How conscious investors can turn up the heat and make companies change | Vinay ShandalIn a talk that's equal parts funny and urgent, consultant Vinay Shandal shares stories of the world's top activist investors, showing how individuals and institutions can take a page from their playbook and put pressure on companies to drive positive change. "It's your right to have your money managed in line with your values," Shandal says. "Use your voice, and trust that it matters."
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What humanity will gain by going to Mars | Leland MelvinIt might take going to another planet for different nations to finally, once and for all, learn how to get along with each other.
What will we eat on Mars? We can't live off of a diet of potatoes alone. There are huge problems to solve, but recent technologies like 3D printing might help things move a lot faster, and be a lot less dangerous.
Leland is a featured big thinker on season 2 of Mars on the National Geographic Channel. You can find out more information about the show here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/tv/mars/
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So, for humans to live on Mars and not just make a lot of potatoes and live off the potatoes for a while it's just the habitat, the systems itself for a robust life support system that's going to keep you alive for this long period of time. I mean we go to the space station that's been up there since 2000 and its been working, but we have a day and a half trip to get something to the space station if something fails and we need a spare part. Mars is going to take six to eight months to get something there. So trying to build systems that are super redundant but also have ways to fix things like with 3-D printing. I mean that's another thing that we have on the space station but we haven't had to utilize it for making things that are critical that are in situ [ph] right there. And so I think that is one of the things a habitat that's bullet proof. The food aspects, you know, eating food that not only tastes good but it also has a nutritional value that you're going to get all the nutrients that you need to function and liver for this extended period of time. The Martian environment is very harsh with the thin atmosphere, 3/8ths G, solar radiation, all these things, building suits that can handle that when you're doing these excursions and going out and cleaning the solar panels and doing these things having robust systems that will keep you alive.
And then just water and food. I think I heard it's going to take 24,000 pounds of food for I think a colony of four or five to live up there so do you pre-position? Do you fly those and pre-position that there and hope that a dust storm or something doesn't wipe it out and know that it's still there? And then a shelf life of five years, whereas the shelf life for the food on the space station is 18 months, so a five year shelf life and every time an item of food sits there for another month, another month, another month it loses nutritional value, it loses flavor, it loses texture. So making sure that we have something that people are going to want to eat and will eat to stay healthy in this environment.
This is how we end hyper-partisan politics | Alice DregerRead more at BigThink.com:
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What does the universe sound like? A musical tour | Matt RussoCheck out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com
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The pharmacy of the future? Personalized pills, 3D printed at home | Daniel KraftWe need to change how we prescribe drugs, says physician Daniel Kraft: too often, medications are dosed incorrectly, cause toxic side effects or just don't work. In a talk and concept demo, Kraft shares his vision for a future of personalized medication, unveiling a prototype 3D printer that could design pills that adapt to our individual needs.
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5 transformational policies for a prosperous and sustainable world | Johan RockströmIn a talk about how we can build a robust future without wrecking the planet, sustainability expert Johan Rockström debuts the Earth3 model -- a new methodology that combines the UN Sustainable Development Goals with the nine planetary boundaries, beyond which earth's vital systems could become unstable. Learn more about five transformational policies that could help us achieve inclusive and prosperous world development while keeping the earth stable and resilient.
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The key to a better malaria vaccine | Faith OsierThe malaria vaccine was invented more than a century ago -- yet each year, hundreds of thousands of people still die from the disease. How can we improve this vital vaccine? In this informative talk, immunologist and TED Fellow Faith Osier shows how she's combining cutting-edge technology with century-old insights in the hopes of creating a new vaccine that eradicates malaria once and for all.
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Why we have an emotional connection to robots | Kate DarlingWe're far from developing robots that feel emotions, but we already have feelings towards them, says robot ethicist Kate Darling, and an instinct like that can have consequences. Learn more about how we're biologically hardwired to project intent and life onto machines -- and how it might help us better understand ourselves.
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The Prison Cell Meditation by Damien EcholsRead more at BigThink.com:
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Let's protect the oceans like national parks | David LangYou don't have to be a scientist to help protect the world's oceans, says underwater drone expert and TED Fellow David Lang -- in fact, ordinary citizens have pulled together to save the planet's natural treasures many times in history. Lang asks us to take a lesson from the story of the US National Parks Service, offering a three-point plan for conserving underwater wonders.
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Have Americans become too fragile for their own good? | Jonathan Haidt*Special Note: In the video Jonathan Haidt says, "TheCoddling.org" in but later on he caught himself and clarified that the book's website is actually "TheCoddling.com" — His list of resources for teaching yourself Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be found at https://www.thecoddling.com/better-mental-health
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How whistle-blowers shape history | Kelly Richmond PopeCheck out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com
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What baby boomers can learn from millennials at work -- and vice versa | Chip ConleyFor the first time ever, we have five generations in the workplace at the same time, says entrepreneur Chip Conley. What would happen if we got intentional about how we all work together? In this accessible talk, Conley shows how age diversity makes companies stronger and calls for different generations to mentor each other at work, with wisdom flowing from old to young and young to old alike.
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What Americans agree on when it comes to health | Rebecca OnieWe may not be as deeply divided as we think -- at least when it comes to health, says Rebecca Onie. In a talk that cuts through the noise, Onie shares research that shows how, even across economic, political and racial divides, Americans agree on what they need to live good lives -- and asks both health care providers and patients to focus on what makes us healthy, not what makes us angry.
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3 ways to create a space that moves you, from a Broadway set designer | David KorinsCheck out more TED Talks: http://www.ted.com
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How ‘The Goblin’ may unravel the mystery of Planet Nine | Michelle ThallerRead more at BigThink.com:
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It might surprise you to know that we are still learning about our own solar system; even the question about how many planets are there is kind of a funny one—Take Pluto.
Pluto was classified as a dwarf planet, and there are other dwarf planets as well, in fact the largest in the asteroid Ceres is now classified as a dwarf planet. A lot of these dwarf planets actually exist farther beyond the orbit of Pluto, and we’re just finding them now. And one of my favorite discoveries recently has been something called The Goblin. Now, The Goblin is a dwarf planet—it’s actually much smaller than Pluto, it’s only about a fifth diameter of Pluto, and it is really, really far out there. It’s in a highly elongated orbit; the closest it ever gets is about twice as far away as Pluto is, and the farthest it gets is about 2300 times the distance from the earth to the sun; it goes way, way, way out there. This orbit takes it about 40,000 years to go once around the sun. It’s really, really incredible. It doesn’t surprise me that these objects are only recently being discovered because most of them are so distant. They are so faint, and if they’re at the very far part of their orbit they’re moving very, very slowly—very, very hard to detect.
Now The Goblin is really interesting in a number of ways: one of the things that I love about it is that it does actually seem to hint that there may be something larger out there—we’ve been noticing this for the last couple of years. These distant icy bodies are called Kuiper Belt objects, and often they’re on elongated orbits that come close to the sun (and by close I mean about the orbit of Pluto and then much, much farther away into the very outer reaches of the solar system). We now know of dozens of these objects, and there are probably many more out there we haven’t discovered yet. The interesting thing: as we began to observe how their orbits were aligned in our solar system there’s something called perihelion, which is the closest pass an object makes to the sun. And amazingly all of these objects all over this sky seem to have perihelions, closest approaches to the sun, that were beautifully lined up together. There is no reason for that to be the case. If they were independent orbiting bodies there’s no way their closest approach to the sun should match. So the idea is there’s a larger body out there somewhere, a larger planet, and as it orbits it lines up kind of shepherds all these smaller objects into its orbit. The evidence for this really is pretty compelling. We don’t know of any other way to explain the lined up orbits of these Kuiper Belt objects. So then the question is: where is this bigger planet?
Our estimates put it at least three to five times the mass of the earth, maybe even a little bit more massive than that. It could be something on the order the size of Neptune. This is a big planet we’re talking about, and honestly it’s a little embarrassing that we’ve missed an entire big planet in our solar system. We are now so good at detecting planets we can see them around other stars, so how is it we’ve missed this planet? Well, if it really is very far away from us in its orbit right now, even a big planet would be tiny to the most powerful telescopes, so we could have missed it. It also would be moving so slowly that maybe we didn’t notice that it was a planet. Maybe people assumed it was distant star. So telescopes all over the world are scanning the sky for any sense that there’s an object out there moving very, very slowly that could be evidence of this giant planet.
Judging from the way these orbits are lined up I think it is very likely there could be a big planet out there, and I am going to be really happy when we have something else to add to our knowledge of the solar system. There’s also something kind of wonderful happening January 1st of 2019, it’s coming up pretty soon—and that is that we’re going to visit one of these Kuiper Belt objects for the very first time. The New Horizons spacecraft a couple years ago flew by Pluto. Hopefully you remember the beautiful images of Pluto that have returned. Then we aimed it at one of these distant Kuiper Belt objects. We call it MU69, or it’s been nicknamed Ultima Thule, which means “farthest frontier.”
Now hopefully you remember the New Horizons spacecraft from its spectacular flyby of Pluto a couple of years ago. So after it flew by Pluto we aimed it even farther out to encounter one of these distant icy objects. It’s the first time we will ever see what one of these objects is like. After January we will finally have a picture of a part of the solar system we’ve never seen before.
How cryptocurrency can help startups get investment capital | Ashwini AnburajanWe're living in a golden era of innovation, says entrepreneur Ashwini Anburajan -- but venture capital hasn't evolved to keep up, and startups aren't getting the funding they need to grow. In this quick talk, she shares the story of how her company became part of an entirely new way to raise capital, using the powers of cooperation and cryptocurrency.
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How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without ropes | Alex HonnoldImagine being by yourself in the dead center of a 3,000-foot vertical cliff -- without a rope to catch you if you fall. For professional rock climber Alex Honnold, this dizzying scene marked the culmination of a decade-long dream. In a hair-raising talk, he tells the story of how he summited Yosemite's El Capitan, completing one of the most dangerous free solo climbs ever.
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3 great untruths to stop telling kids—and ourselves | Jonathan HaidtRead more at BigThink.com:
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The secrets of spider venom | Michel DugonSpider venom can stop your heart within minutes, cause unimaginable pain -- and potentially save your life, says zoologist Michel Dugon. As a tarantula crawls up and down his arm, Dugon explains the medical properties of this potent toxin and how it might be used to produce the next generation of antibiotics.
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3 ways to be a better ally in the workplace | Melinda EplerWe're taught to believe that hard work and dedication will lead to success, but that's not always the case. Gender, race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation are among the many factors that affect our chances, says writer and advocate Melinda Epler, and it's up to each of us to be allies for those who face discrimination. In this actionable talk, Epler shares three ways to support people who are underrepresented in the workplace. "There's no magic wand for correcting diversity and inclusion," she says. "Change happens one person at a time, one act at a time, one word at a time."
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Why it's too hard to start a business in Africa -- and how to change it | Magatte WadeMany African countries are poor for a simple reason, says entrepreneur Magatte Wade: governments have created far too many obstacles to starting and running a business. In this passionate talk, Wade breaks down the challenges of doing business on the continent and offers some solutions of her own -- while calling on leaders to do their part, too.
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Why being respectful to your coworkers is good for business | Christine PorathLooking to get ahead in your career? Start by being respectful to your coworkers, says leadership researcher Christine Porath. In this science-backed talk, she shares surprising insights about the costs of rudeness and shows how little acts of respect can boost your professional success -- and your company's bottom line.
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What doctors should know about gender identity | Kristie OverstreetKristie Overstreet is on a mission to ensure that the transgender community gets their health care needs met. In this informative, myth-busting talk, she provides a primer for understanding gender identity and invites us to shift how we view transgender health care -- so that everyone gets the respect and dignity they deserve when they go to a doctor.
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Education doesn’t happen on paper. It happens between people. | Elizabeth Alexander*Note: This is a repost of a video that was originally uploaded on Sunday, Oct 21. It has been reuploaded to fix a typo and to update the cover image.*
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How we can make energy more affordable for low-income families | DeAndrea SalvadorEvery month, millions of Americans face an impossible choice: pay for energy to power their homes, or pay for basic needs like food and medicine. TED Fellow DeAndrea Salvador is working to reduce energy costs so that no one has to make this kind of decision. In this quick talk, she shares her plan to help low-income families reduce their bills while also building a cleaner, more sustainable and more affordable energy future for us all.
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3 lessons on decision-making from a poker champion | Liv BoereeIs it better to be lucky or good? Should we trust our gut feelings or rely on probabilities and careful analysis when making important decisions? In this quick talk, professional poker player Liv Boeree shares three strategies she's learned from the game and how we can apply them to real life.
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The evolution of homosexuality: A new theory | Richard PrumRead more at BigThink.com:
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Richard Prum:
Diversity in sexual attraction found in people is a fundamental aspect of human biology, yet it’s actually been poorly described or poorly theorized in previous evolutionary biology.
I don’t know if people know so much about sociobiology specifically, but one way to get at that might be to talk about the definition of fitness and how that lead to certain views about the inevitability of adaptation as a strong force; The beauty happens theory is the idea that ornament evolves merely because it’s attractive or beautiful. The beauty happens idea is contrasted with the more popular theory that comes from Alfred Russell Wallace about the evolution of ornament as a kind of practical indicator of mate quality.
The aesthetic view of evolution provides some really interesting insights into the evolution of human sexuality, and in particular human sexual diversity.
So individuals that are attracted to the same sex are frequently imagined to evolve because they provide help to their kin, that is, if there are some people in any social group that are non-reproductive because of their sexual preferences then they will be helping with raising of their nieces and nephews. This is sort of the “helpful uncle” hypothesis. The problem with that idea is that it should actually lead to a kind of asexual phenotype or an asexual behavior; it doesn’t actually describe the evolution of sexual attraction itself.
Well the aesthetic view of evolution proposes that we should put subjective experience—that is, the nature of animal and human desire—at the center of our scientific explanation. So in order to explain same sex attraction in people we need to actually ask: how could same sex attraction actually evolve?
Well, in the book I propose that human same sex attraction evolved specifically because it contributed to female sexual autonomy or to the freedom of choice. What I mean by that is that in the case of female/female sexual relationships they could contribute to female alliances that could protect females from sexual coercion by male hierarchical groups. At the same time I propose that male/male sexual attraction could have evolved because any social situation in which males have multiple sexual outlets would have contributed to female freedom to move among individuals in that social system and to avoid coercion and sexual violence. This is a new aesthetic theory of the evolution of same-sex behavior in people, and I think it’s one that deserves really serious consideration as we move forward.
Intimate photos of a senior love triangle | Isadora KosofskyPhotographer and TED Fellow Isadora Kosofsky is a chronicler of love, loss and loneliness. In this searching talk, she shares photos from her four years documenting the lives of a senior citizen love triangle -- and reveals what they can teach us about the universal search for identity and belonging.
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Why thinking on paper is a fast way to focus | Ryder CarrollRead more at BigThink.com:
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Ryder Carroll: I think one thing that we often kind of forget is just because something is convenient does not make it efficient. So a lot of times with data entry if you type, for example, it happens a lot faster but in that process a lot gets lost because you’re just kind of parroting the source, and I think that it’s really important to actually hear what’s being said than just simply kind of spitting it back out onto paper. So when you’re writing a lot of the time what you want to do is reduce the amount of information that you’re capturing only down to what truly matters. So you’re distilling information in real time. And in order to do that you have to think about what truly matters. And I feel like writing by hand allows us to think significantly more about the information that we are writing down.
I mean the actual act of writing activates very many different parts of our brain simultaneously. From the signs that I’ve seen it doesn’t happen when you’re typing. So, for example, students that were separated into two separate groups – one was allowed to take notes via handwriting and the other via typing. And the group that wrote by hand retained the information significantly longer and significantly more accurately.
So I think that when you concentrate and you focus on writing you are engaging with content significantly more. You have to. The weight of the pen, the ideas, the concepts that you’re trying to distill down to what matters, how your handwriting looks, how quickly you’re writing and all those things immediately focus your attention more so than I would say typing would.
For the last ten years I’ve been a digital product designer and I noticed that my journaling actually allowed me to think in a completely different way. So even when I would be designing different kinds of software applications from watch interfaces to video game interfaces it always started out on paper. And over time I realized that the more I could actually take my thoughts offline, the clearer they would become and the more I could focus. Because you could sit down and start typing out, you can journal in an app but I notice I’d be journaling in an app and the next thing I knew I’m ordering shoes online and you have no idea how you got from one point to the other. But when you sit down with a notebook and as soon as you engage with the page you are unplugged. So it forces you to really engage with your thoughts in a way that I feel has not been accurately replicated in the digital space. So for me the act of Bullet journaling is an act of thinking. It’s an act of unplugging and actually processing the information. And in my community I’ve found that that’s also provided significant value to people who get caught up in the rush of everyday life. It’s a moment that you can take back. It’s a moment where you can really have the luxury of sitting down and starting to digest the things that you otherwise can easily be overwhelmed by.
So decision fatigue is when you find yourself literally exhausted by the amount of decisions that you have to make because we’re constantly inundated by so many different things from so many different channels. All that information requires our attention, and a lot of that information actually requires us to act. And acting on information is essentially making a decision. So do you want to go watch this movie? Do you want to go on this trip? Do you want to respond to this email? Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you? You have to constantly keep asking yourself and you’re making decisions.
How to build a thriving music scene in your city | Elizabeth CaweinHow does a city become known as a "music city"? Publicist Elizabeth Cawein explains how thriving music scenes make cities healthier and happier and shares ideas for bolstering your local music scene -- and showing off your city's talent to the world.
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Being busy all the time is a habit you made. You can unmake it. | Dan PontefractRead more at BigThink.com:
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The current approach today is essentially we’ve entered into a culture of freneticism—that’s a Big Think word, and that means we’re really busy. But I believe we’ve created the business on ourselves. Ultimately we’ve become distracted by SQUIRREL the next thing that pops into our head or the next thing that pops onto our device or the next thing that pops into our laptop; we’re addressing it. And for some reason we think it’s a good idea to attend to every notification, every want of an employee, every need of a boss. And so we are loading ourselves up with more to do. We are ultimately working on the next thing while we’re doing the current thing at the same time. We think that multitasking is a badge of honor.
We think that “do more with less” is the corporate mantra that’s going to take us to gold medal plates. And it’s frightening. And what we need to do is to take a step back and say, “How did we get here, is it good, and what’s in store for the future?”
We go from one meeting to another. We’re in a peripatetic state. We’re just ultimately going from the 8:00 to the 9:00 to the 10:00 to the 11:00. We used to go out for lunch and pause, but now we go get lunch, we bring it to our desk and we stare at another device trying to catch up with everything we haven’t done between 8:00 and 12:00, and then we go to the next meeting at 1:00, and we end up at 5:00. And then maybe we pick up the kids or we’ve got to go to soccer practice. And instead of looking at the soccer practice and the kids at that soccer practice we’re looking at our device, because there’s eight more texts and 15 more emails that have come in. And now it’s 7:00 and you’ve got to make dinner. And at 7:00 and it’s dinner you’re like “Well, I don’t actually know how to make dinner anymore” so you order. And then while you’re ordering you’re attending to all your social streams.You’re saying “Oh! Well, I forgot how much I like dopamine, so I like those red things on my phone and my laptop that say hey, I’ve got eight likes on Instagram and 24 likes on Facebook. Maybe I’ll post more.”
And then all of a sudden 16 more emails come in and you’ve got 14 more tasks to do because now you’re at 9:00. “Well, I don’t know, maybe I should just watch something”.
The tragedy of this American moment: Populism, elites, and the 2020 election | Anand GiridharadasRead more at BigThink.com:
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Anand Giridharadas: You know that old saying about the fox guarding a henhouse? So I like to tell a different version of that story with a backstory.
We’re the hens, regular people trying to live our lives. And we had a guard of the henhouse—it was the government. It wasn’t perfect but it did a reasonable job of protecting us from each other, guarding equality, making sure none of the hens were pecking the other hens too much. And then came along the last 30 to 40 years a fox, and the fox is big business and wealthy people. And the fox didn’t like the guard because the fox kind of... wanted the hens to itself. And so what did the fox do? Bit that guard in the leg.
It argued that government was bad, “The government was the enemy,” and defunded government, had fought for lower taxes so government could do less stuff. Then the guard starts stumbling away and bleeding out. Off the scene the hens are unguarded, and the fox presents itself to the hens and says, “What a shame! Government is just not what it used to be, not protecting you! Not fighting for you. It’s so inefficient. It’s so, gosh, that’s so sad. Well, let me step in! I’m rich and I’m here to help.”
Well, rich people and wealthy corporations spent a generation waging a war on government, defunding government, allowing social problems to fester and allowing their own profits to soar.
And then, with government weakened, social problems multiplying and their own pockets full, they reinvent themselves as the new replacement of government, which is—instead of trickle down economics we now have trickle down change: Let them make their fortune, and then they’ll just throw some social change down from the mountain.
Well we have to decide in America if that’s the kind of change we want. But what I do know is if you project that kind of change backwards throughout time we wouldn’t have created most of the change that we all take for granted today. I mean if—there would, frankly, have been no New Deal. There’s be no modern American economy if we had depended on the powerful to throw down scraps.
What happened when we tested thousands of abandoned rape kits in Detroit | Kym WorthyIn 2009, 11,341 untested rape kits -- some dating back to the 1980s -- were found in an abandoned warehouse once used by the Detroit police to store evidence. When this scandal was uncovered, prosecutor Kym Worthy set a plan into action to get justice for the thousands of victims affected. In this powerful, eye-opening talk, Worthy explains how her office helped develop an innovative program to track and test these kits -- and calls for a national effort to help solve the problem of stockpiled rape kits.
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How police and the public can create safer neighborhoods together | Tracie KeeseeWe all want to be safe, and our safety is intertwined, says Tracie Keesee, cofounder of the Center for Policing Equity. Sharing lessons she's learned from 25 years as a police officer, Keesee reflects on the public safety challenges faced by both the police and local neighborhoods, especially in the African American community, as well as the opportunities we all have preserving dignity and guaranteeing justice. "We must move forward together. There's no more us versus them," Keesee says.
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The simple genius of a good graphic | Tommy McCallIn a talk that's part history lesson, part love letter to graphics, information designer Tommy McCall traces the centuries-long evolution of charts and diagrams -- and shows how complex data can be sculpted into beautiful shapes. "Graphics that help us think faster, or see a book's worth of information on a single page, are the key to unlocking new discoveries," McCall says.
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How I became part sea urchin | Catherine MohrAs a young scientist, Catherine Mohr was on her dream scuba trip -- when she put her hand right down on a spiny sea urchin. While a school of sharks circled above. What happened next? More than you can possibly imagine. Settle in for this fabulous story with a dash of science.
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Why museums are returning cultural treasures | Chip ColwellArchaeologist and curator Chip Colwell collects artifacts for his museum, but he also returns them to where they came from. In a thought-provoking talk, he shares how some museums are confronting their legacies of stealing spiritual objects and pillaging ancient graves -- and how they're bridging divides with communities who are demanding the return of their cultural treasures.
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How we could teach our bodies to heal faster | Kaitlyn SadtlerWhat if we could help our bodies heal faster and without scars, like Wolverine in X-Men? TED Fellow Kaitlyn Sadtler is working to make this dream a reality by developing new biomaterials that could change how our immune system responds to injuries. In this quick talk, she shows the different ways these products could help the body regenerate.
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Google 2.0: Why MIT scientists are building a new search engine | Danny HillisRead more at BigThink.com:
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Among other projects—you’re doing lots of stuff—you get involved in some very heady questions about the origins of truth on the internet. And this is where we’re getting folks because the work that Danny’s describing now in theory ultimately became a venture, right?Metaweb.
Danny Hillis: So that’s right. So what I really thought is that what we need to do is have a way of representing the knowledge of the world in a way that machines can get at them, and take advantage of it—and that that should be shared. Everybody should be able to get at it. That is, in some sense if the human knowledge isn’t a shared resource—then what is? I mean what has civilization been doing all these years? So I created a company that built this database called Freebase. It was a free database. And the, and the company basically took any kind of public knowledge that we could get, information about anything and put it in machine-readable format.
We were kind of creating with the idea that this is going to be useful to the world. We didn’t really have a business model. And we started building it up, and then it became useful to lots of different people including particularly all the search engines. So eventually Google bought it, of course. And then I got Google to agree to keep it open for three years, but they only kept the part that was already open open, and they started building it up. And so now Google has something called the Knowledge Graph which is the evolution of this. And it probably has about 100 billion different entities. So everybody in this room is in that graph. This building is in that graph.
Peter Hopkins: Yes, I took a screenshot earlier of when you just Googled NeueHouse, and all of these different—
Danny Hillis: That’s right. Neuehouse is obviously in the graph. So this event is, and yes. So anything like a person, a place, an event. Anything like that is in this huge knowledge base, and all the relationships between them are. So when you, for instance, print out a Google map, that is rendered from the Knowledge Graph; so the Knowledge Graph knows the bus schedules and it knows the address of the restaurant and the traffic.
Peter Hopkins: It’s drawing all this information together around the thing that the searcher cares about.
Danny Hillis: That’s right. So the map is just in some sense a custom rendering of a piece of the Knowledge Graph for your particular purpose. And also by the way, I don’t know – this doesn’t have any ads on it, but the other thing is that the ads are also like a lot of Knowledge Graph about what the products are about and whether—it probably has knowledge about you, specifically, and so on. So it’s gone way beyond the kind of public knowledge, also again it probably has very particular private knowledge about people too.
Peter Hopkins: Now from Google’s perspective it’s safe to say that this is a quantum leap in terms of the original basis of its citation-based search model. All of a sudden it is now providing this multidimensional search that is drawing in way more richness.
Danny Hillis: It still does the old kind of search. So right now when you, let’s say I put in museums of New York. You know, “museums in New York.” Well, it still does the old keyword search of searching for pages that have the word “museum” and the phrase “New York,” but it doesn’t—if you say “an exhibition in Manhattan” or something, you might have something that’s a museum in New York that actually didn’t use the word “museum” and “New York” on the page. But the Knowledge Graph knows that Manhattan is in New York, and it knows that exhibitions are in museums, or may know something is a museum even if it doesn’t use the word museum in its title.
Why the hospital of the future will be your own home | Niels van NamenNobody likes going to the hospital, whether it's because of the logistical challenges of getting there, the astronomical costs of procedures or the alarming risks of complications like antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But what if we could get the lifesaving care provided by hospitals in our own homes? Health care futurist Niels van Namen shows how advances in technology are making home care a cheaper, safer and more accessible alternative to hospital stays.
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The press trampled on my privacy. Here's how I took back my story | Kate StoneAfter a horrific accident put her in the tabloid headlines, Kate Stone found a way to take control of her narrative -- and help prevent others from losing their privacy, too. Learn how she reclaimed her story in this personal talk infused with humor and courage.
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How to build an authoritarian regime — and how to stop one | Timothy SnyderRead more at BigThink.com:
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Timothy Snyder: It’s normal that when a new medium comes along, a new communications technology comes along, that this is very disorienting to our own hardware. The same thing was true when the book came along. I mean the book, as compared to the manuscript, was a very powerful technology, and one could even say even in our 21st century world, where we claim that everything is so new and everything has transcended everything, where everything transcends everything every 15 minutes, the book is still a pretty powerful technology even when stacked up against all the things that it’s stacked up against now.
But think back to say the 16th century when the printing press is beginning to make hay, what happens is that people are overwhelmed by new ideas, specifically religious world views are challenged, and religions fracture, and people fight wars, and a third of the European population is killed. So we think about the book and we think “That’s Enlightenment,” but Enlightenment happens 150 years after the printing press, and in the meantime an awful lot of Europeans killing off a lot of other Europeans. So I like to take that as the starting point—that new media are going to be destabilizing.
And so the assumption that the Internet was going to come along and just take a basically good world and make it faster and more connected and cleaner and so on—that was something that we should have been skeptical about from the very beginning. And now we’re seeing why we should be skeptical about it.
So does the Internet allow new things, or does the Internet create a channel for old things? I would say it’s rather the latter. We know, because this is something that people have theorized about since the Enlightenment, that in order for there to be a democracy there has to be something between you and me and our fellow citizens, something between you and me and our leaders, which is: a factual world. We have to have this thing called the public sphere where you and I and our fellow citizens and our leaders agree that there are certain realities out there, and that from those realities we draw our own conclusions, our own evaluative conclusions about what would be better or worse, but we agree that the world is out there. And that it’s important for you and I, as citizens, to formulate projects, but it’s also important in moments of difficulty for you and I, as citizens, to resist our leaders. Because if we’re going to resist our leaders we have to say, “On the basis of this set of facts, this is the state of affairs; it’s intolerable; therefore we resist.” If there are no facts we can’t resist, it becomes impossible.
So there are a couple of centuries of Democratic theory which make that argument in one form or another. That’s an old argument. And what follows from that is that if you want to build an authoritarian regime you try to make that factual world less salient, you try to make the world less about the facts that are between you and me and more about the emotions that will either divide us or bring us together, it doesn’t really matter which.
Authoritarianism depends upon people getting used to hearing the things that they want to hear, and what it does is it takes that public sphere and dissolves it.
It says, “There aren’t really truths out there, there aren’t really experts out there who can tell you those truths, it’s really all about how you feel about the world.” And that’s true in old authoritarianism and in new authoritarianism.
So Germans in the 1930s who were no less educated than we are, probably more educated than we are, more literate—they got themselves believing all kinds of things that they wanted to believe, and they believed in, many of them, right down to the bitter end, and they got themselves convinced that truth was not a matter of constant evaluation of evidence, but truth was a matter of some larger truth, something that made them feel like they were together and that others were against them. That’s all old.
Why we choke under pressure -- and how to avoid it | Sian Leah BeilockWhen the pressure is on, why do we sometimes fail to live up to our potential? Cognitive scientist and Barnard College president Sian Leah Beilock reveals what happens in your brain and body when you choke in stressful situations, sharing psychological tools that can help you perform at your best when it matters most.
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Your fingerprints reveal more than you think | Simona FranceseOur fingerprints are what make us unique -- but they're also home to a world of information hidden in molecules that reveal our actions, lifestyles and routines. In this riveting talk, chemist Simona Francese shows how she studies these microscopic traces using mass spectrometry, a technology that analyzes fingerprints in previously impossible detail, and demonstrates how this cutting-edge forensic science can help police catch criminals.
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How to minimize stress, astronaut style | Chris HadfieldRead more at BigThink.com:
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Corporate responsibility? Don’t make me laugh. | Anand GiridharadasRead more at BigThink.com:
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Anand Giridharadas: Corporate social responsibility or CSR is everywhere—and which company now doesn’t have CSR? All the major banks that screwed America in the financial crisis in the world, that sold out our economy and tried to make a killing selling toxic mortgage products and didn’t come clean to the American people or regulators about what was going on, paid billions of dollars in fines for fraud—Almost all those banks, like most American companies, have CSR departments and they’ll go and they’ll do some—they’ll have shovels, they’ll do something with shovels. They’ll do something with some poor country. They’ll go to some community and they’ll even teach like a financial literacy class, like, “don’t fall prey to financial fraud - of the kind that we perpetrated.” This whole idea that you can sell kids poisonous drinks that give them diabetes while making a playground, that you can build the Dakota pipeline or invest in the Dakota pipeline while sponsoring a climate change gathering with your CSR. That you can push for a healthcare system that only gives people benefits if they work 30 hours a week, thus tempting many employers to only employ people 29 hours a week and then say you’re in the business of empowering workers or being the best first job in America or whatever.
The reality is: many, many companies are trying to fight on both sides of a war in their main operation. In their lobbying activities they are pushing for an America that is merciless. And then, understanding the need to brand themselves, understanding the need to soothe a little bit of the public anger in this age of rage, they give a little back. They throw some scraps at us. And what is so sad is that all too often it works.
“Conscious capitalism.” That’s a good one. Again it’s this idea that we can make capitalism more conscious, more humane simply by wishing it were so. Whereas, in fact, the problem with our brand of market capitalism in American in 2018 is that it’s a capitalism purely driven by the needs of shareholders. And that investors needs have come to so predominate that the needs of communities, the needs of workers, of employees of those companies and various other stakeholders are completely marginalized. And until we change that structure, simply calling for capitalism to be more conscious doesn’t really work. I mean conscious capitalism was supposed to describe Whole Foods, for example, until it got taken over by a private equity firm.
Then you get a word like innovation. We talk about innovation. Innovation is treated as its own good, just “More innovation! Everybody’s got to innovate!”
Well innovation means make things new, and here’s the problem: We’ve done a tremendous amount of innovation in America over the last generation. What we didn’t get a lot of out of that innovation was progress, if progress is defined as “most people’s lives getting better.” In fact, in the era of innovation we’ve also seen the odds of social mobility (of out-earning your parents, for example), fall from 90 percent to 50 percent. A crap shoot, right? So yes, great, we have a lot of new stuff, a lot of “new shit has come to light,” as they said in that movie. But the reality is that hasn’t gotten people paid more, that hasn’t made people’s lives more stable, that hasn’t helped people afford housing, that hasn’t helped people educate their kids better. So we’ve got a lot of innovation but it’s not the same as progress, and progress is the more important of the two.
3 ways to make better decisions -- by thinking like a computer | Tom GriffithsIf you ever struggle to make decisions, here's a talk for you. Cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths shows how we can apply the logic of computers to untangle tricky human problems, sharing three practical strategies for making better decisions -- on everything from finding a home to choosing which restaurant to go to tonight.
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How to create a world where no one dies waiting for a transplant | Luhan YangFor nearly half a century, scientists have been trying to create a process for transplanting animal organs into humans, a theoretical dream that could help the hundreds of thousands of people in need of a lifesaving transplant. But the risks, specifically of transmitting the PERV virus from pigs to humans, have always been too great, stalling research -- until now. In a mind-blowing talk, geneticist Luhan Yang explains a breakthrough: using CRISPR, a technique for editing genes, she and her colleagues have created pigs that don't carry the virus, opening up the possibility of safely growing human-transplantable organs in pigs. Learn more about this cutting-edge science and how it could help solve the organ shortage crisis.
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How I'm using LEGO to teach Arabic | Ghada WaliAfter a visit to a European library in search of Arabic and Middle Eastern texts turned up only titles about fear, terrorism and destruction, Ghada Wali resolved to represent her culture in a fun, accessible way. The result: a colorful, engaging project that uses LEGO to teach Arabic script, harnessing the power of graphic design to create connection and positive change. "Effective communication and education is the road to more tolerant communities," Wali says.
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Capitalism 2.0: How natural laws can create a more equal economy | John FullertonRead more at BigThink.com:
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What are the most important moral problems of our time? | Will MacAskillOf all the problems facing humanity, which should we focus on solving first? In a compelling talk about how to make the world better, moral philosopher Will MacAskill provides a framework for answering this question based on the philosophy of "effective altruism" -- and shares ideas for taking on three pressing global issues.
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"You Never Can Tell" / "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea" | Elise LeGrowSinger-songwriter Elise LeGrow pays homage to early soul and rock innovators with intimate, stripped-down interpretations of their hits. Listen as she and her band perform two of these soulful renditions: Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell" and "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea," first popularized by Johnnie and Joe.
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Did the global response to 9/11 make us safer? | Benedetta BertiIf we want sustainable, long-term security to be the norm in the world, it's time to radically rethink how we can achieve it, says TED Fellow and conflict researcher Benedetta Berti. In an eye-opening talk, Berti explains how building a safer world has a lot less to do with crushing enemies on the battlefield and a lot more to do with protecting civilians -- no matter where they're from or where they live.
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A new way to fund health care for the most vulnerable | Andrew BastawrousIn 2011, eye surgeon and TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous developed a smartphone app that brings quality eye care to remote communities, helping people avoid losing their sight to curable or preventable conditions. Along the way, he noticed a problem: strict funding regulations meant that he could only operate on people with specific diseases, leaving many others without resources for treatment. In this passionate talk, Bastawrous calls for a new health care funding model that's flexible and ambitious -- to deliver better health to everyone, whatever their needs are.
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Why “I’m not racist” is only half the story | Robin DiAngeloRead more at BigThink.com:
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Robin DiAngelo:
All systems of oppression are highly adaptive, and they can adapt to challenges and incorporate them. They can allow for exceptions. And I think the most powerful adaptation of the system of racism to the challenges of the civil rights movement was to reduce a racist to a very simple formula. A racist is an individual—always an individual, not a system—who consciously does not like people based on race—must be conscious—and who intentionally seeks to be mean to them. Individual, conscious, intent. And if that is MY definition of a racist, then your suggestion that anything I’ve said or done is racist or has a racist impact, I’m going to hear that as: you just said I was a bad person. You just put me over there in that category. And most of my bias anyway is unconscious. So I’m not intending, I’m not aware. So now I’m going to need to defend my moral character, and I will, and we’ve all seen it. It seems to be virtually impossible based on that definition for the average white person to look deeply at their socialization, to look at the inevitability of internalizing racist biases, developing racist patterns, and having investments in the system of racism—which is pretty comfortable for us and serves us really well. I think that definition of a racist, that either/or, what I call the good/bad binary is the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic because it makes it virtually impossible to talk to the average white person about the inevitable absorption of a racist world-view that we get by being literally swimming in racist water.
White fragility is meant to capture the defensiveness that so many white people display when our world views, our identities or our racial positions are challenged. And it’s a very familiar dynamic. I think there’s a reason that term resonated for so many people. I mean even if you yourself are to explain white fragility it’s fairly recognizable that in general white people are really defensive when the topic is racism and when they are challenged racially or cross racially.
So the fragility part is meant to capture how easy it is to trigger that defensiveness. For many white people the mere suggestion that being white has meaning will set us off. Another thing that will set us off is generalizing about white people. Right now I’m generalizing about white people, and that questions a very precious ideology, which is: most white people are raised to see ourselves as individuals. We don’t like being generalized about. And yet social life is patterned and observable and predictable in describable ways. And while we are, of course, all unique individuals, we are also members of social groups. And that membership is profound. That membership matters.
We can literally predict whether my mother and I were going to survive my birth and how long I’m going to live based on my race. We need to be willing to grapple with the collective experiences we have as a result of being members of a particular group that has profound meaning for our lives. We live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race. I think we all know that. How we would explain why that is might vary, but that it’s separate and unequal is very, very clear.
While we who are white tend to be fragile in that it doesn’t take much to upset us around race, the impact of our response is not fragile at all. It’s a kind of weaponized defensiveness, weaponized hurt feelings. And it functions really, really effectively to repel the challenge. As a white person I move through the world racially comfortable virtually 24/7. It is exceptional for me to be outside of my racial comfort zone, and most of my life I’ve been warned not to go outside my racial comfort zone.
And so on the rare occasion when I am uncomfortable racially it’s a kind of throwing off of my racial equilibrium, and I need to get back into that. And so I will do whatever it takes to repel the challenge and get back into it. And in that way I think white fragility functions as a kind of white racial bullying, to be frank. We make it so miserable for people of color to talk to us about our inevitable and often unaware racist patterns that we cannot help develop from being socialized into a culture in which racism is the bedrock and the foundation. We make it so miserable for them to talk to us about it that most of the time they don’t, right? We just have to understand that most people of color that are working or living in primarily white environments take home way more daily slights and hurts and insults than they bother talking to us about.
How AI could compose a personalized soundtrack to your life | Pierre BarreauMeet AIVA, an artificial intelligence that has been trained in the art of music composition by reading more than 30,000 of history's greatest scores. In a mesmerizing talk and demo, Pierre Barreau plays compositions created by AIVA and shares his dream: to create original live soundtracks based on our moods and personalities.
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Emotional intelligence at work: Why IQ isn’t everythingRead more at BigThink.com:
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Since I started writing about and researching emotional intelligence in business, I found that data in support of it has only gotten stronger. I saw recently a study, this surprised me, engineers, software coders and so on were evaluated by their peers, people who work with them day-to-day on how successful they were at what they do. This turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of success in any field. And that was correlated with their IQ in one hand and their emotional intelligence on the other. And when I say emotional intelligence they were evaluated on a 360 that looks at all 12 of the key emotional intelligence competencies that distinguish star performers from average. The surprise was this: IQ correlated zero, zero with their success as rated by peers.Emotional intelligence correlated very, very highly. Well, why would that be? Well consider this, in order to be an engineer you have to have an IQ about a standard deviation or more above average, that’s an IQ of about 115 or so. And another recent paper shows that there’s no relationship between career success and an IQ above 120.
The reason is this: there is a strong floor effect for IQ in any role. All engineers have an IQ of 115 or more, so the range of variance is very reduced for IQ and success. Emotional intelligence however varies radically. So emotional intelligence means: How well you manage yourself. Can you work toward your goals despite obstacles? Do you give up too soon? Do you have a negative outlook or a positive outlook? These are all emotional intelligence competencies that matter for success.
Then there’s the relationship competencies: Can you tune in to other people? Do you notice other people? I remember hearing about two MIT grads who went into a giant tech company, one of them went around to other members of her team and asked, “What are you doing? How can I help? The other stayed in his office and wrote code all day. It’s very clear who was going to get ahead; it was the one who wanted to be a team player. You don’t write code in isolation anymore; everyone works on projects together. You may write the code but you have to coordinate, you have to influence, you have to persuade, you have to be a good team member. All of those are emotional intelligence competencies that distinguish outstanding from average performers.
So when you think about it that way, it makes sense that even among engineers emotional intelligence will predict who is a star and who’s just mediocre. And when you think about this at the organizational level it means you want to be sure to include emotional intelligence when you consider hiring people. I have a friend at an executive recruiting company that specializes in C-level hires, CEOs, CFOs and so on. And they once did a study internally of people they had recommended who turn out to be bad and were so bad they were fired. So these were failures, they were surprised to have failures, but they realized when they looked more carefully that these were people who were hired because of business expertise and IQ and fired because of a deficiency in emotional intelligence, so it’s more important than ever these days. And so in hiring it needs to be considered, and in promoting people, of course, it needs to be considered. And it should be part of HR. It should be what you help people develop for their strengths. Because the good news about emotional intelligence is: It’s learned and learnable, and you can upgrade it at any point in life if you’re motivated.
Dear Jeff Bezos: What are you going to do with all that money? | Jeffrey SachsRead more at BigThink.com:
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Jeffrey Sachs: One of the astounding facts of our time is the gusher of wealth going to the very top; of the wealth distribution in the world. It’s mind-boggling.
Mind-boggling to think about Jeff Bezos, for example, with a net worth—personally, individual net worth of…
hold onto your chair, how about $163 billion? That’s a lot of money. I am myself an Amazon user. I think it’s an awfully good service and product that he’s developed, but $163 billion in a world where a lot of his workers struggle to get by, a lot of the people in Seattle (where Amazon is headquartered) are homeless, where there are incredible needs, that a tiny fraction of that wealth could keep millions of kids alive and in school. You have to say, “all right, world economy is dynamic, but it’s not really exactly fair, and it’s not really oriented towards addressing everyone’s basic human rights and needs.”
What’s happened to the wealth at the top, it’s amazing. Back in 2006 there were about 700 billionaires or so, that was a lot, and they had a net worth, if you added up all of their stocks and bonds and other assets, of something on the order of about $3 trillion, and we’d sit there and say oh my god can you imagine this? And in just a dozen years—a dozen years! Even in a dozen years with a mega financial crisis in between, the billionaires went from about 700 or so to now 2,208 on the most recent Forbes magazine list of billionaires. And their net worth went from around three trillion, which was absolutely mind-boggling to begin with, to $9.1 trillion at the start of 2018 when Forbes published the list (and now almost surely well above it $10 trillion), including this phenomenal wealth of Mr. Bezos the richest person in the world, but many others. Now Bill Gates, who is far and away the world’s leading philanthropist because he was long the richest person in the world and he and Melinda Gates very rightly, generously, wisely, boldly, in a visionary way, said “We’re going to give this away,” created the biggest foundation in the world: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
They’ve been putting in several billion dollars a year to fighting disease and doing a fantastic job. But consider this, in 2010 Bill Gates called on other billionaires join in and make a pledge, called A Giving Pledge, to give away at least half of your wealth during your lifetime. And Bill Gates took that pledge himself. At that point his net worth was about $50 billion. He’s been giving away roughly $4 billion a year since then, and you might think his net worth has gone down a bit given that generosity, but his net worth now is $93 billion.
So the wealth is such a gusher that you could give billions away and it just keeps growing and growing and growing beyond anything that most of us mortals can even imagine.
What I know—as an economist that has worked all over the world, including in the poorest places in the world—little bits can save lives and make futures for the children of this world at unbelievably low costs, and it just gets me that we have $10 trillion here and we have kids who are hungry, dying and out—no school over here, and can’t we make the connection? And the answer is we have to.
So my thought is at a minimum ten trillion, come on! And put in at least one percent. That’s such a tiny amount because your wealth grows at much more than that—put in one percent of your net worth, per year, minimum, to help the kids. One percent of ten trillion is $100 billion. And if you take out your paper and pencil—or your Excel spreadsheet—you can show that for $100 billion a year, one percent of the net worth of just 2,208 individuals, you could get every kid in school all the way through upper-secondary education and you could establish universal health coverage for everybody in every low-income country in the world. That’s a pretty good gig for 2,208 people, but they’ve got to get on with it. I think they have enough yachts, enough mansions, enough of everything, and it’s really time for that wealth to be deployed for the purposes of our generation, of children who utterly and desperately need it. And I say do it voluntarily, or if you don’t do it voluntarily, fine: we’ll put on a levy, and SDG levy, a Sustainable Development Goals levy of one percent of your net worth, because we’re going to get this job done, we’re going to get every child healthcare, we’re going to get every child into school.
A love letter to realism in a time of grief | Mark Pollock and Simone GeorgeWhen faced with life's toughest circumstances, how should we respond: as an optimist, a realist or something else? In an unforgettable talk, explorer Mark Pollock and human rights lawyer Simone George explore the tension between acceptance and hope in times of grief -- and share the groundbreaking work they're undertaking to cure paralysis.
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Let's launch a satellite to track a threatening greenhouse gas | Fred KruppWhen we talk about greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide gets the most attention -- but methane, which often escapes unseen from pipes and wells, has a far greater immediate impact on global warming. Environmentalist Fred Krupp has an idea to fix the problem: launch a satellite that tracks global methane emissions, and openly share the data it collects with the public. Learn more about how simple fixes to cut down on this invisible pollutant can help us put the brakes on climate change. (This ambitious plan is one of the first ideas of The Audacious Project, TED's new initiative to inspire global change.)
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How Pfizer is supporting SDG #3: Good Health and Well-beingThe United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are a set of 17 directives to be completed by a 2030 deadline, with the aim of significantly improving quality of life for all people on Earth.
Pfizer’s commitment to the UN's SDG #3, Good Health and Well-being, is exemplified by its mission to improve global health through a combination of local and global programs catalyzed by innovative health leaders.
In 1998, Pfizer embarked on a 22-year mission to eradicate trachoma by 2020. Trachoma is an infectious eye disease that can cause irreversible blindness or vision impairment. So far, it has been eradicated in six countries.
Pfizer is a committed partner in improving global health, helping to provide a number of critical cancer medications to six African countries where an estimated 44 percent of all cancer cases in sub-Saharan Africa occur each year.
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3 ways businesses can fight sex trafficking | Nikki CliftonSex buying doesn't just happen late at night on street corners in the shady part of town -- it also happens online, in the middle of the workday, using company equipment and resources. With this problem comes an opportunity, says attorney Nikki Clifton, because it means that the business community is in a unique position to educate and mobilize their employees to fight sex trafficking. In an honest talk, Clifton outlines how businesses can help, from setting clear policies to hiring survivors.
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What commercialization is doing to cannabis | Ben CortIn 2012, Colorado legalized cannabis and added to what has fast become a multibillion-dollar global industry for all things weed-related: from vape pens to brownies and beyond. But to say that we've legalized marijuana is subtly misleading -- what we've really done is commercialized THC, says educator Ben Cort, and that's led to products that are unnaturally potent. In an eye-opening talk, Cort examines the often unseen impacts of the commercial cannabis industry -- and calls on us to question those who are getting rich off of it.
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How data is helping us unravel the mysteries of the brain | Steve McCarrollGeneticist Steve McCarroll wants to make an atlas of all the cells in the human body so that we can understand in precise detail how specific genes work, especially in the brain. In this fascinating talk, he shares his team's progress -- including their invention of "Drop-seq," a technology that allows scientists to analyze individual cells at a scale that was never before possible -- and describes how this research could lead to new ways of treating mental illnesses like schizophrenia.
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The extraordinary effect of mindfulness on depression and anxiety | Daniel GolemanRead more at BigThink.com:
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Let's get honest about our money problems | Tammy LallyStruggling to budget and manage finances is common -- but talking honestly and openly about it isn't. Why do we hide our problems around money? In this thoughtful, personal talk, author Tammy Lally encourages us to break free of "money shame" and shows us how to stop equating our bank accounts with our self-worth.
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"Wild Women" | Sunni PattersonWith lightning on her tongue, Sunni Patterson performs her powerful poem, "Wild Women," accompanied by the entrancing moves of dancer Chanice Holmes.
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A new way to think about the transition to motherhood | Alexandra SacksWhen a baby is born, so is a mother -- but the natural (and sometimes unsteady) process of transition to motherhood is often silenced by shame or misdiagnosed as postpartum depression. In this quick, informative talk, reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks breaks down the emotional tug-of-war of becoming a new mother -- and shares a term that could help describe it: matrescence.
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How I went from child refugee to international model | Halima AdenHalima Aden made history when she became the first hijab-wearing model on the cover of Vogue magazine. Now she returns to Kenya's Kakuma Refugee Camp -- where she was born and lived until the age of seven -- to share an inspiring message about what she's learned on the path from child refugee to international model.
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How China is (and isn't) fighting pollution and climate change | Angel HsuChina is the world's biggest polluter -- and now one of its largest producers of clean energy. Which way will China go in the future, and how will it affect the global environment? Data scientist Angel Hsu describes how the most populous country on earth is creating a future based on alternative energy -- and facing up to the environmental catastrophe it created as it rapidly industrialized.
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A rare galaxy that's challenging our understanding of the universe | Burçin Mutlu-PakdilWhat's it like to discover a galaxy -- and have it named after you? Astrophysicist and TED Fellow Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil lets us know in this quick talk about her team's surprising discovery of a mysterious new galaxy type.
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An astronaut’s guide to risk taking | Chris HadfieldRead more at BigThink.com:
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Chris Hadfield: Everything worth doing in life has risk.
Learned to ride a bike, learn to walk. When I was a kid learning to walk I fell and cracked my skull, but I needed to learn to walk. Taking a test, getting married, getting a drivers license, all of those things, they give you an approved capability or an improved richness in life, but they all come with a degree of risk. That is exaggerated if the thing that you want to do is fly a rocket ship. Rocket ships are dangerous. It’s a controlled explosion. If you drew a cartoon of a rocket what it would be would be a bomb with six seats on the top. I mean rocket ships are crazy dangerous. On the first flight of the Space Shuttle when Bob Crippen and John Young were sitting there back in 1981 and they blasted off out of Florida, now that we go back and we look at what the actual history of the Space Shuttle was, their odds of dying that day in the first eight-and-a-half minutes were one in nine! Terrible odds, one in nine. I mean look around you at ten people and realize: just to try that one in nine times they would have died. They got away with it, and we learned a lot from it, but even when I flew on my first shuttle flight on the 74th shuttle flight we learned enough things, we had improved it, but the odds of dying that day for my crew were still one in 38, which—no insurance company would be happy. It’s hard to get life insurance as an astronaut actually.
But the question you really need to ask that is do I want to learn to walk? Do I want to ride this bike? Do I want to get married? Do I want to learn to drive a car? What risks are worth taking in my life? Because even if you decide “Okay I’m going to take no risk, I’m going to stay at home and hide under my pillow,” there’s still risk with that and you’re still going to die eventually anyway! So it’s kind of a measure of what was worth doing in your life, and therefore what was worth taking a risk for? Once you’ve got that behind you and said “Okay I’m going to be an astronaut, I’m going to fly a rocket ship, that’s a risk I’m going to take,” now it changes your whole job.
Your job is not to be afraid, your job is not to be an incompetent nervous passenger, your job now is to defeat the risk, like when you learned to ride a bike. If you just stay as a passenger on the bike you’re never going to know what to do with the handlebars and you’re never going to master riding a bike. And once you can ride a bike you’ve got a freedom you’ve never had before.
And rocket ships are just the same, you have to decide what risks are worth taking and then start changing who you are, learning how to turn the handlebars so that you can make this thing do something that otherwise might hurt you or kill you. And then once you’ve got that done it can take you to places and give you richnesses in your life that you never would have had access any other way. And in my case when you make it through that launch, when you’ve guided that rocket up through the atmosphere and the engine shut off, suddenly you’re in the rarest of human experiences. You’re weightless, and the world is pouring by at five miles a second, and you can see across an entire continent and you’re peering into something that is brand new for humanity. So I think it’s worth asking yourself: “What risks are worth taking?” And once you’ve decided to take them, then change who you are so that you can win, you can defeat, you can master that thing and open a door for yourself that otherwise was just shut.
How art can shape America's conversation about freedom | Dread ScottIn this quick talk, visual artist Dread Scott tells the story of one of his most transgressive art installations, which drew national attention for its controversial use of the American flag and led to a landmark First Amendment case in the US Supreme Court.
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Minimalism is killing us: Re-awaken your senses, bring back joy | Ingrid Fetell LeeRead more at BigThink.com:
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Ingrid Fettell Lee:
I think one of the reasons we don’t feel joy as much as we might like is because we have a culture in which joy is judged often as frivolous, as childish, as superficial. And it’s interesting to think about where this actually comes from. It has pretty deep roots in our culture. So if you look in 1810 Goethe wrote in his Theory of Color that “savage nations”, uneducated people, and children typically prefer bright colors whereas “people of refinement” avoid color in their dress and try to banish color from the objects about them. And what happens in this equation is that we’re seeing the equivalency between “savage nations”, so uncivilized people, primitiveness, a lack of sophistication or education and children. And those are being equated to the sort of aesthetics, the tangible manifestations of joy in our culture. And when you look at the roots of this a lot of it stems from colonialism. So you had a bunch of Europeans getting on boats going around the world trying to conquer other people’s and when they found these sort of “uninhibited” displays of emotion, when they found festivals and dancing and drumming and colorful dwellings and outfits they felt a need to distance themselves from those behaviors.
And so what happened was European culture became more and more emotionally repressed as a result. So we had to get rid of the color in our surroundings because that was “uncivilized”. We had to get rid of our sort of exuberant and playful displays. And you actually see this when in certain colonies when settlers would arrive they would bring their pretty raucous festivals—I mean Carnival originated in Europe and it was a pretty raucous festival there. They would bring it to these colonies like In Trinidad and Tobago, for example. And then once they got there they realized the had to stop visibly celebrating and they started having formal balls instead of, you know, wild celebrations, because that made the seem “too close” to the natives. And so joy became repressed within our culture, and in its place we got this sense of seriousness that this is what is valued. And that became reflected in our aesthetic culture as well.
Over the past few years the dominant aesthetic has been an aesthetic of minimalism. And we’ve been encouraged to sort of simplify and strip back our possessions in our homes and sort of get to very simple gray, beige interiors.
And in a way this has been described as sort of reaction to all of the overstimulation that’s going on in our devices, that it sort of helps us relax. But, in fact, what we find is that minimalist interiors actually can be very stressful. That when you look at our sort of natural love of abundance and lushness and textures and sensation, when you actually deprive us of sensations we go a little bit crazy. And a study I love that sort of explores this had a bunch of people sitting in a room, and all they had to entertain themselves was a machine that gave electric shocks. And after only a few minutes of sitting alone in a bare, unadorned room they started giving themselves quite painful electric shocks rather than sit without any stimulation. So the brain seeks and craves stimulation. And when it doesn’t have that it will sort of seek it out even in ways that maybe aren’t so adaptive.
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One of the most important aspects of meaningful conversation is listening. If you’re asking important questions and not listening, you’re not having a conversation at all; you are giving a soliloquy. So one of the easiest ways that we can practice active listening and avoid a conversation dead-end is to make sure that we are “turning” the conversation more than we’re “taking” it. So I’ll give you a quick example.
So my sister just comes back from Thailand and she says, “I had amazing trip. We went to the north and the beaches in the south.” So here’s what a “take” would sound like. It’s like, “Oh I went to Thailand last year. We went to the beaches too.”
So do you see what you just did? You just directed that thing right into a dead-end, and now it’s going to stop. So what a “turn” looks like is you get to say, “Oh wow I went to the beaches as well! What was your favorite part?” And so that simple turn shows them two things: that you heard what they said and that you care enough to ask a follow-up question.
And I promise you that the best conversationalists always turn the conversation more than they take it. Because often times what happens is that it’s not our first question that is going to get the answer or the depth that we desire, so if we commit to turning the conversation back three and four times we’re going to peel off those layers and get more depth out of our conversations. So always remember turn the conversation more than you take it, and you’re going to avoid those conversation dead ends.
When we move past asking better questions we move into the “metamorphic two-step”. And this is all about presence. And presence is so important in conversation. You’ve all said this before, “She has such presence.” “He has such presence.” Presence is that embodied existence in the moment, it’s when you’re only responding and reacting to what’s happening right now. There’s no story from the past, there’s no fear of the future, and it’s a magical thing when we can create that in conversation. And one of the easiest ways to do that is something called the metamorphic two-step. And the metamorphic two-step is actually a hypnosis technique that will help you to identify how you want to feel in social situations.
So I learned this from my friend Andrew who is a hypnotherapist here in New York City, he works with a lot of the Fortune 500 brands, the quickest growing startups. And basically what he talks about with some of these leaders is helps them to identify where they have anxiety in their leadership roles and helps them to overcome that and really achieve peak performance.
And so when I first met him I said, “Okay so how would you use hypnosis to alleviate something like a social anxiety?” And so what he would tell me is he’d say, “Okay, so what I want you to do is think about a social situation where you might have some anxiety.” And I would say, “Okay I’m going into a big tech conference with a bunch of really influential people and I might be nervous.” And he’d say, “Articulate the undesired state of being. What is that?” And so I’d say, “I’m worried that I won’t have anything to say, I’m worried that they won’t think that I’m high up enough to actually care about what I’m going to say, I’m not going to add value.”
How sound can hack your memory while you sleep | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesCan you cram for a test while you sleep? Neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues attempt to enhance memory by running experiments on subjects while they sleep. You'll be surprised by the results.
On DIY Neuroscience, a TED original series, watch cutting-edge neuroscience experiments on a shoestring budget. Check out more here: go.ted.com/diyneuroscience
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How octopuses battle each other | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesThem's fighting words if you're an octopus, in that more than one octopus in a space often means a rumble. Neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues analyze aggression by observing the fighting behavior of two-spotted octopuses or, if you prefer, octopodes.
On DIY Neuroscience, a TED original series, watch cutting-edge neuroscience experiments on a shoestring budget. Check out more here: go.ted.com/diyneuroscience
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On DIY Neuroscience, a TED original series, watch cutting-edge neuroscience experiments on a shoestring budget. Check out more here: go.ted.com/diyneuroscience
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This computer is learning to read your mind | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesModern technology lets neuroscientists peer into the human brain, but can it also read minds? Armed with the device known as an electroencephalogram, or EEG, and some computing wizardry, neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues attempt to peer into a subject's thoughts.
On DIY Neuroscience, a TED original series, watch cutting-edge neuroscience experiments on a shoestring budget. Check out more here: go.ted.com/diyneuroscience
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How you can make a fruit fly eat veggies | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesCan the mind be manipulated to love a food we loathe? The evidence from fruit flies is compelling, and perhaps surprising. Our tag team of neuroscientists attempts to change a fly's preference for fruit over vegetables simply by shining a light on their brain.
On DIY Neuroscience, a TED original series, watch cutting-edge neuroscience experiments on a shoestring budget. Check out more here: go.ted.com/diyneuroscience
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How a dragonfly's brain is designed to kill | DIY Neuroscience, a TED seriesDragonflies can catch prey with near perfect accuracy, the best among all predators. But how does something with so few neurons achieve such prowess? Neuroscientist Greg Gage and his colleagues explore how a dragonfly unerringly locks onto its preys and captures it within milliseconds using just sensors and a fake fly.
On DIY Neuroscience, a TED original series, watch cutting-edge neuroscience experiments on a shoestring budget. Check out more here: go.ted.com/diyneuroscience
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