that they can never acquire capital for themselves.
So, in Karl Marx's point of view, the natural progression would be for these people to start organizing.
So these people maybe start organizing into unions.
So they could collectively tell the person who owns the land or the factory "no, we're not going to work" or
"we're going to go on strikes unless you increase our wages" or "unless you give us better working conditions".
So when you start talking about this unionization stuff, you're starting to move into the direction of Socialism.
The other element of moving in the direction of Socialism is that Karl Marx didn't like this kind of high concentration.
Socialists in general I should say, didn't like this high concentration of wealth, that you have this reality of, not only do you have these people who could accumulate all of this wealth and maybe to some degree they're able to accumulate it because they were innovative or they were good managers of land, or whatever.
Although the Marxists don't give a lot of credit to the owners of capital, they don't give a lot of credit to them.
Maybe they did have some skill in managing some type of an operation.
But the other problem is that it gets handed over it gets handed over to their offspring
So, private property you have this situation where it just goes from, maybe, father to son from parent to a child, so it's not even based on any type of meritocracy.
It's really just based on this inherited wealth and this is a problem, that you know, definitely happened in Europe when you go back to the French Revolution, you have generation after generation of nobility, regardless of how incompetent each generation would be they just had so much wealth that they were essentially in control of everything.
Another principle in moving into Socialist direction is kind of a redistribution of wealth.
So let me write it over here.
Redistribution. Redistribution.
So, in Socialism you can still have private property but the government takes a bigger role
Let me write this: larger government.
And one of the roles of the government is to redistribute wealth and the government also starts having control of the major factors of production.
So maybe the utilities, maybe some of the large factories that do major things all of the sudden start to become in the hands of the government or in the words of the Communists, in the hands of the people and the redistribution is going on, so, in theory, you don't have huge amounts of wealth in the hands of a few people.
If you kind of take these ideas to their natural conclusion you get to the theoretical Communist state.
And the theoretical Communist state is a classless society and in Karl Marx's point of view, and this is a little harder to imagine a stateless society
So, in Capitalism you definitely have classes you had the class that owns the capital and then you had the labor class and you had all of these divisions and they are kind of diferent from each other and he didn't really imagine a world where labor maybe could get out of this that they could get their own capital maybe they could start their own business.
So he just saw this tension would eventually lead to Socialism and eventually a classless society where you'd have a central, well he didn't go to much into the details you'd have kind of equal, everyone is society has ownership over everything and society somehow figures out where things should be allocated and all of the rest. And it's all stateless.
And that's even harder to think about in a concrete fashion.
So that's Karl Marx's view of things.
But it never really became concrete until Vladimir Lenin shows up.
So, the current version of Communism, the current thing that most of us view as Communism is sometimes viewed as Marxist-Leninist State
Leninist.
These are sometimes used interchangeably
Marxism is kind of the pure Utopian, we're eventually going to get to a world where everyone is equal.
Everyone is doing exactly what they want. There's an abundance of everything.
I guess to some degree it is kind of describing what happens in Star Trek where everyone can go to a replicator and get what they want. And if you want to paint part of the day, you can paint part of the day. And you're not just a painter you can also do whatever you want.
Let me write that down
So Marxism, pure Marxism is kind of a Utopian society. And just in case you don't know what Utopian means, it's kind of a perfect society where you don't have classes.
Everyone is equal, everyone is leading this kind of rich, diverse, fulfilling lives.
And Utopia is also kind of viewed as unrealistic
If you viewed it in the more negative light, it's like,
I don't know how we will ever be able to get there, who knows?
I don't want to be negative about it. Maybe we'll get one day to a Utopian society.
But Leninist is kind of the more practical element of Communism.
Because, obviously after the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917, in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union gets created. They had to actually run a government. They had to actually run a state based on these ideas of Communism.
In a Leninist philosophy, and this is where it starts to become in tension with the ideas of Democracy.
In a Leninist philosophy you need this kind of a party system and he calls this Vanguard Party.
So the Vanguard is kind of the thing that is leading that is leading the march.
So, this Vanguard Party that kind of creates this constant state of revolution.
And its whole job is to guide society.
It's to kind of almost be the parent of society and take it from Capitalism through Socialism to this ideal state of Communism.
And it's one of those things where the ideal state of Communism was never, it's kind of hard to know when you get there and so what happens in a Leninist state is that this Vanguard Party, which is usually called the Communist Party, is in a constant state of revolution kind of saying we are sheperding the people to some future state without a real clear definition of what that future state is.
And so, when you talk about Marxist-Leninist besides talking about what's happening in the economic sphere, it's also talking about this party system, this party system where you really just have one dominant party that it will hopefully act in the interest of the people.
So, one dominant Communist party that acts in the interest of the people.
And obviously the negative here is, how do you know that they are really acting in the interest of people? How do you know that they are actually competent?
What means are there to do anything if they are misallocating things? If it is corrupt? If you only have a one party system...
And just to make it clear, you know,
The largest existing Communist state is the People's Republic of China.
And although it's controlled by the Communist party in economic terms it's really not that communist anymore. So it can be confusing.
So what I want to do is draw a little bit of a spectrum.
In the vertical axes over here I want to put Democratic
Democratic.
And up here I'll put Authoritarian
Authoritarian or Totalitarian.
Let me put Totalitarian.
Well, I'll put Authoritarian.
I'll do another video on the difference.
Authoritarian and they're similar.
Totalitarian is more of an extreme form of Authoritarian where the government controls everything and you have a few people controling everything it's very non-democratic Authoritarian is kind of along those directions.
And then in this spectrum
We have the Capitalism, Socialism and Communism.
So the United States, I would put the United States some place over here.
I would put the United States over here. It has some small elements of Socialism.
You do have labor unions.
They don't control everything.
You also have people working outside of labor unions.
It does have some elements of redistribution.
There are inheritance taxes, there are...
I mean it's not an extreme form of redistribution. You can still inherit private property.
You still have safety nets for people. You have MediCare, MediCaid.
You have welfare.
So there's some elements of Socialism
But it also has a very strong Capitalist history private property, deep markets.
So I would stick to the United States over there.
I would put the USSR, not current Russia, but the Soviet Union when it existed
I would put the Soviet Union right about...
I would put the Soviet Union right about there
So this was the U... I'd put the USSR right over there.
I'd put the current State of Russia actually...
I'd put the current State of Russia some place over here.
Because they actually have fewer safety nets and they kind of have a more...their economy can kind of go crazier and they actually have a bigger disparity in wealth than a place like the United States
So this is.. This is current Russia
And probably the most interesting one here is the People's Republic of China the current People's Republic of China which is at least on the surface a Communist state but in some ways it's more Capitalist than the United States in that they don't have strong wealth redistribution.
They don't have strong safety nets for people. So, you could put some elements of China over here, closer to the left... and they are less democratic than either the US or even current Russia although some people would call current Russia...
Well, I won't go too much into it
But current China, you could draw it here a little bit So it could be even a little bit more Capitalist than the United States. Definitely they don't even have good labour laws and all the rest.
But in other ways you do have state ownership of a lot.
And you do have State control of a lot.
So, in some ways they're kind of spanning this whole range.
So, this right over here is China.
And even thought it's called a Communist State, in some ways, it's more Capitalist than countries that are very proud of their Capitalism.
But in a lot of other ways, especially with the government ownership and the government control of things and this one dominant party.
So, it's kind of Leninist but with less of the Marxist going on.
So, in that way it's more in the Communist direction.
So, hopefully that clarifies what can sometimes be a confusing topic.
It's great being here at TED.
You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet.
The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted.
And you can't tell the story about pollinators -- bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies -- without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years.
I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years.
To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of.
It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart.
Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with.
Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth.
It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it.
When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action.
We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat.
And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind.
It's like the canary in the coalmine.
If they disappear, so do we.
It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it.
What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers:
"What motivates the pollinators?"
Well, their answer was,
"It's all about risk and reward."
Like a wide-eyed kid, I'd say, "Why is that?"
And they'd say, "Well, because they want to survive."
I go, "Why?"
"Well, in order to reproduce."
"Well, why?"
And I thought that they'd probably say, "Well, it's all about sex."
And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, "Nothing lasts forever.
Everything in the universe wears out."
And that blew my mind.
Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.
Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment.
It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again.
So here is some nectar from my film.
I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden.
And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder.
Here are some images from the film.
(Music)
(Applause)
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(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.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Did you get it?
I got it. This is dangerous.
Run!
Dangerous.
Tonyo!
Nobody shoots Nobody shoots!
Stop killing activists and journalists!
Maraming nakikita dito sa Morong.
Alam mo yung isa kong anak eh, puntong morong, alam mo yung isa kong anak eh, ten o'clock in the evening naglalakad kami somewhere papuntang Barrio Balantik.
Akbay-akbay ako. tapos, sabi ng anak ko,
"Nanay, 'wag ka nang tumingin sa taas" sabi ko naman, "Eh bakit?
Bakit?" may nakatingin sa ating tikbalang! tinitignan tayo.
Pinagmamasdan tayo.
"Ako ba nama' y tinatakot mo?"
"Tara't tayo'y tumakbo na!"
Kasi, sabi ng matatanda, yung lugar na iyon, ay talagang pugad ng tikbalang noong araw pa. pero, usually may mga taong hindi naniniwala pero, paano naman yung mga nakakikita kaya nga may mga drawings, anong pinagbatayan nila? ayun, sa aktwal, nakaranas ako na kasama ang anak ko
Ngayon, ang isa pang insidente, yun namang ikalawa kong anak
Doon rin sa lugar na iyon.
"look at that oh.
Aba paglingon ko nga eh, nahuli nga ng paningin ko eh, parang hele-helerang bata hele-helerang batang parang anino na...sunod-sunod na kulay itim ganito.
Maliit, siguro mga 3 feet Eh takbuhan ng takbuhan eh at ang pagtakbo nila, magkakapila magkakasunod na patagi-tagilid na ganon para bang, chek chek chek chek natakot ako eh.
Takbo kami.
Tapos eh, nung pauwi na kami, hindi na kami dumaan Hindi na kami rumaan roon at talagang kami ay umiba na ng raraanan ayoko na't baka naroroon nanaman eh.
Mahirap.
So yung mga karanasan ko na...
Mga anak ko ang nakakikita pero at that time, dun sa ikalawa kong anak nakita ko rin.
Split seconds nga eh parang anino ng maliliit na batang 3 feet na nangakapila tapos kung tumakbo nga eh patagi-tagilid na ganoon tapos biglang nawala para bang chek-chek-chek parang ganon
So yun lamang ang aking maishe-share na kwento
Sanay nagustuhan niyo ang kwento ng mga taga-Morong
Murray Schisgal .. mm..who's been my dear friend for over 30 years er..kicked off TOOTSlE with the thought of how would you be different if you had been born a woman in a conversation we had one time not what is it feel like to be a woman cause at all sexes have asked themselves the question what is it feel like to be, what would it feel to be like the opposite sex but his question was different if..if you..if you were born a woman ..how would you be different? so that kicked off, which is..um..it would take too long to answer how we then got involved in TOOTSlE for.. ..for about 2 years before we even got it directed ..just working on different drafts of the script
But I did go to Columbia and I asked them if they would spend the money to do make-up tests so that.. I could look like a woman.
And if I couldn't look like a woman they would agree not to make the movie.
And they say: "what do you mean?"
I just somehow intuitively felt that unless I could walk down the streets of New York and not have..err..dressed as a woman.. ..and not have people turned and said: "who's that guy in drag?" or turned for any reason,..that..you know.."who's that freak?" unless I could do that, I didn't want to make the film
I didn't want to make the audience to suspend their..their..their.. their..their believability.
When we got to that point and looked at it on screen, I was shocked that I wasn't more attractive and I said: "now you have me looking like a woman, ..now make me a beautiful woman.." because I thought I should be beautiful if I was going to be a woman
I would want to be as beautiful as possible and they said to me that's as.. ..good as it gets.. er.. that's as beautiful as we can get you ..ahahah.. ...Charlie! and it was at that moment that I had an epiphany and I went home, started crying..er.. talking to my wife and I said:
I have to make this picture and she said: why? and I said: because, I think I'm an interesting woman ..when I looked at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party
I would never talk to her, that character, because.. she doesn't fulfill, physically, the demands that we're brought up to think we have..women have to have in order for us to ask them out.. she said: "what are you saying?"
and I said: "there's too many interesting women I have.. ..I have.. I..I have not had the experience to know in this life.. because I have.. ..been brainwashed. and ..
that was never a comedy for me!
Growing together
Growing a better future
The Grow campaign is a global effort aimed at addressing the broken food system
The movement aims to put food on the table for the 1 billion people who go to bed hungry.
These people have little or no access to resources needed to produce food ... or they have no money to buy food at all.
The GROW movement pushes for better policies on agriculture, the environment ... and bring back the control over food production from the big agribusinesses ... to the hands of small farmers, fisherfolks, rural women and indigenous peoples.
Why join GROW?
In Southeast Asia, such movement is crucial. Here, 6 out of 10 people go to bed hungry.
Majority of them are farmers, rural women, fisherfolks, and indigenous peoples.
They are also the planet's main food producers.
Women do both productive and reproductive work and make up half of the rural labor force.
But women have less access than men to resources and opportunities ... such as land, livestock, wages, education, financial services, and access to technology.
Other problems are making the situation worse. Land grabs are endangering the region's food security.
Small scale farmers are pushed off their land by private sector investments in agriculture.
Southeast Asian countries are among the biggest destinations of such investments.
Extreme weather changes brought about by climate change is causing floods and droughts.
Rising food prices limits people's access to food.
And years of intensive chemical farming has destroyed lands, affecting the viability of future harvests. What can we do to GROW?
Let's GROW our own movement here in Southeast Asia.
We can help empower women so that they can have better access to produce food ... for their families and communities.
The FAO estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men ... yields can increase by 20 to 30%.
We can do this by supporting communities and peoples affected by land grabbing ... especially those who are pushed off by giant corporations.
We should call on government and companies to put a stop to land grabbing.
As individuals and groups ... we can push for regulation to help ensure that investments also benefit and do not harm communities.
We can also push for a global climate deal that demand huge emission cuts from developed countries.
Developed countries should also provide technology and finance ... to support adaptation projects of communities in the region.
We can call on governments in the region to invest in sustainable agricultural production using the communities local knowledge.
We can buy and consume locally produced food ... to also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, normally produced in shipping food.
We can plant and GROW our-own seed now.
For food, livelihood, community and the planet.
For 2.5 million years the Earth's climate has fluctuated cycling from ice ages to warmer periods. But in the last century the planet's temperature has risen unusually fast about 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Farenheit.
Scientists believe it is human activity that is driving the temperatures up a process known as global warming
Ever since the Industrial Revolution began factories, power plants and eventually cars have burned fossil fuels such as oil and coal releasing huge amount of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere.
These greenhouse gases trap heat near the earth through a naturally occurring process called the greenhouse effect
The greenhouse effect begins with the sun and the energy it radiates to the earth.
The earth and the atmosphere absorb some of this energy while the rest it radiated back into space.
Naturally occurring gases in the atmosphere trap some of this energy and reflect it back, warming the earth
Scientists now believe that the greenhouse effect is being intensified by the extra greenhouse gases that humans have released
Evidence for global warming includes a recent string of very warm years.
Scientists report that 1998 was the warmest year in measured history, with 2005 coming in second.
Meanwhile, readings taken from ice cores show that the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane have hit their highest value in the last 420,000 years.
Arctic sea ice is also shrinking
According to NASA studies, the extent of Arctic sea ice has declined about 10% in the last 30 years.
As long as industrial nations consume energy and developing countries increase their fossil fuel consumption, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will continue to rise
Researchers predict that temperatures will increase about 2 to 10 degrees F by the end of this century
What's less certain is what rising temperatures mean for the planet.
Some climate models predict subtle changes, others forecast rising sea levels which could flood coastal areas around the world.
Weather patterns could change, making hurricanes more frequent severe droughts could become more common in warm areas, and species unable to adapt to changing conditions would face extinction.
Although much remains to be learned about global warming, many organizations advocate cutting greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the impact of global warming.
Consumers can help by saving energy around the house, switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs, and driving fewer miles in the car each week.
These simple changes may help keep the Earth cooler in the future.
DARUS (Abandoned Widowers)
I had a small business before.
Making bread, sponge cakes and donuts.
I had people who sold my products.
I also had some employees.
Aside from that, I also worked as an administrative staff at SMP (Junior High School) 2, which now has become SMP 2 Balongan.
Tempted with the offer of being granted a visa, right away I went to Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām (The Grand Mosque).
I had imagined what Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām looks like.
I finally signed up by paying a lump sum from selling my land and rice field.
I also left my job at the school.
I signed up in Jakarta and was going back and forth for almost a year.
It cost me a lot of money.
But then the sponsor (agent) ran away.
During that year I was going back and forth between Jakarta and Indramayu.
But the sponsor (agent) disappeared and I was deserted in the (migrant workers) compound with 3-4 other people.
In that uncertain situation with the sponsor disappearing, we all went back home.
Back to the village.
When I got home, I was deeply in debt.
I sold my rice field and borrowed money.
My wife and I discussed about it.
Half-heartedly, my wife had to go abroad (to become a migrant worker) to pay off our debt, that I used to sign up (to go to the Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām).
Also to pay off our previous debts, we pawned off our rice field, borrowed money for my business, borrowed money for our daily needs and for our children's school tuition.
So that they could stay in school.
I failed twice.
First, the plan to go to Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, and second, to Malaysia.
When I got back home, I had so much burden in my mind.
Then I thought of forming a Depok (traditional cultural) group.
I gathered friends who were left by their wives abroad.
I named it DARUS, which stands for "Duda nggak ada yang ngurus" (Abandoned Widowers).
That's the group's name.
To gather friends who felt left behind (by their wives), we practiced every afternoon.
That was the beginning.
When it started to go well, I changed the name into Putra Millenium.
Thank God for every performance we could get even though I don't have much capital to start the business.
But I can create job opportunities for friends, even if it's only seasonal.
Usually during harvest time.
How many personnel I can bring depends on the request.
Some clients ask for 30 people, some ask for 40 people to perform.
It's dangdut music with someone wearing a large lion costume and 4 people carrying it.
The daughter of the person who hold the celebration sits on top of the lion.
They would go round and round.
One lion needs four men to carry, so if there are four lions, it means we need 16 men.
Not to mention we need men to push the carriage and the singer on the stage.
This is what we call Depok Lion, with the kids of those who hold the celebration, or the neighbors or family members sit on top.
One lion needs four men to carry, so five lions needs 20 men.
The lions would be carried around the neighborhood.
The singer and musicians are on the carriage as well.
Being pushed by some men.
The sound system is put in here.
Around 15 people are on the carriage.
We need at least 4-5 men to push the carriage.
This man is one of the managers.
The 25 personnel includes the musicians who are in the carriage.
We go around the neighborhood and stop right before the afternoon prayer time.
We stop at the celebration venue around 12 pm, and start again at 1 pm.
But at 1 pm we don't go around anymore, we perform at the venue.
We play different kind of songs, Javanese songs, and also dangdut songs.
Many people come and watch.
(The fee) depends on how far the location is.
If it is far, in Indramayu for instance, it could be around 2,5 - 3 million Rupiah ($250 - $300).
But if it is only around here, we charge around 2 million Rupiah ($200).
It can provide job opportunity to friends to earn more money.
At least each person get 25 - 30 thousand Rupiah ($2,5 - $3).
If get saweran (donation) from people who watch, then we get more money.
The audience gives money.
Sometimes we can get around 700 thousand - 1 million Rupiah ($70 - $100), and we divide the money equally between all personnel.
Most of the singers are also former migrant workers.
And the personnel are mostly men whose wives have left abroad to be migrant workers.
Harish Gwalani 18 on 25. Hitesh Shah 24 on 25.
lshaan Awasthi..
Kewal Talwar 23 on 25. Harish Gwalani 20 on 25.
We are losing our listening.
We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening, but we're not very good at it.
We retain just 25 percent of what we hear.
Now not you, not this talk, but that is generally true.
Let's define listening as making meaning from sound.
It's a mental process, and it's a process of extraction.
We use some pretty cool techniques to do this.
One of them is pattern recognition.
(Crowd Noise) So in a cocktail party like this, if I say, "David, Sara, pay attention," some of you just sat up.
We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal, and especially our name.
Differencing is another technique we use.
If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes, you would literally cease to hear it.
We listen to differences, we discount sounds that remain the same.
And then there is a whole range of filters.
These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to.
Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters.
But they actually create our reality in a way, because they tell us what we're paying attention to right now.
Give you one example of that:
Intention is very important in sound, in listening.
When I married my wife, I promised her that I would listen to her every day as if for the first time.
Now that's something I fall short of on a daily basis.
(Laughter)
But it's a great intention to have in a relationship.
But that's not all.
Sound places us in space and in time.
If you close your eyes right now in this room, you're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces.
And you're aware of how many people are around you because of the micro-noises you're receiving.
And sound places us in time as well, because sound always has time embedded in it.
In fact, I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future.
So, "Sonority is time and meaning" -- a great quote.
I said at the beginning, we're losing our listening.
Why did I say that?
Well there are a lot of reasons for this.
First of all, we invented ways of recording -- first writing, then audio recording and now video recording as well.
The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared.
Secondly, the world is now so noisy, (Noise) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily, it's just hard to listen; it's tiring to listen.
Many people take refuge in headphones, but they turn big, public spaces like this, shared soundscapes, into millions of tiny, little personal sound bubbles.
In this scenario, nobody's listening to anybody.
We're becoming impatient.
We don't want oratory anymore, we want sound bites.
And the art of conversation is being replaced -- dangerously, I think -- by personal broadcasting.
I don't know how much listening there is in this conversation, which is sadly very common, especially in the U.K.
We're becoming desensitized.
Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention.
And that means it's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet, the subtle, the understated.
This is a serious problem that we're losing our listening.
This is not trivial.
Because listening is our access to understanding.
Conscious listening always creates understanding.
And only without conscious listening can these things happen -- a world where we don't listen to each other at all, is a very scary place indeed.
So I'd like to share with you five simple exercises, tools you can take away with you, to improve your own conscious listening.
Would you like that?
(Audience:
Yes.) Good.
The first one is silence.
Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again.
If you can't get absolute silence, go for quiet, that's absolutely fine.
Second, I call this the mixer.
(Noise) So even if you're in a noisy environment like this -- and we all spend a lot of time in places like this -- listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear?
How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to?
You can do it in a beautiful place as well, like in a lake.
How many birds am I hearing?
Where are they?
Where are those ripples?
It's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening.
Third, this exercise I call savoring, and this is a beautiful exercise.
It's about enjoying mundane sounds.
This, for example, is my tumble dryer.
(Dryer) It's a waltz.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
I love it.
Or just try this one on for size.
(Coffee grinder)
Wow!
So mundane sounds can be really interesting if you pay attention.
I call that the hidden choir.
It's around us all the time.
The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these, if you just take one thing away.
This is listening positions -- the idea that you can move your listening position to what's appropriate to what you're listening to.
This is playing with those filters.
Do you remember, I gave you those filters at the beginning.
It's starting to play with them as levers, to get conscious about them and to move to different places.
These are just some of the listening positions, or scales of listening positions, that you can use.
There are many.
Have fun with that.
It's very exciting.
And finally, an acronym.
You can use this in listening, in communication.
If you're in any one of those roles -- and I think that probably is everybody who's listening to this talk -- the acronym is RASA, which is the Sanskrit word for juice or essence. And RASA stands for Receive, which means pay attention to the person;
Appreciate, making little noises like "hmm," "oh," "okay";
Summarize, the word "so" is very important in communication; and Ask, ask questions afterward.
Now sound is my passion, it's my life.
I wrote a whole book about it.
So I live to listen.
That's too much to ask from most people.
But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully -- connected in space and in time to the physical world around us, connected in understanding to each other, not to mention spiritually connected, because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart.
That's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill.
Why is it not taught?
It's crazy.
And if we can teach listening in our schools, we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous, scary world that I talked about and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time -- or at least capable of doing it.
Now I don't know how to do that, but this is TED, and I think the TED community is capable of anything.
So I invite you to connect with me, connect with each other, take this mission out and let's get listening taught in schools, and transform the world in one generation to a conscious listening world -- a world of connection, a world of understanding and a world of peace.
Thank you for listening to me today.
(Applause)
I think what is probably the most misunderstood concept in all of science and, as we all know, is now turning into one of the most contentious concepts - may be not in science, but in our popular culture - is the idea of evolution.
Going back to the corner where I first saw you
Gonna camp in my sleeping bag I'm not gonna move
Got some words on cardboard, got your picture in my hand
Saying, "If you see this girl can you tell her where I am"
Some try to hand me money, they don't understand I'm not broke I'm just a broken hearted man
Is there any letters for me today?
I have, I have
There is a good news and a bad news
Stop the nonsense.
Good news first.
The good news is, up until now your family hasn't received any letters.
The bad news is the acceptance letter is oddly arrived at the hospital
What?
I got accepted, I got in
Mom, I got in
I got in
Mom, I got accepted into Alistun Commercial College
I got in, I got in
Please don't be like that
Looking at you like this makes me want to cry
For many years
Have you ever seen me cried?
I am always strong
Xiaohai, don't be like this
Yunhai said just wait 3 minutes you'll cry
Believe it or not,
If you stay here one more minute, I will make you cry.
Get out!
It's not my idea
It's Yunhai who made me do it
It's not my idea
GM Shen (General Manager Shen)
I...I made another mistake
Xiao..Xiao..Xiaohai..he ran away again
Go!
- Go where?
- Up to you
Where is 'up to you' ?
This place.
- OK -
Driver, drive a bit faster
Even faster
Go from here..faster, faster
Xiaoge it's fast already
Follow what I say
Like this.
Change gear
Push the pedal.
Take right
Pass it over..pass here
Use 5th gear, 5th gear
Pass it, pass it from the right
Right!
- Xiaoge, you have a real skill
Everyone knows that I have real skill
I am a professional racer
Haha, I can see that, professional
This is a mistake
Don't reduce speed, add more speed ..faster
Driver, take the secondary road.
- OK -
I finally got accepted into Alistun Commercial College
Yay..I got in
I got in
I got accepted into Alistun College. - brake..turn left -
Don't touch my steering wheel
Left, left... take your hands off
Take your hand off..right, right, right side
Don't touch my steering wheel
Right side, you're crazy.. take your hand off
What did I hit?
Where is the person?
Wahh..to hell with it!
You just go to hell with it!
Show how homes are destroyed (inaudible) The cries of the young people (inaudible) they are experiencing
Where is the freedom for the poor. The government system is rotten. More rotten than rats.
Government is worthless!
Government is worthless!
Many homes destroyed... (inaudible) the priority given to foreigners... always disappointing... justice and freedom
Sadness and anger put to the streets Change fear into bravery
Government is worthless!
Government is worthless!
Government is worthless!
Don't make the mistake of invading our community. (inaudible) ... leaders of the country... who hold the country in our hands ... poverty gets worse...
The corruption of our leaders instead of focusing on poverty, they focus on strengthening themselves...
You're all worthless! You keep promising...
But because of you our dreams disappear like bubbles. You're the ones that have education but we're the ones serving you! You have eyes and ears but you don't use them!
You have eyes but do not righteous doing just hearing while you swim...
The government is worthless!
So today we are here
Because the Government is worthless!
The government is worthless!
Yo, the government is worthless!
So today we're here today even though it's hot
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar.
Millions of people were in severe need of help.
The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area.
But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims.
When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail.
The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps.
But help was coming.
At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points.
And it took them four days.
The new software they used?
Google Mapmaker.
Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally.
People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store.
Maps matter.
Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land.
For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone.
In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable.
And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere.
Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now.
So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries.
You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal.
And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore.
This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning.
This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time.
This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet.
Welcome to the new world.
(Applause)
The first half of the 20th century was an absolute disaster in human affairs, a cataclysm.
We had the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the rise of the communist nations.
And each one of these forces split the world, tore the world apart, divided the world.
And they threw up walls -- political walls, trade walls, transportation walls, communication walls, iron curtains -- which divided peoples and nations.
It was only in the second half of the 20th century that we slowly began to pull ourselves out of this abyss.
Trade walls began to come tumbling down.
Here are some data on tariffs: starting at 40 percent, coming down to less than 5 percent.
We globalized the world.
And what does that mean?
It means that we extended cooperation across national boundaries; we made the world more cooperative.
Transportation walls came tumbling down.
You know in 1950 the typical ship carried 5,000 to 10,000 tons worth of goods.
Today a container ship can carry 150,000 tons; it can be manned with a smaller crew; and unloaded faster than ever before.
Communication walls, I don't have to tell you -- the Internet -- have come tumbling down.
And of course the iron curtains, political walls have come tumbling down.
Now all of this has been tremendous for the world.
Trade has increased.
Here is just a little bit of data.
In 1990, exports from China to the United States: 15 billion dollars.
By 2007: over 300 billion dollars.
And perhaps most remarkably, at the beginning of the 21st century, really for the first time in modern history, growth extended to almost all parts of the world.
So China, I've already mentioned, beginning around 1978, around the time of the death of Mao, growth -- ten percent a year.
Year after year after year, absolutely incredible.
Never before in human history have so many people been raised out of such great poverty as happened in China.
China is the world's greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades.
India, starting a little bit later, but in 1990, begetting tremendous growth.
Incomes at that time less than $1,000 per year.
And over the next 18 years have almost tripled.
Growth of six percent a year.
Absolutely incredible.
Now Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa -- Sub-Saharan Africa has been the area of the world most resistant to growth.
And we can see the tragedy of Africa in the first few bars here.
Growth was negative.
People were actually getting poorer than their parents, and sometimes even poorer than their grandparents had been.
But at the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century, we saw growth in Africa.
And I think, as you'll see, there's reasons for optimism, because I believe that the best is yet to come.
Now why.
On the cutting edge today it's new ideas which are driving growth.
And by that I mean it's products for which the research and development costs are really high, and the manufacturing costs are low.
More than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge.
Now ideas have this amazing property.
Thomas Jefferson, I think, really expressed this quite well.
He said, "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine.
As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."
Or to put it slightly differently: one apple feeds one man, but an idea can feed the world.
Now this is not new.
This is practically not new to TEDsters.
This is practically the model of TED.
But what is new is that the greater function of ideas is going to drive growth even more than ever before.
This provides a reason why trade and globalization are even more important, more powerful than ever before, and are going to increase growth more than ever before.
And to explain why this is so, I have a question.
Suppose that there are two diseases: one of them is rare, the other one is common, but if they are not treated they are equally severe.
If you had to choose, which would you rather have: the common disease or the rare disease?
Common, the common -- I think that's absolutely right, and why? Because there are more drugs to treat common diseases than there are to treat rare diseases.
The reason for this is incentives.
It costs about the same to produce a new drug whether that drug treats 1,000 people, 100,000 people, or a million people.
But the revenues are much greater if the drug treats a million people.
So the incentives are much larger to produce drugs which treat more people.
To put this differently: larger markets save lives.
In this case misery truly does love company.
Now think about the following: if China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now.
Now we are not there yet, but it is happening.
As other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously.
And that means an increase incentive to do research and development, which benefits everyone in the world.
Larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas, whether it's software, whether it's a computer chip, whether it's a new design.
For the Hollywood people in the audience, this even explains why action movies have larger budgets than comedies: it's because action movies translate easier into other languages and other cultures, so the market for those movies is larger.
People are willing to invest more, and the budgets are larger.
Well if larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas, how do we maximize that incentive?
It's by having one world market, by globalizing the world.
The way I like to put this is: one idea. Ideas are meant to be shared, so one idea can serve one world, one market.
One idea, one world, one market.
Well how else can we create new ideas?
That's one reason.
Globalize trade.
How else can we create new ideas?
Well, more idea creators.
Now idea creators, they come from all walks of life.
Artists and innovators -- many of the people you've seen on this stage.
I'm going to focus on scientists and engineers because I have some data on that, and I'm a data person.
Now, today, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world's population are scientists and engineers.
(Laughter)
The United States has been an idea leader.
A large fraction of those people are in the United States.
But the U.S. is losing its idea leadership.
And for that I am very grateful.
That is a good thing.
It is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the United States, and a handful of other developed countries, have shouldered the entire burden of research and development.
But consider the following: if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the United States is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone, which are shared by everyone.
I think of the great Indian mathematician, Ramanujan.
How many Ramanujans are there in India today toiling in the fields, barely able to feed themselves, when they could be feeding the world?
Now we're not there yet.
But it is going to happen in this century.
The real tragedy of the last century is this: if you think about the world's population as a giant computer, a massively parallel processor, then the great tragedy has been that billions of our processors have been off line.
But in this century China is coming on line.
India is coming on line.
Africa is coming on line.
We will see an Einstein in Africa in this century.
Here is just some data.
This is China.
less than one million new university students in China per year; over five million.
Now think what this means.
This means we all benefit when another country gets rich.
We should not fear other countries becoming wealthy.
That is something that we should embrace -- a wealthy China, a wealthy India, a wealthy Africa.
We need a greater demand for ideas -- those larger markets I was talking about earlier -- and a greater supply of ideas for the world.
Now you can see some of the reasons why I'm optimistic.
Globalization is increasing the demand for ideas, the incentive to create new ideas.
Investments in education are increasing the supply of new ideas.
In fact if you look at world history you can see some reasons for optimism.
From about the beginnings of humanity to 1500: zero economic growth, nothing.
1500 to 1800: maybe a little bit of economic growth, but less in a century than you expect to see in a year today.
1900s: maybe one percent.
Twentieth century: a little bit over two percent.
Twenty-first century could easily be 3.3, even higher percent.
Even at that rate, by 2100 average GDP per capita in the world will be $200,000.
That's not U.S. GDP per capita, which will be over a million, but world GDP per capita -- $200,000.
That's not that far.
We won't make it.
But some of our grandchildren probably will.
And I should say, I think this is a rather modest prediction.
In Kurzweilian terms this is gloomy.
In Kurzweilian terms I'm like the Eeyore of economic growth.
(Laughter)
Alright what about problems?
What about a great depression?
Well let's take a look. Let's take a look at the Great Depression.
Here is GDP per capita from 1900 to 1929.
Now let's imagine that you were an economist in 1929, trying to forecast future growth for the United States, not knowing that the economy was about to go off a cliff, not knowing that we were about to enter the greatest economic disaster certainly in the 20th century.
What would you have predicted, not knowing this?
If you had based your prediction, your forecast on 1900 to 1929 you'd have predicted something like this.
If you'd been a little more optimistic -- say, based upon the Roaring Twenties -- you'd have said this.
So what actually happened?
We went off a cliff but we recovered.
In fact in the second half of the 20th century growth was even higher than anything you would have predicted based upon the first half of the 20th century.
So growth can wash away even what appears to be a great depression.
Alright.
What else?
Oil.
Oil. This was a big topic.
When I was writing up my notes oil was $140 per barrel.
So people were asking a question. They were saying,
"Is China drinking our milkshake?"
(Laughter)
And there is some truth to this, in the sense that we have something of a finite resource, and increased growth is going to push up demand for that.
But I think I don't have to tell this audience that a higher price of oil is not necessarily a bad thing.
Moreover, as everyone knows, look -- it's energy, not oil, which counts.
And higher oil prices mean a greater incentive to invest in energy R&D.
You can see this in the data.
As oil prices go up, energy patents go up.
The world is much better equipped to overcome an increase in the price of oil today, than ever in the past, because of what I'm talking about.
One idea, one world, one market.
So I'm optimistic so long as we hew to these two ideas: to keep globalizing world markets, keep extending cooperation across national boundaries, and keep investing in education.
Now the United States has a particularly important role to play in this: to keep our education system globalized, to keep our education system open to students from all over the world, because our education system is the candle that other students come to light their own candles.
Now remember here what Jefferson said.
Jefferson said, "When they come and light their candles at ours, they gain light, and we are not darkened."
But Jefferson wasn't quite right, was he?
Because the truth is, when they light their candles at ours, there is twice as much light available for everyone.
So my view is: Be optimistic.
Spread the ideas.
Spread the light.
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.
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.
(Applause)
Current News
These are the stories you should look out for tonight
According to the latest survey of the International Peace Magazine the Philippines is one of the countries with the lowest crime rate since 2006
There are no hungry Filipinos, according to the XWCD
So, my name is Kelly Chen, I consider myself a Bay
Area native.
I grew up on Freemont and, I'm a Genetic
Counselor.
And, technically, I guess my title is Perinatal Genetic Counselor.
So I focus on patients who are pregnant, or thinking about pregnancy. >> So walk us through wa, what is it like?
I mean, who, what kind of patient comes to you, and how does the workflow process work, when they seek out a genetic counselor? >> So the workflow for a perinatal genetic counselor, and perinatal is actually, kind of a new phrase we created at where I work.
So if you see a trait that happens in a grandparent, a parent, and a child, then that's much more likely to be a dominant trait. If you see a condition where multiple brothers and sisters are affected and by, chance maybe their parents are related to each other, and no one else in the family has the trait.
Then that's more likely or suggestive of something recessive.
So the pedigree really does help us try to figure out modes of inheritance. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity.
We started Universal Subtitles because we believe every video on the web should be subtitle-able.
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[Child]
Children
We're 7 siblings without blankets at night
We live in a house that's smaller than other peoples toilets
We set aside complaints for a moment
But we'll just sleep it off
We see how they are breaking our houses our young people are crying and experiencing hardship
Where is the freedom for the poor?
If the system of government is rotten this government is worthless. this government is worthless.
Many don't have homes because those in power prioritize themselves we can see with influence of foreign powers
Shall justice and freedom be doomed to fail?
Sadness and anger are then brought to the streets an exchange of bravery this government is worthless. this government is worthless this government is worthless
Just dont make a mistake of coming to our community the leaders that hold our country hardships in the philippines are increasing because of the corruption on those in power
Instead of you driving out foreigners, it is you who strengthens their presence
You have no use, but to make promises
And so because of you, our dreams are gone like bubbles, we were educated but the opposite is happening as we are the ones serving you
You have eyes and ears but you do not use them while you grow richer this government is worthless this government is worthless this government is worthless
So today we are here
Because this government is worthless this government is worthless this government is worthless
So today we are here even if it is hot
In the last video we got some practice adding what we could consider smaller numbers.
For example, if we added 3 + 2 we could imagine that if maybe I had three lemons -- 1, 2, 3 -- and if I were to add to those three lemons maybe two lime-- Is it lime or limes?
How many-- how much tart, sour fruit do I have now?
Well, we learned in the last video we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pieces of fruit. So 3 + 2 = 5.
And we also saw that that's the exact same thing as if we add 2 + 3.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
So it doesn't matter what order you add in. You're still going to get five.
The other thing we saw in the last video is the number line version
So we could draw a line.
We won't do that.
But let's start at 0, and 0 means nothing.
So: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 -- Let's go pretty high.
13, 14.
I'll see you in the next video.
You've probably heard the term Ponzi scheme before, let me write it down, and what we're going to do in this video is explain what it really is.
You might have a sense it's some type of scam, that you're taking one person's money and giving it to another, but we're going to do a tangible example of how it actually works.
And right here, I have two pictures of the probably the two most famous perpetrators of Ponzi schemes, this is
Charles Ponzi right here.
It was obviously named after him and then, more recently, this is Bernie Madoff, who pulled off probably the longest-lasting and largest Ponzi scheme of all time.
Who knows, maybe there's a longer-lasting and larger one out there that we have still haven't figured out yet, but this is the largest one to date.
And Ponzi wasn't the first person to come up with the Ponzi scheme, but they decided to name it after him because he was the first person to really make it famous.
This mugshot was taken in the early 1900s when he was finally caught for perpetrating his scheme.
So how does it work?
So let's start with some investors here.
We could get rid of pictures of these two gentlemen.
So let's say that I've got a scheme, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up my investors, so these are my investors.
And then, let's say, we have several time periods.
So we can see why the investors think, at least initially, that my scheme is legitimate.
So, let's say, that this is the time period, so we have period one, maybe this is years, year one, year two, year three, year four, year five.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to write each investor--
I'm going to write down how much money they think they have with me, the person operating the Ponzi scheme and then I'll show you exactly how much money I have and how I can even get away with having the first investors think that I'm legitimate.
So let's say I have investor A.
So this is going to be their investor's perceived-- let me do this in a different color-- investor's perceived holdings or perceived value.
And over here, I'm going to write total actual value.
So we have the investor A in blue, and let's say in year one, he gives me $10,000.
And I say I I've got a surefire way of doubling his money in the second year.
So in the second year, I actually do nothing with the money and you know, I might actually be spending it on my own yachts and you know, fancy suits and whatnot.
But let's just say I'm just keeping it in a bank account so you know, he gives it to me, $10,000 and I do nothing with that money.
I don't even get interest on it.
It's not even in a bank account, I stuff it into my mattress.
So the reality is, after a year, it's still only $10,000, but I promised him that I had some type of a genius scheme that could double his money in a year, so I send him a statement that says that his $10,000 is now $20,000.
And I feel good about it because I know that he's going to be so excited that his money doubled that he's going to want to keep his money with me, because he'll hope that it can double again.
And not only is he going to do that, but he's going to go to the country club and show off to all of his other friends how he was able to do way better than they did with their investments.
So he's going to essentially convince other people to join in.
So let's say he convinces investor B to join in.
Investor B looks at the statement says, hey, this guy running this-- well he doesn't know it's a scheme, let's say he says , Sal seems to know what he's doing, he doubled investor A's money in a year.
I'm going to give him a bunch of money, let's say I'm going to give him $15,000 in year two.
So how much total actual value do I have in year two now? I have the $10,000 from investor A plus this $15,000, so I have a total of $25,000.
This is the actual amount that I have in my bank account, assuming that I'm not spending it on my yacht or my fancy suits.
But the total perceived value, let me write that down another line, if everyone actually wanted the amount of money that they thought they had back, I would have to pay out $35,000.
But we know that's not going to happen, because people think I'm such a good investor, they want their money to ride as long as possible.
So you already see this discrepancy.
There's only $25,000 in this little pile of money that I'm collecting, but people think that there should be $35,000.
This is their perceived value, because the this guy thought his money doubled, although it didn't, it just sat there.
Now, let's say that the next year I sent them statements that say, look, I made super-awesome investments again, the money doubled again.
So this guy's money, his perceived value, he gets a statement that says you now have $40,000.
This guy down here, investor B, gets a statement that says you now have $30,000.
And then they go back to the country club, and they get investor C onboard.
They're like, look, both of us have tried out this guy, he's doubled our money two years in a row for both of us, you probably want in on this as well.
And investor C is like yeah, well you know, my two buddies, they look like legitimate guys, let me put my money there.
Let's say it gets bigger every time because that's usually how these things go, you know, you normally don't don't have just three investors, you'll have hundreds of investors.
And the more fake positive returns you get, the more people that want to put their money in.
So investor C, let's say he comes in and he puts in $20,000.
So what's the reality?
Let's focus on it.
So there's a perception on year 3, this guy just put his $20,000.
A think he's got $40,000, B thinks he has $30,000, so the perceived value here's $40,000 plus $30,000, $70,000 plus $20,000 is $90,000.
That's the perceived value.
But the actual value is just going to be this $25,000 we had in period two, assuming we didn't spend the money or do anything with it plus the $20,000 that this guy just deposited.
So the reality is $45,000.
Now let's say that as we go from period three to period four, or let's say right when this guy gets his statement for $40,000, and it's the exact same time period that this guy had put in his $20,000.
Let's say person A, he says, you know what, I felt like my ride has gone long enough, I don't want to test fate, let me take my money out and you might say, oh you the scheme will be ruined, but it's going to work because enough money is coming in from new investors to pay this guy off.
We now have $45,000 actual value, even though the people think there's $90,000.
So if this guy withdraws all of his money, so if he withdraws all of his money so it goes to zero, I have the cash to pay them.
I have $40,000 even though people think there's $90,000.
So I subtract out $40,000 right here, and there's only $5,000 dollars left in the bank account and since this guy withdrew his money, the perceived value-- this $40,000 is no longer there, I gave the guy the cash-- the perceived value now is $50,000.
So I essentially owe people $50,000, investors B and C think that they have $50,000 invested with me, but the reality is that I only have $5,000 in my bank account.
And probably a more realistic reality is I was probably spending a lot of this money on my own little luxuries the whole time.
But let's continue another way, once again this guy, not only did he double his money for two years, they're all the same country club.
This guy doubled his money again, this guy just invested his money.
And now this guy says, look, the scheme is legitimate.
This legitimized the scheme This is legit.
Because, look, I doubled my money for two years and I was able to withdraw the money.
So he was able to withdraw his money, so when he goes back to the country club, he gives this guy and that guy more conviction that this is all on the up and up.
And then investor D will probably jump in too and say, wow, now that he's doubled money two years in a row, I see it's legitimate.
Investor A was able to withdraw his money, I'll give even more money, I'll give $100,000.
Maybe this is a ton of people who are now going to put in a $100,000.
And then the next year, I double the money again.
And obviously, I won't make it exactly double, I'll make it, you know 40% one year and 30% percent the next year so doesn't look too suspicious.
I want to make it look like real returns, but for the sake of our math, let's say I double it again.
So now and we're in year four.
And this guy withdrew all of his money, but investor B now thinks he has $60,000. Investor C thinks he has $40,000.
And investor D thinks he has $200,000.
Oh, and I forgot to put investor D's deposit here.
So when he put a $100,000, I only had $5,000 in my bank account, but then if I add $100,000 I'll now have $105,000 in my bank account after this guy comes in at, you know, at the end of period three, we can imagine. And, with the perceived amount, I owe is $150,000.
So the green is what happens after D comes in, so these are no longer valid.
But you can see that as more money comes in, I have more and more money to pay out, even though I'm not doing anything.
Even though all of these returns are fake.
So now I actually have $105,000 even though people think, well that's at the end of period three, at the end of period four, what do people think?
People think that I have $300,000 of holdings.
Let me write that down.
But the reality is I still only have $105,000 of holdings.
This is the total actual value.
But notice, if this guy or this guy, some of the early investors, wanted to pull out some of their money, although they probably don't want to, because where else can you double your money every year and this guy already showed that I'm good for paying back the money.
But even if this guy or this guy wanted to pull out their money, I would be able to give it to them because I have at least enough for those withdrawals.
Now, everything would be ruined if everyone gets freaked out or scared and if I have mass withdrawals or if more people withdraw money than there is in the bank plus the amount of money that comes in.
So in order for a Ponzi scheme to keep going, and Bernie
Madoff was able to do this for very long time, you have to have good, believable, legitimate returns.
Although they're not legitimate, they just need to look legitimate.
So that you have more money coming in that out.
And the whole point of the doing this Ponzi scheme, if you're a stylish criminal, isn't just to keep the cash there, you know, the $10,000 from one period to the next.
The whole point of it is to take a lot of that for yourself, for you to live off of and put into some Swiss bank account to be able to escape the country at some point.
Anyway, hopefully you found that enjoyable.
All right, we're on problem 44.
And they said, which is the factored form of 3a squared minus 24ab plus 48b squared?
And if this confuses you with a's and b's instead of an x there, I just like to think of in this case, this looks like an x squared.
So I like to think of it the same way I would think of it in terms of if this was an x squared minus some number times x plus some other number.
So let's put that in the back of your head.
If that's confuses you, don't worry about it.
But the first thing I like to do is try to get rid of the coefficient on the, in this case, the a squared term.
Let's see if we can factor out a number.
All of these are divisible by 3.
3 is divisible by 3, 24 is divisible by 3 and 48 is divisible by 3.
So we should be able to factor out a 3, so let's do that.
So that is equal to 3 times a squared minus 8ab.
24 divided by 3 is 8 and there's a minus in front of it.
Plus 48 divided by-- 3.
My brain was getting ahead of me.
Now to factor this we have to think about it as, are there two numbers-- well, think of it.
Let me rewrite this a little bit.
If we view a as kind of the independent variable-- you wouldn't have to do it, but I just wanted you to visualize it properly.
3a squared minus 8b times a plus 16b squared.
So if we viewed a squared as kind of the independent variable or the x term, so now this kind of has the shape of polynomials that hopefully you're used to factoring a little bit.
We just have to think, OK, are there two numbers that add up to minus 8b, and that when I multiply the two numbers, I get 16b squared?
So first all, the number is going to be in terms of b, obviously.
Because if I'm adding them and I get a b and-- I get b's. And if I square them I get a b squared.
And it also makes me lead to it's the same number, just used twice.
Otherwise, it would be weird to get a squared here.
So the number that should pop out, you say, OK, what two numbers add up to minus 8 and that when I square it is equal to 16?
Minus 4, right?
Minus 4, minus 4 is minus 8.
Minus 4 squared is 16.
So the number we're talking about is minus 4b, right?
Minus 4b. b, that's a b.
Plus minus 4b is equal to minus 8b.
And minus 4b squared is equal to 16b squared.
So we can factor this out to be 3-- let me switch colors.
3 times.
We said minus 4b is the number.
When you add it twice you get minus 8b.
And you square it, you get that.
So it's a minus 4b times a minus 4b.
And that is choice C.
Next problem, 40-- did I skip 45?
I did.
Let me copy and paste 45 in here.
Can't skip problems.
45.
OK.
Maybe over do on top of this one.
Let me see if I can erase this.
Look at that.
All right, now I can paste 45 and we're ready to go.
So there's two ways to do it.
You could just factor this.
Well, that's the easiest way.
Or you could test for 0's.
But we'll just factor.
So if we wanted to say-- well, let me just-- x squared minus 11x plus 24.
So just like the last problem you have to say, what two numbers when I add them equal to minus 11, and when I multiply them, is equal to positive 24?
So first of all, if I'm multiplying them and I get a positive 24, they're either both positive or they're both negative.
Since this is a negative number it tells me that they both have-- I mean they both can't be positive.
You can't add two positive numbers and end up with a negative.
So we're going to deal with two negative numbers.
So essentially, what two negative numbers when I add them equals minus 11 and when I multiplying them equals 24?
And hopefully, 8 and 3 pop out at you.
Because minus 8 plus minus 3 is equal to minus 11.
That's that.
And then minus 8 times minus 3 is positive 24.
So this can be factored as x minus 8 times x minus 3. And if we look at their choices, they had x minus 3 there.
And of course, don't get this confused.
If they said, solve this equation, right?
This is just an expression.
Now it becomes an equation if we put an equal sign.
Then we would have this equaling 0 and then you could say the roots of this polynomial or the solutions to the equation are what makes this true.
And then the solutions wouldn't be minus 8 and minus 3.
So it's be x is equal to 8 would make this 0, or x is equal to 3 would make that 0.
But anyway, I'm going off on a tangent and that's not what they asked you.
But I think that confuses people sometimes.
OK, 46.
OK, now this is an interesting one because immediately, when I look at the numbers, there's not one number that I can just factor out of everything.
9, 12, and 4, they don't have any common factors, so I can't just do that simplification.
So we're going to do a little bit more complexity.
But the best way to think about is whatever's on the t squared, this is probably kind of-- this whole expression, if we're trying to factor it into two binomials or into one binomial, this is going to be the first term of that binomial squared.
I'm just taking the square root of 9t squared.
Let's say plus a.
And now we can actually just multiply this out and see what happens.
Well first of all, they gave us a multiple choice.
We could just multiply these out and see what happens.
But let's pretend like that they didn't give us choices and we had to do this in a vacuum.
If we did this in a vacuum, we would have to factor it ourselves.
We wouldn't just be able to test their choices.
Let's do that.
So if we multiply this out, we have 3t times 3t is 9t squared.
Then you 3t times b, so it's plus 3bt.
Now what are we adding?
Let's see.
It says 3 times, a plus b, t.
So it'd be 3 times, a plus b, t.
I just added these two terms and I factored out the t and the 3 plus ab.
Well now we can do a little pattern matching, right?
We could say a plus b times 3 is equal to 12.
So a plus b is equal to what? a plus b is equal to 12.
This whole coefficient right here is a 12 up here.
So a plus b, it must be equal to 4.
Because 4 times 3 is equal to 12. a plus b is equal to 4 and we have a times b is also equal to 4.
So the only number that I can think of when I add them I get 4, when I multiply them I get 4 is 2 and 2.
Both of these are 2.
So if I were to factor this completely I get 3t plus 2 squared, essentially.
Because both of these terms are the same thing, and that's choice A.
A faster way frankly, to do this might have just been to multiply this out and say, that's the same thing.
So let's think about this a little bit.
So the first thing that I like to do once again is to try to factor out any numbers that are just common to all of the terms.
So let me do that.
8 goes into both of these, right?
And actually, let's factor out a negative 8, and I'll show you why did that.
Because I like to put the z squared, I like that one to be positive.
And so you get a minus 8.
And you didn't have to do that.
You could have just factored an 8. What's 32 divided by minus 8?
In the last video we learned a little bit about photosynthesis.
And we know in very general terms, it's the process where we start off with photons and water and carbon dioxide, and we use that energy in the photons to fix the carbon.
And now, this idea of carbon fixation is essentially taking carbon in the gaseous form, in this case carbon dioxide, and fixing it into a solid structure.
And that solid structure we fix it into is a carbohydrate.
The first end-product of photosynthesis was this 3-carbon chain, this glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate.
But then you can use that to build up glucose or any other carbohydrate.
So, with that said, let's try to dig a little bit deeper and understand what's actually going on in these stages of photosynthesis.
Remember, we said there's two stages.
The light-dependent reactions and then you have the light independent reactions.
I don't like using the word dark reaction because it actually occurs while the sun is outside.
It's actually occurring simultaneously with the light reactions.
It just doesn't need the photons from the sun.
But let's focus first on the light-dependent reactions. The part that actually uses photons from the sun.
Or actually, I guess, even photons from the heat lamp that you might have in your greenhouse.
Let's learn a little bit about just how a plain vanilla bank works.
Welcome to our programming tutorials on Khan Academy.
Are you completely new to computer programming?
Well, don't worry--that means that you're like 99.5% of the world.
And we're here to help.
I bet you're wondering what programming actually is.
When we write a program, we're giving a computer a series of commands, that kind of look like a weird form of English.
You could just think of a computer as a really obedient dog, listening to your commands, and doing whatever you tell it to do. Thankfully, programming isn't this obscure skill that only special people can do--
Many people have portraits of their husband
That's true, and this was found in the villa of Livia, who was Augustus' wive
It was found in her villa at Primaporta
Most people now have just a photograph of their husband in their home, not a full-scal marble sculpture! --Not usually
But that was exactly what Livia had
Except that, allthough this was found in her home, these sculptures had enormous political significance: they were filled with Roman political ideology, as with so much Roman art.
Well, this was probably a copy of a bronze, which would have been used
In a much more public environment.
--And many more copies were made
This is just one that happened to survive.
It was important for the emperor to distribute his image throughout the empire and so many copies were made of images of the emperor
This is long before photography of course and most people would never get to see the emperor -
So he distributed the likeness, and in a sense, the attributes of the ruler through sculpture and painting
'Likeness' is a good word, because it is 'like' Augustus, but not exactly Augustus because, surely, this is idealised:
So we have the new ruler of the Empire, who is using this sculpture as a way of communicating how he wants to be understood, what he wants to represent to his public, to those that he rules.
Go ahead tell to attorney what happened.
They forced me.
The case is strong.
The case is strong.
The case is strong. The case is strong. The case is so strong.
- We have a new boy with us today.
- So what?
Now, now.
Everybody this is Joseph.
- You should sit beside Papa. - No, he shouldn't.
Hands in the air.
Oh, not you Joseph.
You're fine. Just go and sit over there.
Good. I'm sure we're going to make Joseph feel very welcome.
Hands down. Take out your Maths Matters.
Miss, Seth Quinn threw my book out the window.
- Did not.
- Did so.
Seth Quinn, go down and get that book.
Now, page thirty seven.
math
Hey, "Live Aid", do they know what's Christmas?
Christian Kelly!
- Are you annoying Joseph?
- No. _BAR_ - Is he Joseph?
I'm sure he isn't.
Sit up straight so I can see you, Christian.
- He was pokin' Joseph's back, miss.
- Shut up.
- He was. - F--k off.
Now!
Take it down...
"Specy" fancies you. You're dead!
Hurry up now, we haven't got all day.
Excellent boys. That is it for today. But remember to practice your sums at home.
Good day to you. Good day, teacher.
Hey "Live Aid", what's number three?
Christian, what did I just say? - Don't know.
- No talk. - I wasn't.. - Just finish your sums! Finished Joseph?
Now, I think we've all had plenty time.
Pencils down.
Down! Now who's first?
Seth Quinn. Didn't have me hand up.
Come up now and do number one for us please.
Bet he gets it wrong.
Don't know.
Maybe we'll have a little less guff out of Seth for a while.
Now Hazel. Why don't you show us all how to do number one.
Good girl.
Good day.
So, they believe in you. Resting the whole game on your shoulders, eh? I am a star, Father.
In the last game I scored three goals. Yes, you're a star. Very star.
Hey "Live Aid", you hungry?
You want that?
It's a good one. Kelly's got snot on his finger.
Oh my finger! Ow, let go!
Everybody, hands in the air.
Oh my finger, he broke me finger.
Sit down!
Hands in the air.
There's nothing broke. And you'll be grand.
- It's sore.
- I'm sure it is.
I've seen her knickers.
What colour?
Now! That's better.
Yellow.
Oh, God give me strength.
Christian sit down.
Now Joseph, Christian is no angel.
- Are you Christian?
- I didn't do anything. We do not pull fingers, or whatever you just did to Christian here.
In this classroom or anywhere else.
You're definitely dead.
Don't listen to that door bag.
Dead!
You're dead.
Fight! Fight!
Hit 'im. Hit 'im.
Come on, Kelly!
Go on: punch him!
Come on. Are you going to fight, or what?
This is boring.
Let him go.
Seth Quinn, Christian Kelly.
Not a squeak out of you.
Open on page 47 of 'Total Egualia'. Questions one to seven. I am going to be right outside now and listening for any messing.
Now. - I didn't do anything.
- Shut up, Christian, for Christ's sake.
- We need to sort this out boys.
I didn't do-- _BAR_ - Christian!
Seth, what happened? _BAR_ - Nothin'.
- It's a funny sort of nothin I saw...
Well, Joseph. Your turn....
( sighs ) You're just great lads..
What am I gonna do with you?
Alright so.
If that's the way you want it.
- Miss. _BAR_ - Yes.
- I seen it. _BAR_ - Now, Hazel.
- But I seen Christian-- - Back inside! _BAR_- But he-- _BAR_ - Hazel!
She's a bitch that one.
I's only tellin' her...
- Hazel O'Hara!
- What?
- I heard what you just said. - It's a private conversation.
- Don't you dare talk to me like that.
- Like what? - Stand up!
- I am standing. Well, hands in the air then.
She thinks she's robbin a f-ckin' bank.
"Now..."
Now.
In you go.
Now.
So, imagine you're standing on a street anywhere in America and a Japanese man comes up to you and says,
"Excuse me, what is the name of this block?"
And you say, "I'm sorry, well, this is Oak Street, that's Elm Street.
This is 26th, that's 27th."
He says, "OK, but what is the name of that block?"
You say, "Well, blocks don't have names.
Streets have names; blocks are just the unnamed spaces in between streets."
He leaves, a little confused and disappointed.
So, now imagine you're standing on a street, anywhere in Japan, you turn to a person next to you and say,
"Excuse me, what is the name of this street?"
They say, "Oh, well that's Block 17 and this is Block 16."
And you say, "OK, but what is the name of this street?"
And they say, "Well, streets don't have names.
Blocks have names.
Just look at Google Maps here.
There's Block 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.
All of these blocks have names, and the streets are just the unnamed spaces in between the blocks.
And you say then, "OK, then how do you know your home address?"
He said, "Well, easy, this is District Eight.
There's Block 17, house number one."
You say, "OK, but walking around the neighborhood,
I noticed that the house numbers don't go in order."
He says, "Of course they do.
They go in the order in which they were built.
The first house ever built on a block is house number one.
The second house ever built is house number two.
Third is house number three.
It's easy.
It's obvious."
So, I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions we didn't even know we had, and realize that the opposite of them may also be true.
So, for example, there are doctors in China who believe that it's their job to keep you healthy.
So, any month you are healthy you pay them, and when you're sick you don't have to pay them because they failed at their job.
They get rich when you're healthy, not sick.
(Applause)
In most music, we think of the "one" as the downbeat, the beginning of the musical phrase: one, two, three, four.
But in West African music, the "one" is thought of as the end of the phrase, like the period at the end of a sentence.
So, you can hear it not just in the phrasing, but the way they count off their music: two, three, four, one.
And this map is also accurate.
(Laughter)
There's a saying that whatever true thing you can say about India, the opposite is also true.
So, let's never forget, whether at TED, or anywhere else, that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.
Domo arigato gozaimashita.
[Thunder]
At last. Welcome Neo!
As you no doubt have guessed, I am Morpheus.
It's an honor to meet you.
No, the honor is mine.
Please come.
Sit.
I imagine that right now you are feeling a bit like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole.
You can say that.
I can see it in your eyes.
You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up.
Ironically, this is not far from the truth.
Do you believe in fate, Neo?
No.
Why Not?
Because I do not like the idea that I am not in control of my life.
I know exactly what you mean.
Let me tell you why you are here. You're here because you know something.
What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.
You felt it your entire life.
Something's wrong with the world.
You don't know what it is, but it is there like a splinter in your mind driving you mad.
It is this feeling that has brought you to me.
Do you know what I am talking about?
The Matrix.
Do you want to know what it is?
The Matrix is everywhere; it is all around us, even in this very room.
You can see it when you look out the window. or when you turn on your television; you can feel it when you go to work, to church. When you pay your taxes.
It is the wool that has been pulled over your eyes.to blind you from the truth.
What truth?
Like everyone else you were born into bondgage, born into a prison and that you cannot smell or taste or touch, a prison for your mind (Sighs.) Unfortunately, you cannot be told what the Matrix is.
You have to see it for yourself.
This is your last chance.
After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and you believe whatever you want to believe.
Take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Remember.
All I am offering is the truth, Nothing more.
Follow me.
The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation.
And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with.
I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands.
Yves Behar:
And in scenic Switzerland for me.
FN:
I always had a passion for alternative vehicles.
This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada.
YB:
Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there.
FN:
And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions.
This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother.
YB: To the dismay of my mother, this is dangerous teenage fashion right there.
(Laughter)
FN:
And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia -- also the U.S. and Japan.
YB:
So, wind power, solar power -- we had a lot to talk about.
We had a lot that got us excited.
So we decided to do a special project together.
To combine engineering and design and ...
FN: Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful.
YB:
And we made a baby.
(Laughter)
FN:
Can you bring out our baby?
(Applause)
This baby is fully electric.
It goes 150 miles an hour.
It's twice the range of any electric motorcycle.
Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design.
It's got an amazing user experience.
It was wonderful working with Yves Behar.
He came up with our name and logo.
We're Mission Motors.
And we've only got three minutes, but we could talk about it for hours.
YB:
Thank you.
FN:
Thank you TED.
And thank you Chris, for having us.
(Applause)
[Instrumental intro of the "I Was Here" song]
[Beyoncé, over the music]
On August 19, 2012, it's high time we rise together.
Do one thing for another human being.
Nothing is too small.
It begins with each of us.
Make your mark and say "I was here."
Go to whd-iwashere.org and together, we'll make our stories known. ♪ I was here.
I lived, I loved ♪ <P align="right">[Over the song:] <i>One day,</i></P> one message, one billion people take an action ♪ I did, I've done ♪ <P align="right">[Over the song:] <i>for each other.</i> ♪ I was here ♪
I'll see you then.
[Cymbals + echo]
(I Was Here World Humanitarian Day August 19 whd-iwashere.org)
(Music)
(Applause) (Music)
(Applause)
Welcome to the presentation on BASlC ADDlTION.
I know what you're thinking:
"Sal, addition doesn't seem so basic to me." Well, I apologize.
I hope I --
Hopefully, by the end of this presentation, or in a couple of weeks, it will seem basic. So lets get started with,
I guess we could say, some problems.
Well, let's say I start with an old classic.
1 + 1
And I think you already know how to do this.
But, I'll kind of show you a way of doing this, in case you don't have this memorized, or you haven't already mastered this.
You say, well, if I have one (Let's call that an avocado.)
If I have 1 avocado, and then you were to give me another avocado, how many avocados do I now have?
Well, let's see. I have 1 ... 2 avocados.
So 1 + 1 is equal to 2.
Now, I know what you are thinking:
"That was too easy."
So, let me give you something a little bit more difficult. I like the avocados.
I might stick with that theme.
What is 3 + 4? Hmm.
This is, I think, a more difficult problem.
Well, let's stick with the avocados.
And in case you don't know what an avocado is, it's, it's actually a very delicious fruit. It's actually the fattiest of all the fruits.
You probably didn't even think it was a fruit -- even if you [have eaten] one.
So, let's say I have 3 avocados. 1, 2, 3. Right?
So let me put this 4 in yellow, so you know that these are the ones you're giving me. 1 2 3 4
So how many total avocados do I have now?
That's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 avocados.
So 3 + 4 is equal to 7.
And now I am going to introduce you to another way of thinking about this.
It's called the number line.
And, actually, I think this is how I do it in my head, when I forget -- if I don't have it memorized.
So [on the] number line, I just write all the numbers in order, and I go high enough just so I can -- [so that] all the numbers I am using are, kind of, in it.
So, you know the first number is 0, which is nothing. Maybe you don't know; but now you know.
And then you go to 1 (one) 2 (two) 3 (three) 4 (four) 5 (five) 6 (six) 7 (seven) 8 (eight) 9 (nine) 10 (ten)
It keeps going, 11 (eleven)
So, we're sayng 3 + 4.
So let's start at 3. So I have 3 here.
And we're going to add 4 to that 3.
So all we do is we go up the number line, or we go to the right on the number line, 4 more.
So we go 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4.
Notice, all we did is we just increased it by 1, by 2, by 3, by 4.
And then we ended up at 7.
And that was our answer. We could do a couple of different ones.
We could say, what is --
What if I asked you what 8 + 1 is?
Hmmm. 8 + 1.
Well, you might already know it. 8 + 1 is just the next number [after 8]. But if you look at the number line, you start at 8, and you add 1.
I promise you. You've just got to keep practicing.
Let's say....
I want to draw the number line again. Actually, I have a line tool; so I shouldn't give you all of those ugly looking lines that I've been giving you. Look at that.
So, that's a nice looking line.
I'm gonna feel bad to erase it later on. So let me draw a number line. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
So let's do a hard problem.
What is -- I'm gonna do it in different colors now.
5 + 6 So if you want, you can pause the video and try this.
You might already know the answer.
And the reason why I say this is a hard problem is because the answer [is] more [than the] [number of fingers you have on your two hands]. So you can't necessarily do it on your fingers.
So let's get started with this problem. Actually, my phone is ringing. But I'm going to ignore the phone, because you're more important.
Let's start start at the 5. So we start at the 5.
And we're gonna add 6 to it. So we go: 1 2 3 4 5 6
We're at 11!
So 5 + 6 is equal to 11.
Now I'm gonna ask you a question.
What is 6 + 5?
Can you switch the two numbers and get the same answer?
Well, let's try that. I'm gonna try it in a different color, so we don't get all confused.
So let's start at 6. Right?
Ignore the yellow for now and add 5 to it. 1 ... 2 ... 3 ... 4 ... 5. Ah.
We get to the same place.
And I think you might want to try this on a bunch of problems.
And you'll see it always works out -- that it doesn't matter in what order you -- "5 + 6" is the same thing as "6 + 5."
And that makes sense.
If I have 5 avocados and you give me 6, I'm gonna have 11.
If I have 6 avocados and you gave me 5,
Let's do a couple of -- Since this number line is so nice,
I wanna do a few more problems using it.
Although, as I use it, I'm sure I'll just continue to confuse you,
But -- Let's see.
I'll use white now. What is -- What is 8 + 7?
Well, if you can still read this, 8 is right here. Right? We're gonna add 7 to it.
We go to 15. 8 + 7 is 15.
So hopefully, that gives you a sense of how to do these types of problems.
And more than, I guess this -- and you're gonna learn multiplication in a little bit.
But these types of problems are, when you're getting started off in mathematics, these kind of require the most practice.
And, to some degree, you have to start memorizing them. But, over time, you know, when you look back, I want you to remember how you feel while you are watching this video right now.
If you don't know the answer to any of the addition problems, that we give you in the exercises, you can press the "Hints," and it'll draw circles, and then you can just count up the circles.
Or, if you want to do it on your own, so you get the problem right, you could draw the circles, or you could draw a number line, -- like we did in this presentation.
I think you might be ready to tackle the addition problems.
Have fun!
We knew nothing of a world beyond our own.
We were aristocrats.
From communion with the dead to pumpkins and pranks Halloween is a patchwork holiday.
Stitched together from cultural, religious and occult traditions that spans centuries.
[sound of flute]
It all began with the Celts, a people whose culture had spread across Europe more than 2,000 years ago.
October 31st was the day they celebrated the end of the harvest season in a festival called Samhain.
That night also marked the Celtic New Year and was considered a time between years.
A magical time when the ghosts of the dead walked the Earth. "It was the time when the veil between death and life was supposed to be at its thinnest."
[wolves howling]
On Samhain, the villagers gathered and lit huge bonfires to drive the dead back to the spirit world and keep them away from the living.
But as the Catholic church's influence grew in Europe, it frowned on the pagan rituals like Samhain.
In the 7th century, the Vatican began to merge it with a church sanctioned holiday.
So November 1st was designated All Saint's Day to honour martyrs and the deceased faithful.
"Both of these holidays had to do with the afterlife and about survival after death."
"It was a calculated move on the part of the Church to bring more people into the fold."
All Saint's Day was known then as Hallowmas.
'Hallow' means holy or saintly
So, the translation is roughly - mass of the saints.
The night before October 31st was All Hallow's Eve, which gradually morphed into Halloween.
The holiday came to America with the wave of Irish immigrants during the Potato Famine of the 1840s.
They brought several of their holiday customs with them, including Bobbing for apples and playing tricks on neighbours like removing gates from the front of houses.
The young pranksters wore masks so they wouldn't be recognized.
But over the years, the tradition of harmless tricks grew into outright vandalism.
"Back in the 1930s, it really became a dangerous holiday.
I mean there was...uh..such a hooliganism and vandalism."
"Trick or Treating was originally a extortion deal." "Give us candy or we'll trash your house."
Store keepers and neighbours began giving treats or bribes to stop the tricks and children were encouraged to travel door to door for treats as an alternative to trouble making.
By the late 30s, Trick or Treat became the holiday greeting.
'Love Letter to the Soldier'
Dear Samsul,
I have written two letters to you but you never replied.
Hopefully, through this video letter, you will see your daughter and be moved to respond.
I brought this video letter from Bupul to Merauke so you could watch it.
Samsul, I still live in Bupul village with Mum and Dad.
The village is still like before.
The air is still fresh.
But to this day there is still no electricity and no telephone.
On the journey to Merauke we pass through many border security posts.
The TNI post that used to be near the Maro River bridge ... ... has been moved to near the Eligobel District office.
As you know, the trip from Bupul to Merauke is really tough ... ... usually between 4 and 5 hours.
Samsul, I miss you.
After you left me - when I was 5 months pregnant with our child ... ... life was difficult.
Many people ask who is the father of my child.
Those who know that her father is a TNI soldier call her an army brat.
Sometimes, when Yani is fussy and cranky, Mum and Dad become emotional and say to her:
"Your father only knows how to make you, but he is irresponsible!'
I usually just stay quiet and accept these words from my parents.
Samsul, do you remember when we first met in 2008?
You were very polite and kind.
You used to visit our house often, bringing biscuits, cereal mix and milk.
You came by the house every day until we started dating.
I was still in high school at the time.
I thought we were going to get married.
But you left for Bandung in November 2008 when I was 5 months pregnant.
You promised to move to Merauke and asked me to take care of our daughter.
On 17 March 2009, our daughter, Anita Mariani, was born in the Bupul village.
I call her Yani.
Now Yani has grown big.
She's three years old.
She wants to go to school and become somebody useful for the nation.
Samsul, Mum and Dad have grown old.
They can no longer work to support our child.
I find it difficult to work because I have to take care of Yani constantly.
But I continue to fight to support our child.
If you come back to us, of course I will accept you with open arms.
I will continue to wait for you, Samsul.
I don't care what people say.
Love, from Bupul and Merauke, 21 November 2011.
Maria Goreti Mekiw
Love Letter to the Soldier
Dear Samsul,
I have written two letters to you but you never replied.
Hopefully, through this video letter, you will see your daughter and be moved to respond.
I brought this video letter from Bupul to Merauke so you could watch it.
Samsul, I still live in Bupul village with Mum and Dad.
The village is still like before.
The air is still fresh.
But to this day there is still no electricity and no telephone.
On the journey to Merauke we pass through many border security posts.
The TNI post that used to be near the Maro River bridge ... ... has been moved to near the Eligobel District office.
Samsul, I still keep the mobile phone, clothes, blanket and matress you left for me. Samsul, I miss you.
After you left me - when I was 5 months pregnant with our child ... ... life was difficult.
Many people ask who is the father of my child.
Those who know that her father is a TNI soldier call her an army brat.
Sometimes, when Yani is fussy and cranky,
Mum and Dad become emotional and say to her: "Your father only knows how to make you, but he is irresponsible!'
Samsul, do you remember when we first met in 2008?
You were very polite and kind.
You used to visit our house often, bringing biscuits, cereal mix and milk.
You came by the house every day until we started dating.
I was still in high school at the time.
I thought we were going to get married.
But you left for Bandung in November 2008 when I was 5 months pregnant.
You promised to move to Merauke and asked me to take care of our daughter.
On 17 March 2009, our daughter, Anita Mariani, was born in the Bupul village.
I call her Yani.
Now Yani has grown big. She's three years old.
She wants to go to school and become somebody useful for the nation.
Samsul, Mum and Dad have grown old.
They can no longer work to support our child.
I find it difficult to work because I have to take care of Yani constantly.
But I continue to fight to support our child.
If you come back to us, of course I will accept you with open arms.
I will continue to wait for you, Samsul. I don't care what people say.
Love, from Bupul and Merauke, 21 November 2011.
Maria Goreti Mekiw
The Catholic Church group JPlC MSC recorded at least 19 cases of sexual misconduct by the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNl) Border Security in the Bupul Village, Merauke from 1992 to 2009.
Women were courted, impregnated and abandoned. Several women were also raped.
Bupul is an administrative village of the Elikobel District, Merauke.
Have you ever wondered about the great mysteries of life?
Like how the universe began.
Who built the pyramids?
The secret formula for Coca-Cola. [music]
Some scientists believe there maybe a cosmic connection to these mysteries.
No one knows for sure but we do know that Coca-Cola has been around since the beginning of time.
[sound of lightning]
Ok Ok
Here is the real story.
Coca-Cola was invented right here in the city of Atlanta over a 100 years ago.
[music]
Back in 1886, a pharmacist named John Pemberton was experimenting with a new recipe.
He took some secret ingredients and boiled them into a syrup.
He thought it was pretty tasty. "mmmmm"
So, he took some to Jacob's Pharmacy where he mixed the syrup with carbonated water and placed it on sale for 5 cents a glass.
And the rest is history.
Thus, was invented one of the greatest refreshments of all time.
Dr Pemberton's accountant was named Frank Robinson and it was his idea to call this new drink Coca-Cola.
In fact, he created the now famous trademark in his own handwriting.
As word spread around Atlanta about this fashionable new beverage, sales began to increase.
During its first year, Coca-Cola sold an average of 9 drinks a day.
Dr. Pemberton never imagined the incredible future of his creation.
In 1888, he sold the secret formula to a business man named Asa Candler who later formed a coporation to produce and distribute Coca-Cola.
Mr. Candler was a marketing genius.
And he came up with countless creative ways to promote the product.
He even delivered the syrup in barrels that were painted red to give them a distinctive appearance.
As more and more people discovered, this delicious new refreshment
Coca-Cola began to pop up all over America.
For years, Coca-Cola was served only in soda fountains.
Then, one day a couple of clever guys named Thomas and Whitehead had an idea.
Coca-Cola was so successful as a fountain drink, what if someone put it in bottles?
"Bottles?"
"Yes Sir! Bottles. Folks could take them home."
Well, Mr Candler thought that was a perfectly stupid idea.
So stupid in fact, that he told the two men they could bottle all the Coca-Cola they wanted.
And he sold them the right to do that for just 1 dollar.
Of course, one thing Mr. Candler didn't sell was his secret recipe.
He agreed to sell them Coca-Cola syrup.
They would add carbonated water and Coca-Cola bottling had begun.
It turned out that people loved Coca-Cola in bottles.
Now they could enjoy it any time they wanted.
Coca-Cola was so popular in fact that competitors tried to cash in on its success.
So the bottleries decided to create something that made it easy for people to tell Coca-Cola from the impostors.
And in 1916, they introduced the Coca-Cola contour bottle.
Now people could be sure they were getting the real thing.
The new bottle was so unique, it became instantly famous.
In 1919, Candler sold the company to a group of investors and a man named Robert Woodruff soon became the new company president.
Mr. Woodruff's goal was to make ice cold Coca-Cola available to anyone, anytime, anyplace.
Under his leadership, bottling plants began to pop up all over the world.
And Coca-Cola became the first truly global brand.
Over a 100 years later, the formula is still a closely guarded secret.
But the popularity of Coca-Cola is no secret.
It's the most recognized trademark in the world.
And Coca-Cola is enjoyed in more than 200 countries.
Produced and sold by local bottlers just like the one in your home town.
Wherever you are, wherever you're at thirst.
The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola bottlers answer the need for refreshment in many different ways.
But the shining star is and will always be
Coca-Cola
The original soft drink.
Unique delcious authentic and fun.
There is only one Coca-Cola.
The most refreshing drink in the universe.
Thank you.... thank you so much.
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of
Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow
Americans:
Last month, I went to Andrews Air
Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq.
Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought -- and several thousand gave their lives.
We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world.
(Applause.)
For the first time in nine years, there are no
Americans fighting in Iraq.
(Applause.) For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.
(Applause.)
Most of al Qaeda's top lieutenants have been defeated.
The Taliban's momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.
These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America's Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations.
They're not consumed with personal ambition.
They don't obsess over their differences.
They focus on the mission at hand.
They work together.
Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.
(Applause.) Think about the America within our reach:
A country that leads the world in educating its people.
An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we're in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren't so tied to unstable parts of the world.
Dimitri says he knows about it but I'm not too sure about that... dimitris sound he'll talk to you ill see you later whats the story? hey dimitri do you mind talking about cardio vascular disease? sure thing did you know... 1 out of 5 deaths from the disease (licks ear) is caused directly from smoking believe it or not and people who smoke are at least twice as more likely of getting it it's quite sad and unfortunately my friend has the disease it's terrible second hand smoke can cause it also so your not the only one directly affected by this disease when you smoke i have good news! hah? the disease death rates have halved since when? the 1980s your friend will probably live
John Norquist:
Cities that don't have any freeways at all, they don't really have big traffic problems.
Like Vancouver, British Columbia, they don't have any freeways at all in the whole city.
And it works really well and these other freeways do a lot of damage.
If you look at the real estate anywhere near a freeway, almost always it's degraded, you'll get like surface parking lots or you have buildings that have high vacancy rates, no walking.
It's really hard to design a freeway that would look good in a city.
[music] In 1922 when Corbusier, the great modernist architect, did his drawing, the City of Tomorrow, which proposed the idea of grade separated highways in the city, sort of a utopian dream to be able to drive without ever having to slow down.
It's just when you're in the city, it's the complexity of the city.
If you superimpose on that a rural styled grade separated super highway, it creates a lot of unintended side effects.
Just take for example the West Side Highway in New York.
Sam Schwartz:
On a cold December morning in 1973 I got a call.
I was a junior engineer at the old New York City Traffic Department and the entire West Side Highway collapsed at Gansevoort Street.
John Norquist: It was built in the late "20"s and then fell down in 1973, and fell down again in 1975.
Ultimately after about a 15 year struggle, they decided not to build it back. They just put in West St.
So neighborhoods like Tribeca and Chelsea and Battery Park had the benefit of being able to see the river.
Sam Schwartz:
I had to handle the traffic, that was my assignment, figure out where did the traffic go.
And when I found out as the traffic was able to take different paths, things didn't get worse on all the other routes that had to pick up the slack.
John Norquist:
I don't hear anybody advocating building the West Side Highway again.
Same thing happened with the Embarcadero in San Francisco.
In the central artery in San Francisco, they took down two freeways that had been damaged by the earthquake.
In both cases the traffic distributes better, real estate values were improved, and the population that lives around the area where those roads were has gone up.
The Embarcadero, which was a boulevard for a long time in San Francisco until they ruined it in 1951 when the Embarcadero was built, it's restored, it's just like it was before, maybe even better.
It has a streetcar, it has palm trees along it.
[music]
John Norquist: We're helping local groups in Seattle try to eliminate the Alaskan Viaduct which is a freeway right in front of the waterfront.
We're working in New Orleans to restore the Claiborne Avenue, it's got an elevated freeway that covers up the whole street, and it really ruined one of the great boulevards in New Orleans.
It had about 200 businesses before it was turned into a freeway in 1966. And now it has like 25.
Jack Davis: And now we found that we don't need it as a highway to go east and west.
We don't need it for interstate traffic.
It's too expensive to keep up and we'd be much better off if we took it down.
This will be what was regarded as the single post-Katrina move that most improved the beauty of New Orleans.
We're working in Buffalo to help people tear down the Skyway. ustin Booth:
Buffalo's highways have had a negative effect on a city, from cutting off our waterfront, severing our neighborhoods and scarring our homestead parks and park way systems.
John Norquist:
Robert Moses did a lot of damage in New York, but he did even more damage in Buffalo.
Justin Booth: Today, 52% of Downtown Buffalo's land use is devoted to parking cars as opposed to supporting life and environment that you would expect from the urban environment.
John Norquist:
Buffalo has beautiful Lake Erie and you can't even see Lake Erie from Buffalo because of all the roads.
[music]
The Sheridan was built through the South Bronx in the first place because the health and quality of life of people there was thought not to be important.
John Norquist: It only has about 40,000 cars a day.
It just connects two other... the cross Bronx and the Bruckner
There's a lot of people in the neighborhood that are worried about children and their asthma and their air quality, and they want their neighborhood back.
They've been living in the shadow of that freeway.
Unlike some of the other cities where highways have been removed, in those cases often times elevated highway structures have been converted into boulevards.
[music] John Norquist:
So when you need it the most, the grade separation doesn't even work for what it's supposed to do, which is move traffic quickly.
It's important to review grade separated highways and consider removing it cos your city will be worth more if you get rid of it.
Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics.
In fact, mostly now in other things.
One thing is distant relationships among human languages.
And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families.
They don't like that. They think it's crank.
I don't think it's crank.
And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads.
Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago?
And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages?
How far back does that go?
How far back does modern language go?
How many tens of thousands of years does it go back?
Chris Anderson:
Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is?
Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier.
I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.
So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further.
But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind.
It's what we call a bottleneck.
CA:
Well, Philip Anderson may have been right.
You may just know more about everything than anyone.
So, it's been an honor.
Thank you Murray Gell-Mann.
(Applause)
It couldn't really end like this, could it?
Not after what I've just been through.
We're gonna get through this, right?
We're gonna be together forever, right?
I was starting to think otherwise.
Maybe Justin Bieber was right.
Maybe there was no Juliet for this Romeo.
No Meg Ryan for this Tom Hanks.
Maybe there is no such thing as love.
And just as I was about to resign myself to a life of cat ownership, I saw her.
The girl of my dreams!
I had to think fast.
A train leaves the station travelling at 27 miles per hour.
The next station is 14 city blocks away.
If a man leaves that same station on foot but takes one massive shortcut, will he spend the rest of his life alone?
I was incredibly out of shape.
But every fiber of my being told me I couldn't let this one go.
I have to keep pushing.
I was going to make it!
I wasn't going to make it.
What was this?
Wait a minute!
Bieber!
And just like that, she was gone.
The next station wasn't for miles.
I had nothing left but flat tire and a broken heart.
It couldn't really end like this, could it?
Not after what I've just been through.
We're gonna get through this, right?
We're gonna be together forever, right?
I'm starting to think otherwise.
Maybe Justin Bieber was right.
Maybe there was no Juliet for this Romeo.
No, no Courtney Love for this Kurt Cobain.
Maybe there is no such thing as love.
And just as I was about to renew my "World of Warcraft" membership, I saw her.
The girl of my dreams!
Are you asleep, love?
Are you asleep?... love?
ARE YOU ASLEEP!?
Ohh i think someone is looking for her bedtime story, is she?
How about your favourite?
Sleeping Beauty.
Now where is it, let me see...
Once upon a time, in a kingdom, far away., a princess was born...
[baby crying]
And she was very beautiful, so they called her Beauty.
Beauty, was indeed very beautiful.
Just like yourself, love.
BUT!
She was soon to learn that when IT COMES TO THE HARSHER LESSONS OF THlS LlFE, beauty is not going to get you very far [whispers] very far, very far, very far... Anyway... soon it was the day of her christening and everybody in the kingdom had gathered for this joyful occasion including the lovely, pretty fairies of the forest who were soon to be Beauty's glamorous godmothers.
Oh yes... Everyone was invited to this christening. Everyone... that is except maybe the one person who might have done with the day out.
I'll tell you...
It was the elderly fairy. And do you know why nobody had thought to invite the elderly fairy along? Well I'll tell you...
"OHH, let's not invite the stinking old fairy," they probably said "She smells of dirty bed sheets" "and all she ever talks about is her bad knee."
So, err...the elderly fairy felt a little bit...rejected...and left out, as well she might.
So she decided she'd show that shower a thing or two about how it feels to be old and constantly sleepy.
First of all, she surprised them by appearing in the middle of their la-di-da christening party in a HUGE CLOUD OF TOXlC GREEN SMOKE.
MUHAAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
Oh of course, they had their excuses as to why they hadn't bothered inviting her I thought you wouldn't want to be out and about with your knee giving you so much trouble," said the queen.
I thought you died months ago, said one of the stupid young fairies. Now...
Do you think the elderly fairy, being older and wiser was able to... forgive them?
DON'T BE RlDICULOUS, OF COURSE SHE WASN'T!
SHE LOOMED OVER THE CRADLE IN A MENAClNG MANNER AND LAUGHED FOR A VERY LONG TlME.
MUAHAH chokes cough It was for longer than that!
Oh look at you, aren't you great with your smooth complexions and your social calendars dancing around on your working legs! You make me SlCK! And you look at me and you find me so old and repulsive.
Well, I've learned a thing or two in my time!
TRY THlS ON FOR SlZE!
And with that, she put a terrible curse on the party that each and every one of them would die in the instant they ever fell asleep!
MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Alright, so love... that's me for tonight.
You sleep well... and I'll see you in the morning... with the help of God.
♪ go to sleep, go to sleep...go to sleeeeeeeeeppp... If they ever fell asleep, they would dieee, they would die, they would die, die, die, diee, die, dieee oh good enough for them♪
Now, I want to start with a question:
When was the last time you were called "childish"?
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. Which really bothers me.
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.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Then again, who's to say that certain types of irrational thinking aren't exactly what the world needs?
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.
Kids can be full of inspiring aspirations and hopeful thinking, like my wish that no one went hungry, or that everything were free, a kind of utopia.
How many of you still dream like that, and believe in the possibilities?
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos.
On the other hand, we kids still dream about perfection.
And that's a good thing, because in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first.
In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility.
For instance, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, my home state -- yoohoo, Washington! (Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art.
The resident artist said they got some of their best ideas from the program, because kids don't think about the limitations of how hard it can be to blow glass into certain shapes, they just think of good ideas.
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.
(Laughter)
Now, our inherent wisdom doesn't have to be insider's knowledge.
Kids already do a lot of learning from adults, and we have a lot to share.
I think that adults should start learning from kids.
Now, I do most of my speaking in front of an education crowd -- teachers and students, and I like this analogy:
It shouldn't be a teacher at the head of the class, telling students, "Do this, do that."
The students should teach their teachers.
Learning between grown-ups and kids should be reciprocal.
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.
(Laughter)
True story, by the way.
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.
As history points out, regimes become oppressive when they're fearful about keeping control.
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.
We love challenges, but when expectations are low, trust me, we will sink to them.
My own parents had anything but low expectations for me and my sister.
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."
Well, we heard that one too, but "Pioneer Germ Fighters" totally rules.
(Laughter)
I loved to write from the age of four, and when I was six, my mom bought me my own laptop equipped with Microsoft Word.
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.
Many publishers were not quite so encouraging.
One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children.
Children's publisher not working with children?
I don't know, you're kind of alienating a large client there.
(Laughter)
One publisher, Action Publishing, was willing to take that leap and trust me, and to listen to what I had to say.
They published my first book, "Flying Fingers," you see it here. And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you.
I appreciate your attention today, because to show that you truly care, you listen.
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.
You must lend an ear today, because we are the leaders of tomorrow, which means we're going to take care of you when you're old and senile.
No, just kidding.
(Laughter) No, really, we are going to be the next generation, the ones who will bring this world forward.
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.
Are you ready to make the match?
Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes.
And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago.
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.
She said, "What leads to success?" And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer.
So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people!
So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids?
So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick.
And the first thing is passion.
Freeman Thomas says, "I'm driven by my passion."
TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money.
Carol Coletta says, "I would pay someone to do what I do."
And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.
Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, "It's all hard work.
Nothing comes easily.
But I have a lot of fun." Did he say fun?
Rupert?
Yes!
(Laughter) TEDsters do have fun working.
And they work hard.
I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics.
(Laughter)
Alex Garden says, "To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it."
There's no magic; it's practice, practice, practice.
And it's focus.
Norman Jewison said to me,
"I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing."
And push!
David Gallo says, "Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push."
You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt.
Goldie Hawn says, "I always had self-doubts.
I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough.
I didn't think I'd make it."
Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Frank Gehry said to me,
"My mother pushed me."
(Laughter)
Serve! Sherwin Nuland says, "It was a privilege to serve as a doctor."
A lot of kids want to be millionaires.
The first thing I say is:
"OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value.
Because that's the way people really get rich."
Ideas!
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.
And I give lots of evidence.
Persist!
Joe Kraus says, "Persistence is the number one reason for our success."
You've got to persist through failure.
You've got to persist through crap!
Which of course means "Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure."
(Laughter)
So, the answer to this question is simple:
Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED.
(Laughter) Or failing that, do the eight things -- and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success.
Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews! (Applause)
Welcome to the presentation on adding and subtracting fractions.
Let's get started.
Let's start with what I hope shouldn't confuse you too much.
This should hopefully be a relatively easy question.
If I were to ask you what one fourth plus one fourth is.
Let's think about what that means.
Let's say we had a pie and it was divided into four pieces.
So this is like saying this first one fourth right here, let me do it in a different color.
This one fourth right here, let's say it's this one fourth of the pie, right?
And we're going to add it to another one fourth of the pie.
Let's make it this one-- let me change the color-- pink.
This one fourth, this pink one fourth is this one fourth of the pie.
So if I were to eat both one fourths, or one fourth and then I eat another one fourth, how much have I eaten?
Well, you could look from just the picture,
I have now eaten two out of the four pieces of the pie.
So if I eat one fourth of a piece of pie or one fourth of a pie, and then I eat another one fourth of a pie, I will have eaten two fourths of the pie.
And we know from the equivalent fractions module that this is the same thing as that I've eaten one half of the pie, which makes sense. If I eat two out of four pieces of a pie, then I've eaten one half of it. And if we look at it mathematically, what happened here?
What I am doing is a crab catcher.
The problem is our place is set to be demolished.
Hence, we do not have other means, we only do fishing here in the river.
If we will be evicted, it means destitution. We have no other recourses because the plan of the government is to clear the river here. Many of us will be evicted.
We will be relocated to Lanit, in Leganes.
What will we do there?
There is no sea in the said area.
Hence we have to stay here for the mean time until our houses are set to be demolished.
We have no one to lean on. For me, I have lots of friends who are also pensioners like me.
Whatever good solution that our pensions will be increased, we will seek for those who lobby for the increase of pension.
I work before in a [commercial] fishing boat.
My salary is not enough because it's only forty-five pesos a month.
Later on, I've decide to work in a ship, as a seaman in Negros Navigation.
It is where I started my job, but my salary is minimum, Php 195 a month, year 1963 before I get married here at [Molo]
Boulevard. My wife is Nenita Yulo, who also grew up here.
And I left my job in a [commercial] fishing and decided to work in a ship.
And with God's benevolence, I was hired as a utility seaman.
The best thing to happen, if somebody could help us.
My pension is meager despite the fact that we're poor, prices of all commodities increased.
I am trying to pursue if possible we could get help from Bayan Muna. And I can also tell my co-pensioners that Bayan Muna can help us on how we could increase our pensions.
A lot of struggling math students have found comfort in the sound of this man's voice:
"Welcome to the presentation on using the quadratic equation"
Salman Khan started making math videos to help tutor his cousin, but he became so popular that he quit his job to work on it full time.
Now his online "Khan Academy" attracts countless teachers and students.
Let's try some little more complicated equations.
Let's say we have 3 times x plus 5-- I want to make sure I get all the colors nice-- is equal to 17.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight... at least eight visible pieces.
Nine.
What's interesting is... Is that a nurdle?
I don't know.
Might be.
Yeah.
With this sea state, when we're not getting the small stuff, the big fragments are showing up.
Yeah.
Like they're, they're super buoyant.
So even though we've got like forty knot winds, these are staying on the surface, but then again all the small stuff is... probably churning down deep.
It's really easy when the weather is like this to forget why we're here.
So even though it seems slightly insane that Marcus wants to continue sampling even in these conditions, every single trawl has had plastic, we're going to have a nice even transect, and he's already...
HEY!!
HEY!!
AHHH!
Woah!!!
Heads up!
Computers away!
Make it stop raining!(Laughter)
Like the one place you could hang out.
This should not happen. But there's no way to fix this at sea, I mean, Dale said to fix this, he's going to have to literally take the whole section apart.
This should not happen.
Finally, after a week of gale-force winds and rain, we woke this morning to inviting waters.
When the expedition began, this is what I dreamed about.
A break from the endless flow of emails, ubiquitous advertising and nine to five survival.
But just as a cliché goes, I guess perspective is gained from contrast.
The storm's violence has left a long stream of repair tape on a crucial rigging line, putting our re-stitch main sail and Jody in peril.
Whoa! ...the red one!
The future can be very scary but I like to look at it, not in those terms, because, if I can change one person's mind, to not throw their trash onto the streets, which you see all the time, and it just comes from ignorance, they don't know any better, then there's hope.
Now there are third world countries that have no idea that this plastic doesn't absorb into the ground.
Everything that they've ever used, like banana leaves were used for packaging to wrap things up, and of course if they threw it on the ground it would just go back into the earth.
They don't have a clue that this stuff is going to be around for four hundred to a thousand years.
All of the bio-plastic, PLA, polylactic acid stuff that's in the marketplace right now, only biodegrades under the right conditions in landfills, it does not biodegrade in the ocean.
We need a new chemical formula to make truly biodegradable products.
I wasn't even at the top.
Whether it was purely a co-incidence, or justly celebrating good weather, the calm water made Thanksgiving feel like a picnic at sea.
Three weeks into the voyage, I imagined plain pastas and rice, but Dale's stocked rations and Stiv's elaborate meals so far along in the expedition has proven thoroughly impressive.
It does look suspiciously like there's a hair in your ... right here.
I don't know.
With my stomach graciously back at ease, miles away from extravagant turkey-day parades, there's been only one thing on my mind.
And it's definitely not re-run holiday programming or a football game.
Since the very beginning of the expedition I've had this endless anticipation to see a plastic island.
To swim in chunks of polyethylene, PVC and nylon rubbish, clouding the sea, capturing the shots to shock the world.
As a filmmaker, this asinine desire still exists, as tomorrow we near the reality of the gyre.
Plastic!!
Seven o'clock!
A hundred yards out.
I'm going go to the bow and just see what...
Yup!
Here it is, here it is!
Just off the spinnaker pole about twenty feet.
Yep, right here! It's right under the spinnaker boom... ...it's about five metres.
Can we just drop the stay-sail, it'll make it a lot easier to manoeuvre.
Alright... it's a really quick job.
Get the halyard on the winch.
Two pieces and a line right here.
Straight out.
Can you see it Mary?
Yeah, it's coming right in.
Where do you see it Stiv?
Ok, oh perfect.
It's about, I'd say, fifteen metres off this starboard bow.
Reach in!
Got to reach!
Reach!
Reach!
Dive James!
Arhhh!
And it's all you Anna!
Oh, no, no!
It's too deep!
It's too deep.
Two hundred yards!
Alright, stay!
Stay!
Dead centre.
Arhhh!
Oh shit!
Look look look!
Do I still get 10 points?
Yey Chelsea!
I don't think the best use of our time is to come out into the middle of an oceanic gyre and clean it up.
I think the best use of our time is to stop letting it out into the ocean.
See anything else you guys?
Yeah, I see something big out there!
After world war two, when we started making all of these single use plastics, nobody was thinking about the environmental nightmare that might come out of it.
They were thinking more about the convenience and sanitation and health, think about all the medical equipment that is made out of plastic.
So I think now, you know, we need to take a step back.
Next!
Next!
Alright!
Well done!
This is crazy man!
Yeah!
I got a little fish!
I got a little fish!!!
A little fish guy!
(Laughter)
Ten feet!
Wow! We're in the big stuff now...
Coming down, on the left!
Pink!
Owww!
Yeah!!!
20 Points!
Yay!
While we make light of these old decaying chunks, in actuality, I think we all find it startling that in every single trawl for the last two thousand miles has contained bits of plastic confetti.
Born from these chunks.
So why did you install the satellite phone inside the locker under the sink?
Well, a lot of people talk shit round here so felt it would be appropriate. That was a good answer. The offending part... which as we can see, has split the whisker.
The Struggle of a Mother
What was your experience working abroad as migrant worker?
I worked in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh.
I worked there for 14 months.
Then I got sick.
I asked to go home.
When I told my boss, they asked me:
"Why don't you want to work?"
I replied:
'I am sick."
Then I was taken to the hospital.
The doctor said I should rest.
But I could not rest well.
So, I got sick again.
I asked my boss to send me home.
"I want to go home."
"If you don't have money to pay for my ticket, I'll use my own money."
I also asked to be sent back to the (sponsor/agent) office.
Then my boss's female relative came with her husband
I insisted to go home.
But he (the boss' relative) also insisted I stay.
When I was going to the toilet,
He pulled me.
He dragged me.
He strangled my neck.
He dragged me down the stairs.
My whole body hurt and my clothes were ripped.
I begged for help from my boss.
And my boss said:
"Stop, don't do that to her."
"She'll die," my boss said.
But the person who was torturing me said:
"Stay away. Let her die."
Then I was slapped in the face.
After that, I was taken to Mubaroqh's (boss' relative) house.
When we got there, he stripped me naked.
All my clothes were taken off and he asked:
"What do you bring?
What do you bring?"
I replied, " I haven't brought anything.
I've only brought the clothes I am wearing."
And he let me wear my clothes again.
For two months I was wearing ripped clothes.
And for two weeks I was not allowed to drink clean water.
They ordered me to drink from the tap.
Why did you become migrant worker?
I worked as a migrant worker driven by economic factors.
I had a dream of sending my kids to school.
And because I did not have money, and there was no job opportunities here.
I also only finished Elementary School.
So, I had no other choice than to be a migrant worker.
Any other reason?
Yes.
Because I saw that my neighbors who went abroad they all returned successful.
So it struck my mind to try my luck.
Who knows, that if by becoming a migrant worker I could be as successful as they were?
But in reality, my fate was different from that of my neighbors.
My fate was unfortunate,
and full of difficulty
How did you deal with your problems when working abroad?
At that time, I tried to report to the Indonesian Embassy.
And I also insisted to go home.
And if they refused to send me home, I would have still gone home
And I would have still filed a report
So finally my boss allowed me to go home.
I also kept resisting.
I said to my boss that I am also a human being.
I did not want to be treated like an animal.
I chose to go home rather than to be treated like an animal.
I didn't care whether I could bring money home or not.
I just wanted to go home.
The most important thing was for me to be free from the abuse
Do you still have the desire to work abroad?
No, because I don't want to experience what I experienced before.
I am trying to open a small business here, making cassava chips.
Besides making cassava chips I also want to run a small stall.
Hopefully in the future I could expand my business bit by bit.
And hopefully I can send my kids to school like any other kids.
The love of a mother... to me... unconditionally till the end of time... only giving... without expecting anything in return...
like the sun lighting the whole world...
DARUS (Abandoned Widowers)
I had a small business before.
Making bread, sponge cakes and donuts.
I had people who sold my products.
I also had some employees.
Aside from that, I also worked as an administrative staff at SMP (Junior High School) 2, which now has become SMP 2 Balongan.
Tempted with the offer of being granted a visa, right away I went to Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām (The Grand Mosque).
I had imagined what Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām looks like.
I finally signed up by paying a lump sum from selling my land and rice field.
I also left my job at the school.
I signed up in Jakarta and was going back and forth for almost a year.
It cost me a lot of money.
But then the sponsor (agent) ran away.
During that year I was going back and forth between Jakarta and Indramayu.
But the sponsor (agent) disappeared and I was deserted in the (migrant workers) compound with 3-4 other people.
In that uncertain situation with the sponsor disappearing, we all went back home.
Back to the village.
When I got home, I was deeply in debt.
I sold my rice field and borrowed money.
My wife and I discussed about it.
Half-heartedly, my wife had to go abroad (to become a migrant worker) to pay off our debt, that I used to sign up (to go to the Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām).
Also to pay off our previous debts, we pawned off our rice field, borrowed money for my business, borrowed money for our daily needs and for our children's school tuition.
So that they could stay in school.
I failed twice.
First, the plan to go to Al-Masjid al-Ḥarām, and second, to Malaysia.
When I got back home, I had so much burden in my mind.
Then I thought of forming a Depok (traditional cultural) group.
I gathered friends who were left by their wives abroad.
I named it DARUS, which stands for "Duda nggak ada yang ngurus" (Abandoned Widowers).
That's the group's name.
To gather friends who felt left behind (by their wives), we practiced every afternoon.
That was the beginning.
When it started to go well, I changed the name into Putra Millenium.
Thank God for every performance we could get even though I don't have much capital to start the business.
But I can create job opportunities for friends, even if it's only seasonal.
Usually during harvest time.
How many personnel I can bring depends on the request.
Some clients ask for 30 people, some ask for 40 people to perform.
It's dangdut music with someone wearing a large lion costume and 4 people carrying it.
The daughter of the person who hold the celebration sits on top of the lion.
They would go round and round.
One lion needs four men to carry, so if there are four lions, it means we need 16 men.
Not to mention we need men to push the carriage and the singer on the stage.
This is what we call Depok Lion, with the kids of those who hold the celebration, or the neighbors or family members sit on top.
One lion needs four men to carry, so five lions needs 20 men.
The lions would be carried around the neighborhood.
The singer and musicians are on the carriage as well.
Being pushed by some men.
The sound system is put in here.
Around 15 people are on the carriage.
We need at least 4-5 men to push the carriage.
This man is one of the managers.
The 25 personnel includes the musicians who are in the carriage.
We go around the neighborhood and stop right before the afternoon prayer time.
We stop at the celebration venue around 12 pm, and start again at 1 pm.
But at 1 pm we don't go around anymore, we perform at the venue.
We play different kind of songs, Javanese songs, and also dangdut songs.
Many people come and watch.
(The fee) depends on how far the location is.
If it is far, in Indramayu for instance, it could be around 2,5 - 3 million Rupiah ($250 - $300).
But if it is only around here, we charge around 2 million Rupiah ($200).
It can provide job opportunity to friends to earn more money.
At least each person get 25 - 30 thousand Rupiah ($2,5 - $3).
If get saweran (donation) from people who watch, then we get more money.
The audience gives money.
Sometimes we can get around 700 thousand - 1 million Rupiah ($70 - $100), and we divide the money equally between all personnel.
Most of the singers are also former migrant workers.
And the personnel are mostly men whose wives have left abroad to be migrant workers.
Vincent Malloy is seven years old
He's always polite and does what he's told
For a boy his age, he's considerate and nice
But he wants to be just like Vincent Price [cat purrs]
[cat screams]
He doesn't mind living with his sister, dog and cats Though he'd rather share a home with spiders and bats
There he could reflect on the horrors he's invented
And wander dark hallways, alone and tormented
Vincent is nice when his aunt comes to see him
But imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum
He likes to experiment on his dog Abercrombie
In the hopes of creating a horrible zombie
So he and his horrible zombie dog Could go searching for victims in the London fog
His thoughts, though, aren't only of ghoulish crime
He likes to paint and read to pass some of the time
While other kids read books like Go, Jane, Go! Vincent's favourite author is Edgar Allen Poe
One night, while reading a gruesome tale
He read a passage that made him turn pale
Such horrible news he could not survive
For his beautiful wife had been buried alive!
He dug out her grave to make sure she was dead
Unaware that her grave was his mother's flower bed
His mother sent Vincent off to his room
He knew he'd been banished to the tower of doom
Where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life
Alone with the portrait of his beautiful wife
While alone and insane encased in his tomb
Vincent's mother burst suddenly into the room
She said:
"If you want to, you can go out and play
It's sunny outside, and a beautiful day"
Vincent tried to talk, but he just couldn't speak The years of isolation had made him quite weak
So he took out some paper and scrawled with a pen:
"I am possessed by this house, and can never leave it again"
His mother said: "You're not possessed, and you're not almost dead
These games that you play are all in your head
You're not Vincent Price, you're Vincent Malloy
You're not tormented or insane, you're just a young boy You're seven years old and you are my son
I want you to get outside and have some real fun."
Her anger now spent, she walked out through the hall
And while Vincent backed slowly against the wall
The room started to sway, to shiver and creak
His horrid insanity had reached its peak
He saw Abercrombie, his zombie slave
And heard his wife call from beyond the grave
She spoke from her coffin and made ghoulish demands
While, through cracking walls, reached skeleton hands
Every horror in his life that had crept through his dreams Swept his mad laughter to terrified screams!
To escape the madness, he reached for the door
But fell limp and lifeless down on the floor
His voice was soft and very slow
As he quoted The Raven from Edgar Allen Poe:
"And my soul from out that shadow
That lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted?
Nevermore..."
From Migrant Worker to Activist
[Talking on the phone]:
It was caused by over contract.
The contract expired.
When coming home, it would be a problem if she doesn't get her rights.
She should come home bringing what she's entitled to, like her salary and others.
Hety was a migrant worker who faced abuses from her boss.
She had returned home and is now actively giving counseling and education to potential migrant workers in the village she resides.
She works in the Middle East and now she is asking for the help from SBMC (Migrant Workers Solidarity in Cianjur).
We asked her to write the chronology of her case.
After that we can meet up in the City of Cianjur.
If there is problem, such as her salary not being given, we will call the boss, to ask for her to be sent home.
Aside being sent home, she should also be entitled to her rights, like her salary.
If she comes home without bringing her salary, it would not be good.
Right?
They have been working for three years.
In Saudi Arabia.
Both husband and wife.
She's coming home tomorrow.
She flew out yesterday at 4 pm.
The first time it was only two months, and then she left again.
It has been three years now and she doesn't want to come home.
It might also be because her husband had passed away.
So she extended her contract for another two months.
Thank God, she becomes a successful migrant worker.
Once or twice a week, her father comes to clean the house.
Ah, she's already in Jakarta this afternoon.
That means she will be here tonight.
Ah, early morning tomorrow.
Those two houses belong to sisters.
That one belongs to the older sister whose husband passed away.
The one below is the younger sister's.
Both are migrant workers.
And thank God she is also a successful migrant worker.
So she could afford a house and send her kids to school.
But too bad her husband passed away.
They could not enjoy the result of their work together.
This is Mrs. Aad, and her daughter, Lusni. (Lusni) was a migrant worker from 2004 to 2007.
Then she went again in 2009 and came back in 2011.
Come and talk to us.
Ah, we're on camera.
Yes.
Thank God, she didn't have any problem when working as a migrant worker.
She brought home money and her salary was fully paid.
I work at home now.
I want to work if there is any job for me.
But there is no job.
I was married once, but it was short-lived.
Now, I am not married.
I just got sent this problem, and it's a pretty meaty problem.
A lot harder than what you'd normally find in most textbooks.
So I thought it would help us all to work it out.
And it's one of those problems that when you first read it, your eyes kind of glaze over, but when you understand what they're talking about, it's reasonably interesting.
So they say, the curve in the figure above is the parabola y is equal to x squared.
The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something.
That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter)
What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create.
And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity.
(Laughter) OK.
So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity.
And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific.
When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily;
I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong.
And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually -- the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new.
And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares.
Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect.
And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives.
Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk -- van Gogh syndrome -- that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression.
I do have to say, somebody -- I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't -- I suppose it does something in some part of your brain.
And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different.
I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else?
And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity.
I used to draw.
I thought I would be an artist.
And I had a miniature poodle.
And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative.
Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way.
And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book.
And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words.
Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma.
And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me.
That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age.
I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure.
But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14.
And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors.
And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it.
My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that.
But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart.
And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses
-- she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened.
Everything except randomness.
She did not believe in randomness.
There was a reason for everything.
And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her.
And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next.
And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything.
You become very creative, in a survival sense.
And this, then, led to my big questions.
And they're the same ones that I have today.
And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen?
And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen?
It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story.
Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen.
What are the influences?
How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that?
And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking.
It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe.
And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out
-- years and years, oftentimes.
So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life.
And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on.
And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor.
So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter.
And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen.
There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence.
But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters.
The meaning.
And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning.
There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it.
(Laughter)
And this happens constantly in the writing.
And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about.
And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about.
You won't discover anything.
And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there.
Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have.
And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety.
(Laughter) And they all operate at the same time.
There is also a big question of ambiguity.
And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant.
And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there.
And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it.
Moral ambiguity.
It is constantly there.
And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me.
It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq.
And she said,
"Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life."
A very famous Chinese saying, she said.
And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved.
You know, maybe even 100 years.
So, there was another one that I came across, and it's "saving fish from drowning."
And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything.
And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed.
So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die.
Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors
-- actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: "save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life."
And it was a warning -- don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck.
OK.
I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them.
But, both of these sayings -- saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning -- to me they had to do with intentions.
And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response.
And then we have intentions.
There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something.
And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been.
Maybe things go wrong.
And so, after that, what are our responsibilities?
What are we supposed to do?
Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it?
That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called
"Saving Fish From Drowning."
I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place.
I got these hints everywhere.
And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there.
I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been.
And what I need, in effect, is a focus.
And when I have the question, it is a focus.
And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant.
And it seems like it's happening all the time.
You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe.
And it may also be explained that now you have a focus.
And you are noticing it more often.
But you apply this.
You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions.
Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him?
Why or why not?
It may be something that is perhaps more serious -- as I said, human rights in Burma.
I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there.
And then, after a while, I had to ask myself,
"Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us?"
And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister.
So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book -- and I just would have to face that later, when the time came.
We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of.
We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do?
Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling?
Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide.
This leads to this question. When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child
-- and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe?
It seems so obvious, and yet it is not.
We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary.
In writing a story, it is the place where I begin.
Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems.
My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know.
Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened.
And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother.
There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book.
In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location.
And I needed to find something historically that would match that.
And I took down this book, and I -- first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed -- was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God.
You wonder, are these things random chance?
Well, what is random?
What is chance?
What is luck?
What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain?
And that goes into the story, too.
These are the things I constantly think about from day to day.
Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen.
But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life.
Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen.
Another chance encounter is when I went to a place
-- I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine.
And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt.
And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book.
And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley.
For some reason I wrote about cairns -- stacks of rocks -- that a man was building.
And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid.
I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure.
And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this.
And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything.
And I asked him, "How is it possible to do this?"
And he said, "Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance."
And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point.
I had so many examples -- I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it.
Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things?
Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant?
A big thing that I also think about is accidents.
And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness.
What is the nature of accidents?
And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law?
I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China.
And I saw this beautiful place.
I knew I wanted to come back.
And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China.
And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority.
And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident.
A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm.
60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged.
Responsibility was assigned to the family.
The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed.
And, of course, as Westerners, we say, "Well, it was an accident.
That's not fair.
It's the son, not the father."
When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs.
It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there.
And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons.
And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families.
And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility.
I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years.
And it was to send some men
-- a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses.
Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition.
But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen.
So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me
-- to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life.
Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED.
The book comes and it goes.
When it arrives, it is no longer my book.
It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently.
But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing?
And how do I create my own life?
And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths.
I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point.
I also believe that in thinking about things -- my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces -- I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create.
I have to think of my role.
Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with?
And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined -- and yet is in that real world, the fictional world.
And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth.
And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before.
So, there are never complete answers.
Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new.
And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine.
And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only -- there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating.
And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story
-- in one story -- then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion.
Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling.
I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that.
We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us.
There she is.
Thank you very much!
(Applause)
Oxymel of squills.
What is that?
A combination of vinegar, extract of bulbs and.. mercury sulphide.
There.
That should do it.
As Mr Fox's star rose, my father, quite against his preference, was drawn into supporting his cause.
How could I not sign that petition?
I don't even like most of the Cabinet, as you know.
Until now, I have supported His Majesty in everything, but he only listens to his friends.
I would support him still, had not my duty overcome my inclination.
He's taken it very badly, as a personal betrayal, but what else could I have done?
I know, my dear.
What else could you have done?
- Charles. - Hm?
I've been thinking about Emily.
From my sister's impulsive behaviour, I had learned to be more circumspect and patient in the achievement of my own wishes.
I was as determined as she had been, however, to get what I wanted in the end.
I can do nothing for this child, Lady Caroline.
- Don't say so.
- But I do say so.
Most emphatically.
- What treatment has he had?
Purging with broth.
Mercury.
Ground woodlice.
Ground woodlice?
That was prescribed?
Lady Caroline, this child is beyond the reach of my attention, for the simple reason that there is nothing wrong with him.
- Nothing wrong?
- Nothing wrong.
But...his cough?
His twitching?
His twitching is the natural growth of a normal infant.
Many infants have... a fidgety habit, which, in the fullness of time, they abandon.
- And his cough?
- It is widespread, across the country this year.
And has injured none that I know.
I can't believe it.
The King has conceded.
We have regained authority and I have been made Secretary of War.
Are you pleased by that?
- I hope to bring it to a speedy end.
- And will you?
It will not be easy.
I shall have to do business from morning till night.
Henry, I must tell you about Ste.
Later, my dear. Later.
Duty is the light which has guided my life and which I recommend to all my dear children.
It is the quality that can sustain happiness in the face of adversity.
It is the rock on which our lives are built.
The duty of subject to monarch, of King to country, of child to parent.
Listen to your father, Charles.
You are possibly aware that Emily has received a proposal of marriage she desires to accept.
Yet despite her strong feelings, she has been dutiful in her regard for my opinions.
I have gathered you to see that duty is rewarded.
Emily's behaviour is an example to you all.
I shall tell Lord Kildare that your mother and l withdraw our opposition to his suit.
We're here to celebrate compassion.
But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem.
As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word "compassion" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism.
It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing, or it's seen as potentially depressing.
Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word "compassion" was translated as "pity."
Now compassion, when it enters the news, too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time.
Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images.
And so what I'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection.
And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others.
When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s, we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that.
Now the word "tolerance," if you look at it in the dictionary, connotes "allowing," "indulging" and "enduring."
In the medical context that it comes from, it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.
Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent.
And it's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough.
And the going is pretty rough right now.
I think that without perhaps being able to name it, we are collectively experiencing that we've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue.
Compassion is a worthy successor.
It is organic, across our religious, spiritual and ethical traditions, and yet it transcends them.
Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces.
So what is it, three-dimensionally?
What are its kindred and component parts?
What's in its universe of attendant virtues?
To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind.
Now "kindness" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche.
But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.
And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification.
Compassion is also curious.
Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity.
I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles,
Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi.
They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims, and as they do that, they cultivate what they call
"curiosity without assumptions."
Well that's going to be a breeding ground for compassion.
Compassion can be synonymous with empathy.
It can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation, but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence. It's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there, just showing up.
I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty -- and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping.
I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value.
And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery -- encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.
I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like -- because it is visible.
When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible.
It is so important when we're communicating big ideas -- but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion -- to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood -- the color and complexity of life.
And compassion does seek physicality.
I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford.
And I don't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him, but he's paraplegic.
He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister.
Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again, and -- and he does experience this as an "and" rather than a "but" -- and he experiences himself to be healed and whole.
And as a teacher of yoga, he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability, health, illness and aging.
He says that he's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we're all on.
He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.
And Matthew has made this remarkable observation that I'm just going to offer you and let it sit.
I can't quite explain it, and he can't either.
But he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body, in all its frailty and its grace, without, at the same time, becoming more compassionate towards all of life.
Compassion also looks like this.
This is Jean Vanier.
Jean Vanier helped found the L'Arche communities, which you can now find all over the world, communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities -- mostly Down syndrome.
The communities that Jean Vanier founded, like Jean Vanier himself, exude tenderness.
"Tender" is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting.
We spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive, and I spend a lot of time being those things too.
And compassion can also have those qualities.
But again and again, lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness.
Jean Vanier says that his work, like the work of other people -- his great, beloved, late friend Mother Teresa -- is never in the first instance about changing the world; it's in the first instance about changing ourselves.
He's says that what they do with L'Arche is not a solution, but a sign.
Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities.
And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies.
We need those things too, but we're also bumping up against their limits.
And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story -- that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change.
Our traditions have always known this, and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us.
There is, of course, a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world -- tikkun olam.
And I'll never forget hearing that story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her, that in the beginning of the Creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces.
It lodged as shards inside every aspect of the Creation.
And that the highest human calling is to look for this light, to point at it when we see it, to gather it up, and in so doing, to repair the world.
Now this might sound like a fanciful tale.
Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way.
Rachel Naomi Remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time, because this story insists that each and every one of us, frail and flawed as we may be, inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch.
Stories like this, signs like this, are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us.
Rachel Naomi Remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors.
And this trend of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing, how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine -- the work Fred Luskin is doing -- I think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century -- that science, in fact, is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism.
This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion.
But here's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion.
We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2.
We don't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn't have her.
We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South.
Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions.
But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century.
He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old.
And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less.
He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages.
Some of his favorites were Moses,
Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi,
Gandhi -- he adored his contemporary, Gandhi.
And Einstein said -- and I think this is a quote, again, that has not been passed down in his legacy -- that "these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge."
Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is.
I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word "compassion" in our culture -- we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy.
So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral -- it's not.
This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar.
And by the look of that paunch, he hasn't been doing enough yoga.
We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website, and someone said, "When I look at the first photo, I ask myself, what was he thinking?
And when I look at the second, I ask, what kind of person was he?
What kind of man is this?"
Well, he was complicated.
He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others.
And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination.
Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being.
So was Martin Luther King, Jr.
So was Dorothy Day.
So was Mother Teresa.
So are we all.
And I want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion -- following on what Fred Luskin says -- that these flaws just make us human.
Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems.
But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others.
Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with Crohn's disease.
Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist.
And Karen Armstrong, I think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that, with a zigzag, have led to the Charter for Compassion.
Compassion can't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity.
So I want to propose a final definition of compassion -- this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way -- and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology.
Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this, and we need them to mine it for us now.
But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious.
So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing and say that humanity, the future of humanity, needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race.
Thank you.
(Applause)