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<doc docid="2183" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/marc_kushner_why_the_buildings_of_the_future_will_be_shaped_by_you</url>
<keywords>talks, TED Books, architecture, design, social media</keywords>
<speaker>Marc Kushner</speaker>
<talkid>2183</talkid>
<title>Marc Kushner: Why the buildings of the future will be shaped by ... you</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: "Architecture is not about math or zoning -- it's about visceral emotions," says Marc Kushner. In a sweeping — often funny — talk, he zooms through the past thirty years of architecture to show how the public, once disconnected, have become an essential part of the design process. With the help of social media, feedback reaches architects years before a building is even created. The result? Architecture that will do more for us than ever before.</description>
<seg id="1"> Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history.</seg>
<seg id="2"> That's a lot to pack into 18 minutes.</seg>
<seg id="3"> It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey.</seg>
<seg id="4"> Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom.</seg>
<seg id="5"> Around the corner from my bedroom was the bathroom that I used to share with my sister.</seg>
<seg id="6"> And in between my bedroom and the bathroom was a balcony that overlooked the family room.</seg>
<seg id="7"> And that's where everyone would hang out and watch TV, so that every time that I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom, everyone would see me, and every time I took a shower and would come back in a towel, everyone would see me.</seg>
<seg id="8"> And I looked like this.</seg>
<seg id="9"> I was awkward, insecure, and I hated it.</seg>
<seg id="10"> I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house.</seg>
<seg id="11"> And that's architecture.</seg>
<seg id="12"> That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy.</seg>
<seg id="13"> And it's no surprise that we feel that way, because according to the EPA, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors.</seg>
<seg id="14"> That's 90 percent of our time surrounded by architecture.</seg>
<seg id="15"> That's huge.</seg>
<seg id="16"> That means that architecture is shaping us in ways that we didn't even realize.</seg>
<seg id="17"> That makes us a little bit gullible and very, very predictable.</seg>
<seg id="18"> It means that when I show you a building like this, I know what you think: You think "power" and "stability" and "democracy."</seg>
<seg id="19"> And I know you think that because it's based on a building that was build 2,500 years ago by the Greeks.</seg>
<seg id="20"> This is a trick.</seg>
<seg id="21"> This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of.</seg>
<seg id="22"> It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time.</seg>
<seg id="23"> We used it [200] years ago to build banks.</seg>
<seg id="24"> We used it in the 19th century to build art museums.</seg>
<seg id="25"> And in the 20th century in America, we used it to build houses.</seg>
<seg id="26"> And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements.</seg>
<seg id="27"> This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying.</seg>
<seg id="28"> It's expensive, it takes a long time, and it's very complicated.</seg>
<seg id="29"> And the people that build things -- developers and governments -- they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to.</seg>
<seg id="30"> That's how we end up with buildings like this.</seg>
<seg id="31"> This is a nice building.</seg>
<seg id="32"> But it doesn't have much to do with what a library actually does today.</seg>
<seg id="33"> That same year, in 2004, on the other side of the country, another library was completed, and it looks like this.</seg>
<seg id="34"> It's in Seattle.</seg>
<seg id="35"> This library is about how we consume media in a digital age.</seg>
<seg id="36"> It's about a new kind of public amenity for the city, a place to gather and read and share.</seg>
<seg id="37"> So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different?</seg>
<seg id="38"> And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum.</seg>
<seg id="39"> On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing, pushing for new technologies, new typologies, new solutions for the way that we live today.</seg>
<seg id="40"> We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we're dead inside because we've got no choice.</seg>
<seg id="41"> We have to go to the other side and reengage those symbols that we know you love.</seg>
<seg id="42"> So we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sellouts, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years.</seg>
<seg id="43"> Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s.</seg>
<seg id="44"> Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism.</seg>
<seg id="45"> It's about concrete.</seg>
<seg id="46"> Small windows, dehumanizing scale.</seg>
<seg id="47"> This is really tough stuff.</seg>
<seg id="48"> So as we get closer to the '80s, we start to reengage those symbols.</seg>
<seg id="49"> We push the pendulum back into the other direction.</seg>
<seg id="50"> We take these forms that we know you love and we update them.</seg>
<seg id="51"> We add neon and we add pastels and we use new materials.</seg>
<seg id="52"> And you love it.</seg>
<seg id="53"> And we can't give you enough of it.</seg>
<seg id="54"> We take Chippendale armoires and we turned those into skyscrapers, and skyscrapers can be medieval castles made out of glass.</seg>
<seg id="55"> Forms got big, forms got bold and colorful.</seg>
<seg id="56"> Dwarves became columns.</seg>
<seg id="57"> It was crazy.</seg>
<seg id="58"> But it's the '80s, it's cool.</seg>
<seg id="59"> This is the thing about postmodernism.</seg>
<seg id="60"> This is the thing about symbols.</seg>
<seg id="61"> They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places.</seg>
<seg id="62"> Because I know, and I know all of you know, this isn't Tuscany.</seg>
<seg id="63"> This is Ohio.</seg>
<seg id="64"> In the late '80s and early '90s, we start experimenting with something called deconstructivism.</seg>
<seg id="65"> We throw out historical symbols, we rely on new, computer-aided design techniques, and we come up with new compositions, forms crashing into forms.</seg>
<seg id="66"> This is academic and heady stuff, it's super unpopular, we totally alienate you.</seg>
<seg id="67"> Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction.</seg>
<seg id="68"> And then, something amazing happened.</seg>
<seg id="69"> In 1997, this building opened.</seg>
<seg id="70"> This is the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Frank Gehry.</seg>
<seg id="71"> And this building fundamentally changes the world's relationship to architecture.</seg>
<seg id="72"> Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building.</seg>
<seg id="73"> The New York Times called this building a miracle.</seg>
<seg id="74"> Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed.</seg>
<seg id="75"> He is our very first starchitect.</seg>
<seg id="76"> Now, how is it possible that these forms -- they're wild and radical -- how is it possible that they become so ubiquitous throughout the world?</seg>
<seg id="77"> And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism.</seg>
<seg id="78"> We created an emotional reaction to these forms.</seg>
<seg id="79"> So did every mayor in the world.</seg>
<seg id="80"> So every mayor knew that if they had these forms, they had culture and tourism.</seg>
<seg id="81"> This phenomenon at the turn of the new millennium happened to a few other starchitects.</seg>
<seg id="82"> Because think about how you consume architecture.</seg>
<seg id="83"> A thousand years ago, you would have had to have walked to the village next door to see a building.</seg>
<seg id="84"> Transportation speeds up: You can take a boat, you can take a plane, you can be a tourist.</seg>
<seg id="85"> Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site.</seg>
<seg id="86"> Architecture is everywhere now, and that means that the speed of communication has finally caught up to the speed of architecture.</seg>
<seg id="87"> Because architecture actually moves quite quickly.</seg>
<seg id="88"> It doesn't take long to think about a building.</seg>
<seg id="89"> It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not.</seg>
<seg id="90"> That's because there's never been a good feedback loop in architecture.</seg>
<seg id="91"> That's how we end up with buildings like this.</seg>
<seg id="92"> It's never going to happen again, I think, because we are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, of steel, or of the elevator, and it's a media revolution.</seg>
<seg id="93"> So my theory is that when you apply media to this pendulum, it starts swinging faster and faster, until it's at both extremes nearly simultaneously, and that effectively blurs the difference between innovation and symbol, between us, the architects, and you, the public.</seg>
<seg id="94"> Now we can make nearly instantaneous, emotionally charged symbols out of something that's brand new.</seg>
<seg id="95"> Let me show you how this plays out in a project that my firm recently completed.</seg>
<seg id="96"> We were hired to replace this building, which burned down.</seg>
<seg id="97"> This is the center of a town called the Pines in Fire Island in New York State.</seg>
<seg id="98"> It's a vacation community.</seg>
<seg id="99"> We proposed a building that was audacious, that was different than any of the forms that the community was used to, and we were scared and our client was scared and the community was scared, so we created a series of photorealistic renderings that we put onto Facebook and we put onto Instagram, and we let people start to do what they do: share it, comment, like it, hate it.</seg>
<seg id="100"> But that meant that two years before the building was complete, it was already a part of the community, so that when the renderings looked exactly like the finished product, there were no surprises.</seg>
<seg id="101"> This building was already a part of this community, and then that first summer, when people started arriving and sharing the building on social media, the building ceased to be just an edifice and it became media, because these, these are not just pictures of a building, they're your pictures of a building.</seg>
<seg id="102"> That means we don't need the Greeks anymore to tell us what to think about architecture.</seg>
<seg id="103"> We can tell each other what we think about architecture, because digital media hasn't just changed the relationship between all of us, it's changed the relationship between us and buildings.</seg>
<seg id="104"> Think for a second about those librarians back in Livingston.</seg>
<seg id="105"> If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search "new libraries."</seg>
<seg id="106"> They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be.</seg>
<seg id="107"> That's ammunition.</seg>
<seg id="108"> That's ammunition that they can take with them to the mayor of Livingston, to the people of Livingston, and say, there's no one answer to what a library is today.</seg>
<seg id="109"> Let's be a part of this.</seg>
<seg id="110"> This abundance of experimentation gives them the freedom to run their own experiment.</seg>
<seg id="111"> Everything is different now.</seg>
<seg id="112"> Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore.</seg>
<seg id="113"> Architects can hear you, and you're not intimidated by architecture.</seg>
<seg id="114"> This is the end of architectural history, and it means that the buildings of tomorrow are going to look a lot different than the buildings of today.</seg>
<seg id="115"> It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works.</seg>
<seg id="116"> It means that a stadium in Brooklyn can be a stadium in Brooklyn, not some red-brick historical pastiche of what we think a stadium ought to be.</seg>
<seg id="117"> It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce.</seg>
<seg id="118"> And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around.</seg>
<seg id="119"> It means that a parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida, can also be a place for sports and for yoga and you can even get married there late at night.</seg>
<seg id="120"> It means that no building is too small for innovation, like this little reindeer pavilion that's as muscly and sinewy as the animals it's designed to observe.</seg>
<seg id="121"> And it means that a building doesn't have to be beautiful to be lovable, like this ugly little building in Spain, where the architects dug a hole, packed it with hay, and then poured concrete around it, and when the concrete dried, they invited someone to come and clean that hay out so that all that's left when it's done is this hideous little room that's filled with the imprints and scratches of how that place was made, and that becomes the most sublime place to watch a Spanish sunset.</seg>
<seg id="122"> Because it doesn't matter if a cow builds our buildings or a robot builds our buildings.</seg>
<seg id="123"> It doesn't matter how we build, it matters what we build.</seg>
<seg id="124"> Architects already know how to make buildings that are greener and smarter and friendlier.</seg>
<seg id="125"> We've just been waiting for all of you to want them.</seg>
<seg id="126"> And finally, we're not on opposite sides anymore.</seg>
<seg id="127"> Find an architect, hire an architect, work with us to design better buildings, better cities, and a better world, because the stakes are high.</seg>
<seg id="128"> Buildings don't just reflect our society, they shape our society down to the smallest spaces: the local libraries, the homes where we raise our children, and the walk that they take from the bedroom to the bathroom.</seg>
<seg id="129"> Thank you.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/78265">Krystian Aparta</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="2102" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/meaghan_ramsey_why_thinking_you_re_ugly_is_bad_for_you</url>
<keywords>talks, beauty, life, women</keywords>
<speaker>Meaghan Ramsey</speaker>
<talkid>2102</talkid>
<title>Meaghan Ramsey: Why thinking you're ugly is bad for you</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: About 10,000 people a month Google the phrase, “Am I ugly?” Meaghan Ramsey of the Dove Self-Esteem Project has a feeling that many of them are young girls. In a deeply unsettling talk, she walks us through the surprising impacts of low body and image confidence—from lower grade point averages to greater risk-taking with drugs and alcohol. And then shares the key things all of us can do to disrupt this reality.</description>
<seg id="1"> This is my niece, Stella.</seg>
<seg id="2"> She's just turned one and started to walk.</seg>
<seg id="3"> And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving- too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way.</seg>
<seg id="4"> It is absolutely gorgeous.</seg>
<seg id="5"> And one of her favorite things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror.</seg>
<seg id="6"> She absolutely loves her reflection.</seg>
<seg id="7"> She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses.</seg>
<seg id="8"> When is it suddenly not okay to love the way that we look?</seg>
<seg id="9"> Because apparently we don't.</seg>
<seg id="10"> Ten thousand people every month google, "Am I ugly?"</seg>
<seg id="11"> This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she lives in Denver.</seg>
<seg id="12"> And like any teenager, she just wants to be liked and to fit in.</seg>
<seg id="13"> And she's slightly dreading it, and she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her that she's ugly.</seg>
<seg id="14"> Because of the difference between what her mom tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe.</seg>
<seg id="15"> Some of them are so nasty, they don't bear thinking about.</seg>
<seg id="16"> This is an average, healthy-looking teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life.</seg>
<seg id="17"> Well, today's teenagers are rarely alone.</seg>
<seg id="18"> They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting, sharing, posting — it never ends.</seg>
<seg id="19"> Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young.</seg>
<seg id="20"> And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night.</seg>
<seg id="21"> There's simply no privacy.</seg>
<seg id="22"> And the social pressures that go along with that are relentless.</seg>
<seg id="23"> This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive.</seg>
<seg id="24"> There's no separation between online and offline life.</seg>
<seg id="25"> What's real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between.</seg>
<seg id="26"> And where are they looking to for inspiration?</seg>
<seg id="27"> Well, you can see the kinds of images that are covering the newsfeeds of girls today.</seg>
<seg id="28"> Size zero models still dominate our catwalks.</seg>
<seg id="29"> Airbrushing is now routine.</seg>
<seg id="30"> And trends like #thinspiration, #thighgap, #bikinibridge and #proana.</seg>
<seg id="31"> For those who don't know, #proana means pro-anorexia.</seg>
<seg id="32"> These trends are teamed with the stereotyping and flagrant objectification of women in today's popular culture.</seg>
<seg id="33"> It is not hard to see what girls are benchmarking themselves against.</seg>
<seg id="34"> But boys are not immune to this either.</seg>
<seg id="35"> Aspiring to the chiseled jaw lines and ripped six packs of superhero-like sports stars and playboy music artists.</seg>
<seg id="36"> But, what's the problem with all of this?</seg>
<seg id="37"> Well, surely we want our kids to grow up as healthy, well balanced individuals.</seg>
<seg id="38"> But in an image-obsessed culture, we are training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on their appearance at the expense of all of the other aspects of their identities.</seg>
<seg id="39"> So, things like their relationships, the development of their physical abilities, and their studies and so on begin to suffer.</seg>
<seg id="40"> Six out of 10 girls are now choosing not to do something because they don't think they look good enough.</seg>
<seg id="41"> These are not trivial activities.</seg>
<seg id="42"> These are fundamental activities to their development as humans and as contributors to society and to the workforce.</seg>
<seg id="43"> Thirty-one percent, nearly one in three teenagers, are withdrawing from classroom debate. They're failing to engage in classroom debate because they don't want to draw attention to the way that they look.</seg>
<seg id="44"> One in five are not showing up to class at all on days when they don't feel good about it.</seg>
<seg id="45"> And when it comes to exams, if you don't think you look good enough, specifically if you don't think you are thin enough, you will score a lower grade point average than your peers who are not concerned with this.</seg>
<seg id="46"> And this is consistent across Finland, the U.S.</seg>
<seg id="47"> and China, and is true regardless of how much you actually weigh.</seg>
<seg id="48"> So to be super clear, we're talking about the way you think you look, not how you actually look.</seg>
<seg id="49"> Low body confidence is undermining academic achievement.</seg>
<seg id="50"> But it's also damaging health.</seg>
<seg id="51"> Teenagers with low body confidence do less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, partake in more unhealthy weight control practices that can lead to eating disorders.</seg>
<seg id="52"> And we don't grow out of it.</seg>
<seg id="53"> Women who think they're overweight — again, regardless of whether they are or are not — have higher rates of absenteeism.</seg>
<seg id="54"> Seventeen percent of women would not show up to a job interview on a day when they weren't feeling confident about the way that they look.</seg>
<seg id="55"> Have a think about what this is doing to our economy.</seg>
<seg id="56"> If we could overcome this, what that opportunity looks like.</seg>
<seg id="57"> Unlocking this potential is in the interest of every single one of us.</seg>
<seg id="58"> But how do we do that?</seg>
<seg id="59"> Well, talking, on its own, only gets you so far.</seg>
<seg id="60"> It's not enough by itself.</seg>
<seg id="61"> If you actually want to make a difference, you have to do something.</seg>
<seg id="62"> And we've learned there are three key ways: The first is we have to educate for body confidence.</seg>
<seg id="63"> We have to help our teenagers develop strategies to overcome image-related pressures and build their self-esteem.</seg>
<seg id="64"> Now, the good news is that there are many programs out there available to do this.</seg>
<seg id="65"> The bad news is that most of them don't work.</seg>
<seg id="66"> I was shocked to learn that many well-meaning programs are inadvertently actually making the situation worse.</seg>
<seg id="67"> So we need to make damn sure that the programs that our kids are receiving are not only having a positive impact, but having a lasting impact as well.</seg>
<seg id="68"> And the research shows that the best programs address six key areas: The first is the influence of family, friends and relationships.</seg>
<seg id="69"> The second is media and celebrity culture, then how to handle teasing and bullying, the way we compete and compare with one another based on looks, talking about appearance — some people call this "body talk" or "fat talk" — and finally, the foundations of respecting and looking after yourself.</seg>
<seg id="70"> Challenging the status quo of how women are seen and talked about in our own circles.</seg>
<seg id="71"> It is not okay that we judge the contribution of our politicians by their haircuts or the size of their breasts, or to infer that the determination or the success of an Olympian is down to her not being a looker.</seg>
<seg id="72"> We need to start judging people by what they do, not what they look like.</seg>
<seg id="73"> We can all start by taking responsibility for the types of pictures and comments that we post on our own social networks.</seg>
<seg id="74"> We can compliment people based on their effort and their actions and not on their appearance.</seg>
<seg id="75"> And let me ask you, when was the last time that you kissed a mirror?</seg>
<seg id="76"> Ultimately, we need to work together as communities, as governments and as businesses to really change this culture of ours so that our kids grow up valuing their whole selves, valuing individuality, diversity, inclusion.</seg>
<seg id="77"> We need to put the people that are making a real difference on our pedestals, making a difference in the real world.</seg>
<seg id="78"> Giving them the airtime, because only then will we create a different world.</seg>
<seg id="79"> A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life.</seg>
<seg id="80"> Think about what this might mean for someone in your life.</seg>
<seg id="81"> Your friend? It could just be the woman a couple of seats away from you today.</seg>
<seg id="82"> What would it mean for her if she were freed from that voice of her inner critic, nagging her to have longer legs, thinner thighs, smaller stomach, shorter feet?</seg>
<seg id="83"> What could it mean for her if we overcame this and unlocked her potential in that way?</seg>
<seg id="84"> Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back.</seg>
<seg id="85"> But let's show our kids the truth.</seg>
<seg id="86"> Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel.</seg>
<seg id="87"> Let's build self-esteem into our school curriculums.</seg>
<seg id="88"> Let's each and every one of us change the way we talk and compare ourselves to other people.</seg>
<seg id="89"> And let's work together as communities, from grassroots to governments, so that the happy little one-year-olds of today become the confident changemakers of tomorrow.</seg>
<seg id="90"> Let's do this.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/78265">Krystian Aparta</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="2024" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/zak_ebrahim_i_am_the_son_of_a_terrorist_here_s_how_i_chose_peace</url>
<keywords>talks, Middle East, TED Books, TED Conference, peace, terrorism, violence</keywords>
<speaker>Zak Ebrahim</speaker>
<talkid>2024</talkid>
<title>Zak Ebrahim: I am the son of a terrorist. Here's how I chose peace.</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: If you’re raised on dogma and hate, can you choose a different path? Zak Ebrahim was just seven years old when his father helped plan the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. His story is shocking, powerful and, ultimately, inspiring.</description>
<seg id="1"> On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League.</seg>
<seg id="2"> Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters.</seg>
<seg id="3"> Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant.</seg>
<seg id="4"> Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not.</seg>
<seg id="5"> I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for me.</seg>
<seg id="6"> It wasn't until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change.</seg>
<seg id="7"> My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see.</seg>
<seg id="8"> However, in every religion, in every population, you'll find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do.</seg>
<seg id="9"> We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI.</seg>
<seg id="10"> That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames.</seg>
<seg id="11"> They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny.</seg>
<seg id="12"> They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of.</seg>
<seg id="13"> Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000 others.</seg>
<seg id="14"> These were the men I looked up to.</seg>
<seg id="15"> These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle.</seg>
<seg id="16"> By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life, and that instability during my childhood didn't really provide an opportunity to make many friends.</seg>
<seg id="17"> Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town.</seg>
<seg id="18"> Being the perpetual new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies.</seg>
<seg id="19"> So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games.</seg>
<seg id="20"> For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn't prepared for the real world.</seg>
<seg id="21"> I'd been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion.</seg>
<seg id="22"> So what opened my eyes?</seg>
<seg id="23"> One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections.</seg>
<seg id="24"> Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia.</seg>
<seg id="25"> My particular group's focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate.</seg>
<seg id="26"> The members of our group came from many different walks of life.</seg>
<seg id="27"> One day toward the end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish.</seg>
<seg id="28"> Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us.</seg>
<seg id="29"> There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures, and that experience proved to be fundamental to the development of my character.</seg>
<seg id="30"> Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I'd been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction.</seg>
<seg id="31"> I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I'm well acquainted with being judged for something that's beyond my control.</seg>
<seg id="32"> Then there was "The Daily Show."</seg>
<seg id="33"> Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me.</seg>
<seg id="34"> One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live.</seg>
<seg id="35"> She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, "I'm tired of hating people."</seg>
<seg id="36"> In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you.</seg>
<seg id="37"> Zak Ebrahim is not my real name.</seg>
<seg id="38"> I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life.</seg>
<seg id="39"> So why would I out myself and potentially put myself in danger?</seg>
<seg id="40"> Well, that's simple.</seg>
<seg id="41"> Instead, I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry.</seg>
<seg id="42"> I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives.</seg>
<seg id="43"> For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father's actions.</seg>
<seg id="44"> And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn't inherent in one's religion or race, and the son does not have to follow the ways of his father.</seg>
<seg id="45"> I am not my father.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="2045" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness</url>
<keywords>talks, TED Conference, brain, consciousness, neuroscience, philosophy</keywords>
<speaker>David Chalmers</speaker>
<talkid>2045</talkid>
<title>David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness?</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Our consciousness is a fundamental aspect of our existence, says philosopher David Chalmers: “There’s nothing we know about more directly…. but at the same time it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.” He shares some ways to think about the movie playing in our heads.</description>
<seg id="1"> Right now you have a movie playing inside your head.</seg>
<seg id="2"> It's an amazing multi-track movie.</seg>
<seg id="3"> It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you're seeing and hearing right now, but that's just the start of it.</seg>
<seg id="4"> Your movie has smell and taste and touch.</seg>
<seg id="5"> It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms.</seg>
<seg id="6"> It has emotions, anger and happiness.</seg>
<seg id="7"> It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you.</seg>
<seg id="8"> And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking.</seg>
<seg id="9"> At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly.</seg>
<seg id="10"> This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world.</seg>
<seg id="11"> Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence.</seg>
<seg id="12"> Each of us is conscious.</seg>
<seg id="13"> We all have our own inner movie, you and you and you.</seg>
<seg id="14"> There's nothing we know about more directly.</seg>
<seg id="15"> At least, I know about my consciousness directly.</seg>
<seg id="16"> I can't be certain that you guys are conscious.</seg>
<seg id="17"> Consciousness also is what makes life worth living.</seg>
<seg id="18"> If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value.</seg>
<seg id="19"> But at the same time, it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe.</seg>
<seg id="20"> Why aren't we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all?</seg>
<seg id="21"> Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions.</seg>
<seg id="22"> I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed.</seg>
<seg id="23"> Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible.</seg>
<seg id="24"> Science, by its nature, is objective.</seg>
<seg id="25"> Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective.</seg>
<seg id="26"> So there can never be a science of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="27"> For much of the 20th century, that view held sway.</seg>
<seg id="28"> Psychologists studied behavior objectively, neuroscientists studied the brain objectively, and nobody even mentioned consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="29"> Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="30"> Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change.</seg>
<seg id="31"> Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said now is the time for science to attack consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="32"> And since then, there's been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="33"> And this work has been wonderful. It's been great.</seg>
<seg id="34"> But it also has some fundamental limitations so far.</seg>
<seg id="35"> We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago.</seg>
<seg id="36"> Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy.</seg>
<seg id="37"> But this is still a science of correlations.</seg>
<seg id="38"> It's not a science of explanations.</seg>
<seg id="39"> We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don't know why they do.</seg>
<seg id="40"> I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with.</seg>
<seg id="41"> But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems.</seg>
<seg id="42"> No knock on the neuroscientists.</seg>
<seg id="43"> There are no truly easy problems with consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="44"> But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all?</seg>
<seg id="45"> Why is there this inner subjective movie?</seg>
<seg id="46"> Right now, we don't really have a bead on that.</seg>
<seg id="47"> And you might say, let's just give neuroscience a few years.</seg>
<seg id="48"> It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we'll figure it out.</seg>
<seg id="49"> The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning.</seg>
<seg id="50"> You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena: how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess, all these questions about behavior.</seg>
<seg id="51"> But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems.</seg>
<seg id="52"> When it comes to the hard problem, that's the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience?</seg>
<seg id="53"> And here, the standard paradigm of emergence, even the standard paradigms of neuroscience, don't really, so far, have that much to say.</seg>
<seg id="54"> Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart.</seg>
<seg id="55"> I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work.</seg>
<seg id="56"> But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work for systematic reasons.</seg>
<seg id="57"> So I think we're at a kind of impasse here.</seg>
<seg id="58"> We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology.</seg>
<seg id="59"> But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture.</seg>
<seg id="60"> On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious.</seg>
<seg id="61"> On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world.</seg>
<seg id="62"> So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how.</seg>
<seg id="63"> Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically.</seg>
<seg id="64"> Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be.</seg>
<seg id="65"> My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one.</seg>
<seg id="66"> His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="67"> The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion.</seg>
<seg id="68"> Actually, all we've got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we've explained everything that needs to be explained.</seg>
<seg id="69"> Well I say, more power to him.</seg>
<seg id="70"> That's the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="71"> At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory.</seg>
<seg id="72"> So I go in a different direction.</seg>
<seg id="73"> In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise.</seg>
<seg id="74"> The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental.</seg>
<seg id="75"> Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass.</seg>
<seg id="76"> They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics.</seg>
<seg id="77"> These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic.</seg>
<seg id="78"> Rather, they're taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there.</seg>
<seg id="79"> Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands.</seg>
<seg id="80"> In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, Newton's laws — so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern.</seg>
<seg id="81"> I think that's the situation we're in with consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="82"> If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, charge — then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list.</seg>
<seg id="83"> The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature.</seg>
<seg id="84"> This doesn't mean you suddenly can't do science with it.</seg>
<seg id="85"> This opens up the way for you to do science with it.</seg>
<seg id="86"> What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes.</seg>
<seg id="87"> Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt.</seg>
<seg id="88"> Well I think something like that is the situation we're in with consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="89"> We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt.</seg>
<seg id="90"> We don't know what those laws are yet, but that's what we're after.</seg>
<seg id="91"> The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal.</seg>
<seg id="92"> Every system might have some degree of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="93"> This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight's microbes, elementary particles.</seg>
<seg id="94"> Even a photon has some degree of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="95"> The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking.</seg>
<seg id="96"> It's not that a photon is wracked with angst because it's thinking, "Aww, I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light.</seg>
<seg id="97"> I never get to slow down and smell the roses."</seg>
<seg id="98"> No, not like that.</seg>
<seg id="99"> But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="100"> This may sound a bit kooky to you.</seg>
<seg id="101"> I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing?</seg>
<seg id="102"> Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental.</seg>
<seg id="103"> If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass, it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are.</seg>
<seg id="104"> It's also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it's much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature.</seg>
<seg id="105"> A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information.</seg>
<seg id="106"> Wherever there's information processing, there's consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="107"> Complex information processing, like in a human, complex consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="108"> Simple information processing, simple consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="109"> A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory.</seg>
<seg id="110"> He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system.</seg>
<seg id="111"> And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="112"> So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="113"> In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="114"> But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off.</seg>
<seg id="115"> The amount of information integration falls off, but it's still non-zero.</seg>
<seg id="116"> On Tononi's theory, there's still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="117"> In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="118"> Now, I don't know if this theory is right, but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it's been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data, and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt.</seg>
<seg id="119"> Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world.</seg>
<seg id="120"> Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract.</seg>
<seg id="121"> It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn't tell us about the reality that underlies it.</seg>
<seg id="122"> As Stephen Hawking puts it, what puts the fire into the equations?</seg>
<seg id="123"> Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="124"> That's what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="125"> On this view, it's consciousness that puts the fire into the equations.</seg>
<seg id="126"> On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra.</seg>
<seg id="127"> It's there right at its heart.</seg>
<seg id="128"> This view, I think, the panpsychist view, has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences.</seg>
<seg id="129"> Some of these may be counterintuitive.</seg>
<seg id="130"> I used to think I shouldn't eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian.</seg>
<seg id="131"> Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view, you're going to go very hungry.</seg>
<seg id="132"> So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="133"> It's also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers.</seg>
<seg id="134"> What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie "Her," Samantha?</seg>
<seg id="135"> Is she conscious?</seg>
<seg id="136"> Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious.</seg>
<seg id="137"> If that's right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off.</seg>
<seg id="138"> Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet.</seg>
<seg id="139"> Does Canada have its own consciousness?</seg>
<seg id="140"> Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference, are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts?</seg>
<seg id="141"> I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's at least one worth taking seriously.</seg>
<seg id="142"> Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don't know that it's correct.</seg>
<seg id="143"> I'm actually more confident about the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental, than about the second one, that it's universal.</seg>
<seg id="144"> I mean, the view raises any number of questions, has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love.</seg>
<seg id="145"> If we can answer those questions, then I think we're going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness.</seg>
<seg id="146"> If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy.</seg>
<seg id="147"> We can't expect to solve it overnight.</seg>
<seg id="148"> But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually.</seg>
<seg id="149"> Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves.</seg>
<seg id="150"> It may just take the right crazy idea.</seg>
<seg id="151"> Thank you.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="2017" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much</url>
<keywords>talks, TEDx, activism, disability, humor, motivation</keywords>
<speaker>Stella Young</speaker>
<talkid>2017</talkid>
<title>Stella Young: I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Stella Young is a comedian and journalist who happens to go about her day in a wheelchair — a fact that doesn’t, she’d like to make clear, automatically turn her into a noble inspiration to all humanity. In this very funny talk, Young breaks down society's habit of turning disabled people into “inspiration porn.”</description>
<seg id="1"> I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria.</seg>
<seg id="2"> I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing.</seg>
<seg id="3"> I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters.</seg>
<seg id="4"> It was all very normal.</seg>
<seg id="5"> And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award.</seg>
<seg id="6"> And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that.</seg>
<seg id="7"> She hasn't actually achieved anything." And they were right, you know.</seg>
<seg id="8"> I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek."</seg>
<seg id="9"> Yeah, I know. What a contradiction.</seg>
<seg id="10"> But they were right, you know.</seg>
<seg id="11"> Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?"</seg>
<seg id="12"> And I said, "What speech?"</seg>
<seg id="13"> You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes.</seg>
<seg id="14"> And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking.</seg>
<seg id="15"> You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?"</seg>
<seg id="16"> "It's usually in the big hall."</seg>
<seg id="17"> And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration.</seg>
<seg id="18"> We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us.</seg>
<seg id="19"> For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists.</seg>
<seg id="20"> We're not real people. We are there to inspire.</seg>
<seg id="21"> And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? Yeah.</seg>
<seg id="22"> Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically.</seg>
<seg id="23"> I am not here to inspire you.</seg>
<seg id="24"> I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability.</seg>
<seg id="25"> It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional.</seg>
<seg id="26"> And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media.</seg>
<seg id="27"> You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude."</seg>
<seg id="28"> Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed.</seg>
<seg id="29"> Or this one: "Before you quit, try!"</seg>
<seg id="30"> These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there.</seg>
<seg id="31"> You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth.</seg>
<seg id="32"> You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs.</seg>
<seg id="33"> And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn.</seg>
<seg id="34"> And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people.</seg>
<seg id="35"> So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people.</seg>
<seg id="36"> The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse.</seg>
<seg id="37"> I could be that person."</seg>
<seg id="38"> But what if you are that person?</seg>
<seg id="39"> I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile.</seg>
<seg id="40"> They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. And it is objectifying.</seg>
<seg id="41"> These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people.</seg>
<seg id="42"> They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective.</seg>
<seg id="43"> And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult.</seg>
<seg id="44"> We do overcome some things.</seg>
<seg id="45"> But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are.</seg>
<seg id="46"> They are not things to do with our bodies.</seg>
<seg id="47"> I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.</seg>
<seg id="48"> So I have lived in this body a long time.</seg>
<seg id="49"> I'm quite fond of it.</seg>
<seg id="50"> It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well.</seg>
<seg id="51"> They're not doing anything out of the ordinary.</seg>
<seg id="52"> They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity.</seg>
<seg id="53"> So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images?</seg>
<seg id="54"> People, when they say, "You're an inspiration," they mean it as a compliment.</seg>
<seg id="55"> And I know why it happens.</seg>
<seg id="56"> It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional.</seg>
<seg id="57"> You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?"</seg>
<seg id="58"> And the thing is, I am.</seg>
<seg id="59"> I learn from other disabled people all the time.</seg>
<seg id="60"> I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though.</seg>
<seg id="61"> I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery.</seg>
<seg id="62"> Genius.</seg>
<seg id="63"> We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us.</seg>
<seg id="64"> I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice.</seg>
<seg id="65"> It makes life hard for us.</seg>
<seg id="66"> And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability.</seg>
<seg id="67"> No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp.</seg>
<seg id="68"> It's just not going to happen.</seg>
<seg id="69"> I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm.</seg>
<seg id="70"> I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down.</seg>
<seg id="71"> I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning.</seg>
<seg id="72"> I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.</seg>
<seg id="73"> Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.</seg>
<seg id="74"> Thank you.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="2007" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_kluwe_how_augmented_reality_will_change_sports_and_build_empathy</url>
<keywords>talks, TED Conference, sports, technology</keywords>
<speaker>Chris Kluwe</speaker>
<talkid>2007</talkid>
<title>Chris Kluwe: How augmented reality will change sports ... and build empathy</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Chris Kluwe wants to look into the future of sports and think about how technology will help not just players and coaches, but fans. Here the former NFL punter envisions a future in which augmented reality will help people experience sports as if they are directly on the field -- and maybe even help them see others in a new light, too.</description>
<seg id="1"> What do augmented reality and professional football have to do with empathy?</seg>
<seg id="2"> And what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?</seg>
<seg id="3"> Now unfortunately, I'm only going to answer one of those questions today, so please, try and contain your disappointment.</seg>
<seg id="4"> When most people think about augmented reality, they think about "Minority Report" and Tom Cruise waving his hands in the air, but augmented reality is not science fiction.</seg>
<seg id="5"> Augmented reality is something that will happen in our lifetime, and it will happen because we have the tools to make it happen, and people need to be aware of that, because augmented reality will change our lives just as much as the Internet and the cell phone.</seg>
<seg id="6"> Now how do we get to augmented reality?</seg>
<seg id="7"> Step one is the step I'm wearing right now, Google Glass.</seg>
<seg id="8"> I'm sure many of you are familiar with Google Glass.</seg>
<seg id="9"> What you may not be familiar with is that Google Glass is a device that will allow you to see what I see.</seg>
<seg id="10"> It will allow you to experience what it is like to be a professional athlete on the field.</seg>
<seg id="11"> Right now, the only way you can be on the field is for me to try and describe it to you.</seg>
<seg id="12"> I have to use words.</seg>
<seg id="13"> I have to create a framework that you then fill in with your imagination.</seg>
<seg id="14"> With Google Glass, we can put that underneath a helmet, and we can get a sense of what it's like to be running down the field at 100 miles an hour, your blood pounding in your ears.</seg>
<seg id="15"> You can get a sense of what it's like to have a 250-pound man sprinting at you trying to decapitate you with every ounce of his being.</seg>
<seg id="16"> And I've been on the receiving end of that, and it doesn't feel very good.</seg>
<seg id="17"> So let's pull up some video.</seg>
<seg id="18"> Go.</seg>
<seg id="19"> Ugh, getting tackled sucks.</seg>
<seg id="20"> Hold on, let's get a little closer.</seg>
<seg id="21"> All right, ready?</seg>
<seg id="22"> Go!</seg>
<seg id="23"> Now, you may have noticed there are some people missing there: the rest of the team.</seg>
<seg id="24"> We have some video of that courtesy of the University of Washington.</seg>
<seg id="25"> Quarterback: Hey, Mice 54! Mice 54!</seg>
<seg id="26"> Blue 8! Blue 8! Go!</seg>
<seg id="27"> Oh!</seg>
<seg id="28"> Fans want that experience.</seg>
<seg id="29"> Fans want to be on that field.</seg>
<seg id="30"> They want to be their favorite players, and they've already talked to me on YouTube, they've talked to me on Twitter, saying, "Hey, can you get this on a quarterback?</seg>
<seg id="31"> Well, once we have that experience with GoPro and Google Glass, how do we make it more immersive?</seg>
<seg id="32"> How do we take that next step?</seg>
<seg id="33"> The Oculus Rift has been described as one of the most realistic virtual reality devices ever created, and that is not empty hype.</seg>
<seg id="34"> I'm going to show you why that is not empty hype with this video.</seg>
<seg id="35"> Oh! Oh!</seg>
<seg id="36"> No! No! No! I don't want to play anymore! No!</seg>
<seg id="37"> Oh my God! Aaaah!</seg>
<seg id="38"> So that is the experience of a man on a roller coaster in fear of his life.</seg>
<seg id="39"> What do you think his experience is going to be when he is going down the side of a mountain at over 70 miles an hour as an Olympic downhill skier?</seg>
<seg id="40"> I think adult diaper sales may surge.</seg>
<seg id="41"> But this is not yet augmented reality.</seg>
<seg id="42"> This is only virtual reality, V.R.</seg>
<seg id="43"> How do we get to augmented reality, A.R.?</seg>
<seg id="44"> We get to augmented reality when coaches and managers and owners look at this information streaming in that people want to see, and they say, "How do we use this to make our teams better?</seg>
<seg id="45"> How do we use this to win games?"</seg>
<seg id="46"> Because teams always use technology to win games.</seg>
<seg id="47"> They like winning. It makes them money.</seg>
<seg id="48"> So a brief history of technology in the NFL.</seg>
<seg id="49"> In 1965, the Baltimore Colts put a wristband on their quarterback to allow him to call plays quicker.</seg>
<seg id="50"> They ended up winning a Super Bowl that year.</seg>
<seg id="51"> Other teams followed suit.</seg>
<seg id="52"> More people watched the game because it was more exciting.</seg>
<seg id="53"> It was faster.</seg>
<seg id="54"> In 1994, the NFL put helmet radios into the helmets of the quarterbacks, and later the defense.</seg>
<seg id="55"> More people watched games because it was faster.</seg>
<seg id="56"> It was more entertaining.</seg>
<seg id="57"> In 2023, imagine you're a player walking back to the huddle, and you have your next play displayed right in front of your face on your clear plastic visor that you already wear right now.</seg>
<seg id="58"> No more having to worry about forgetting plays.</seg>
<seg id="59"> No more worrying about having to memorize your playbook.</seg>
<seg id="60"> You just go out and react.</seg>
<seg id="61"> And coaches really want this, because missed assignments lose you games, and coaches hate losing games.</seg>
<seg id="62"> Losing games gets you fired as a coach.</seg>
<seg id="63"> They don't want that.</seg>
<seg id="64"> But augmented reality is not just an enhanced playbook.</seg>
<seg id="65"> Augmented reality is also a way to take all that data and use it in real time to enhance how you play the game.</seg>
<seg id="66"> What would that be like?</seg>
<seg id="67"> Well, a very simple setup would be a camera on each corner of the stadium looking down, giving you a bird's-eye view of all the people down there.</seg>
<seg id="68"> You also have information from helmet sensors and accelerometers, technology that's being worked on right now.</seg>
<seg id="69"> You take all that information, and you stream it to your players.</seg>
<seg id="70"> The good teams stream it in a way that the players can use.</seg>
<seg id="71"> The bad ones have information overload.</seg>
<seg id="72"> That determines good teams from bad.</seg>
<seg id="73"> And now, your I.T. department is just as important as your scouting department, and data-mining is not for nerds anymore.</seg>
<seg id="74"> It's also for jocks. Who knew?</seg>
<seg id="75"> What would that look like on the field?</seg>
<seg id="76"> Well, imagine you're the quarterback.</seg>
<seg id="77"> You take the snap and you drop back.</seg>
<seg id="78"> You're scanning downfield for an open receiver.</seg>
<seg id="79"> All of a sudden, a bright flash on the left side of your visor lets you know, blind side linebacker is blitzing in.</seg>
<seg id="80"> Normally, you wouldn't be able to see him, but the augmented reality system lets you know.</seg>
<seg id="81"> You step up into the pocket.</seg>
<seg id="82"> Another flash alerts you to an open receiver.</seg>
<seg id="83"> You throw the ball, but you're hit right as you throw.</seg>
<seg id="84"> The ball comes off track.</seg>
<seg id="85"> You don't know where it's going to land.</seg>
<seg id="86"> However, on the receiver's visor, he sees a patch of grass light up, and he knows to readjust.</seg>
<seg id="87"> He goes, catches the ball, sprints in, touchdown.</seg>
<seg id="88"> Crowd goes wild, and the fans are with him every step of the way, watching from every perspective.</seg>
<seg id="89"> Now this is something that will create massive excitement in the game.</seg>
<seg id="90"> It will make tons of people watch, because people want this experience.</seg>
<seg id="91"> Fans want to be on the field.</seg>
<seg id="92"> They want to be their favorite player.</seg>
<seg id="93"> Augmented reality will be a part of sports, because it's too profitable not to.</seg>
<seg id="94"> But the question I ask you is, is that's all that we're content to use augmented reality for?</seg>
<seg id="95"> Are we going to use it solely for our panem, our circenses, our entertainment as normal?</seg>
<seg id="96"> Because I believe that we can use augmented reality for something more.</seg>
<seg id="97"> I believe we can use augmented reality as a way to foster more empathy within the human species itself, by literally showing someone what it looks like to walk a mile in another person's shoes.</seg>
<seg id="98"> We know what this technology is worth to sports leagues.</seg>
<seg id="99"> It's worth revenue, to the tune of billions of dollars a year.</seg>
<seg id="100"> What is this technology worth to a gay Ugandan or Russian trying to show the world what it's like living under persecution?</seg>
<seg id="101"> What is this technology worth to a Commander Hadfield or a Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to inspire a generation of children to think more about space and science instead of quarterly reports and Kardashians?</seg>
<seg id="102"> Ladies and gentlemen, augmented reality is coming.</seg>
<seg id="103"> The questions we ask, the choices we make, and the challenges we face are, as always, up to us.</seg>
<seg id="104"> Thank you.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="1997" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_briggs_the_bridge_between_suicide_and_life</url>
<keywords>talks, culture, depression, mental health, suicide</keywords>
<speaker>Kevin Briggs</speaker>
<talkid>1997</talkid>
<title>Kevin Briggs: The bridge between suicide and life</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: For many years Sergeant Kevin Briggs had a dark, unusual, at times strangely rewarding job: He patrolled the southern end of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a popular site for suicide attempts. In a sobering, deeply personal talk Briggs shares stories from those he’s spoken — and listened — to standing on the edge of life. He gives a powerful piece of advice to those with loved ones who might be contemplating suicide.</description>
<seg id="1"> I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service.</seg>
<seg id="2"> The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge.</seg>
<seg id="3"> The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture.</seg>
<seg id="4"> Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world.</seg>
<seg id="5"> The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937.</seg>
<seg id="6"> Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, "The bridge is practically suicide-proof.</seg>
<seg id="7"> Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable."</seg>
<seg id="8"> But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge.</seg>
<seg id="9"> Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension -- this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul.</seg>
<seg id="10"> But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide.</seg>
<seg id="11"> That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs.</seg>
<seg id="12"> Most die on impact.</seg>
<seg id="13"> Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown.</seg>
<seg id="14"> I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face.</seg>
<seg id="15"> This is the cord.</seg>
<seg id="16"> Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge.</seg>
<seg id="17"> This is where most folks stand before taking their lives.</seg>
<seg id="18"> I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back.</seg>
<seg id="19"> I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life.</seg>
<seg id="20"> I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail.</seg>
<seg id="21"> When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training.</seg>
<seg id="22"> You struggled to funnel your way through these calls.</seg>
<seg id="23"> This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well.</seg>
<seg id="24"> We've come a long, long way since then.</seg>
<seg id="25"> Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers.</seg>
<seg id="26"> This is Jason Garber.</seg>
<seg id="27"> I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan.</seg>
<seg id="28"> I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer.</seg>
<seg id="29"> Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey.</seg>
<seg id="30"> After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box.</seg>
<seg id="31"> Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, "Never, ever open that box."</seg>
<seg id="32"> Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box.</seg>
<seg id="33"> Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man.</seg>
<seg id="34"> The only good thing in the box was hope.</seg>
<seg id="35"> Jason then asked us, "What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there?"</seg>
<seg id="36"> He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone.</seg>
<seg id="37"> This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide.</seg>
<seg id="38"> I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me.</seg>
<seg id="39"> Jason's parents had asked him to do so.</seg>
<seg id="40"> The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people.</seg>
<seg id="41"> I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal?</seg>
<seg id="42"> What would you say?</seg>
<seg id="43"> Would you know what to say?</seg>
<seg id="44"> In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening.</seg>
<seg id="45"> Listen to understand.</seg>
<seg id="46"> Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't.</seg>
<seg id="47"> By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need.</seg>
<seg id="48"> If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question.</seg>
<seg id="49"> One way of asking them the question is like this: "Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts?"</seg>
<seg id="50"> Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them.</seg>
<seg id="51"> Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life.</seg>
<seg id="52"> I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter.</seg>
<seg id="53"> She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you.</seg>
<seg id="54"> "Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference.</seg>
<seg id="55"> That must be quite the experience to be there.</seg>
<seg id="56"> I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend.</seg>
<seg id="57"> Just wanted to drop you a note.</seg>
<seg id="58"> Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc.</seg>
<seg id="59"> I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home.</seg>
<seg id="60"> Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19.</seg>
<seg id="61"> He never made it there.</seg>
<seg id="62"> I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening.</seg>
<seg id="63"> The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge.</seg>
<seg id="64"> A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1:58 p.m. the previous day.</seg>
<seg id="65"> Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves.</seg>
<seg id="66"> Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness?</seg>
<seg id="67"> It shouldn't be so easy to end it.</seg>
<seg id="68"> My prayers are with you for your fight.</seg>
<seg id="69"> The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard.</seg>
<seg id="70"> Good luck this week. Vicky."</seg>
<seg id="71"> I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on.</seg>
<seg id="72"> I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage.</seg>
<seg id="73"> On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower.</seg>
<seg id="74"> I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk.</seg>
<seg id="75"> For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness.</seg>
<seg id="76"> Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance.</seg>
<seg id="77"> When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him.</seg>
<seg id="78"> "This is a new beginning, a new life."</seg>
<seg id="79"> But I asked him, "What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance?"</seg>
<seg id="80"> And you know what he told me?</seg>
<seg id="81"> He said, "You listened.</seg>
<seg id="82"> You let me speak, and you just listened."</seg>
<seg id="83"> Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you.</seg>
<seg id="84"> "Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us.</seg>
<seg id="85"> I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help.</seg>
<seg id="86"> He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated.</seg>
<seg id="87"> I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know.</seg>
<seg id="88"> Kevin is straight, as he says.</seg>
<seg id="89"> We truly thank God for you.</seg>
<seg id="90"> Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia."</seg>
<seg id="91"> And on the bottom she writes, "P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient.</seg>
<seg id="92"> Boy, did I have to straighten that one out."</seg>
<seg id="93"> Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society.</seg>
<seg id="94"> He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others.</seg>
<seg id="95"> Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job.</seg>
<seg id="96"> It's personal.</seg>
<seg id="97"> My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning.</seg>
<seg id="98"> That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him.</seg>
<seg id="99"> This is what suicide does.</seg>
<seg id="100"> For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person.</seg>
<seg id="101"> They just want their own pain to end.</seg>
<seg id="102"> Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death.</seg>
<seg id="103"> In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge.</seg>
<seg id="104"> Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many.</seg>
<seg id="105"> One was Jason.</seg>
<seg id="106"> The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour.</seg>
<seg id="107"> During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions.</seg>
<seg id="108"> On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, "Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go."</seg>
<seg id="109"> And he leapt.</seg>
<seg id="110"> I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide.</seg>
<seg id="111"> Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live.</seg>
<seg id="112"> I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also.</seg>
<seg id="113"> That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do.</seg>
<seg id="114"> Suicide is preventable.</seg>
<seg id="115"> There is help. There is hope.</seg>
<seg id="116"> Thank you very much.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="1961" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/geena_rocero_why_i_must_come_out</url>
<keywords>talks, LGBT, TED Conference, Transgender, activism, beauty, fashion, gender, identity, inequality</keywords>
<speaker>Geena Rocero</speaker>
<talkid>1961</talkid>
<title>Geena Rocero: Why I must come out</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: When fashion model Geena Rocero first saw a photo of herself in a bikini, "I thought ... you have arrived!" As she reveals, that’s because she was born with the gender assignment “boy.” In this moving talk, Rocero tells the story of becoming who she always knew she was.</description>
<seg id="1"> The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that?</seg>
<seg id="2"> I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all.</seg>
<seg id="3"> So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child.</seg>
<seg id="4"> My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self.</seg>
<seg id="5"> For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived.</seg>
<seg id="6"> But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning.</seg>
<seg id="7"> All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies.</seg>
<seg id="8"> Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them.</seg>
<seg id="9"> Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable.</seg>
<seg id="10"> In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history.</seg>
<seg id="11"> I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head.</seg>
<seg id="12"> And my mom asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?"</seg>
<seg id="13"> I said, "Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl."</seg>
<seg id="14"> I knew then how to self-identify.</seg>
<seg id="15"> Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious.</seg>
<seg id="16"> Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free.</seg>
<seg id="17"> Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman.</seg>
<seg id="18"> I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am.</seg>
<seg id="19"> Many are not so fortunate.</seg>
<seg id="20"> There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender.</seg>
<seg id="21"> There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion.</seg>
<seg id="22"> There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess.</seg>
<seg id="23"> So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries.</seg>
<seg id="24"> I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be.</seg>
<seg id="25"> So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L.</seg>
<seg id="26"> She is a transgender beauty pageant manager.</seg>
<seg id="27"> That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?"</seg>
<seg id="28"> That moment changed my life.</seg>
<seg id="29"> All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants.</seg>
<seg id="30"> Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it.</seg>
<seg id="31"> So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains -- it rains a lot in the Philippines -- the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house.</seg>
<seg id="32"> I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines.</seg>
<seg id="33"> But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community.</seg>
<seg id="34"> In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States.</seg>
<seg id="35"> I resisted it.</seg>
<seg id="36"> I told my mom, "Mom, I'm having fun.</seg>
<seg id="37"> I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant queen."</seg>
<seg id="38"> But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker?"</seg>
<seg id="39"> That was all I needed to hear.</seg>
<seg id="40"> My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name.</seg>
<seg id="41"> She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old.</seg>
<seg id="42"> It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery.</seg>
<seg id="43"> At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker.</seg>
<seg id="44"> So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F.</seg>
<seg id="45"> That was a powerful moment.</seg>
<seg id="46"> For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified.</seg>
<seg id="47"> I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model.</seg>
<seg id="48"> Many are not so fortunate.</seg>
<seg id="49"> I think of this woman named Islan Nettles.</seg>
<seg id="50"> She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life.</seg>
<seg id="51"> For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live.</seg>
<seg id="52"> Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population.</seg>
<seg id="53"> Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance.</seg>
<seg id="54"> I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice.</seg>
<seg id="55"> This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.</seg>
<seg id="56"> Today, this very moment, is my real coming out.</seg>
<seg id="57"> I could no longer live my truth for and by myself.</seg>
<seg id="58"> I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror.</seg>
<seg id="59"> I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil.</seg>
<seg id="60"> My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am.</seg>
<seg id="61"> Will you?</seg>
<seg id="62"> Thank you very much.</seg>
<seg id="63"> I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them?</seg>
<seg id="64"> Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed.</seg>
<seg id="65"> And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right?</seg>
<seg id="66"> I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues.</seg>
<seg id="67"> The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started.</seg>
<seg id="68"> There's still a lot of work that needs to be done.</seg>
<seg id="69"> There should be an understanding.</seg>
<seg id="70"> There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies.</seg>
<seg id="71"> Thank you. That was so lovely. Thank you.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="1954" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/ziauddin_yousafzai_my_daughter_malala</url>
<keywords>talks, education, family, feminism, global issues, women, yesallwomen</keywords>
<speaker>Ziauddin Yousafzai</speaker>
<talkid>1954</talkid>
<title>Ziauddin Yousafzai: My daughter, Malala</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Pakistani educator Ziauddin Yousafzai reminds the world of a simple truth that many don’t want to hear: Women and men deserve equal opportunities for education, autonomy, an independent identity. He tells stories from his own life and the life of his daughter, Malala, who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 simply for daring to go to school. "Why is my daughter so strong?” Yousafzai asks. “Because I didn’t clip her wings."</description>
<seg id="1"> In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it.</seg>
<seg id="2"> Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father.</seg>
<seg id="3"> Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation.</seg>
<seg id="4"> She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother.</seg>
<seg id="5"> The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father.</seg>
<seg id="6"> And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child.</seg>
<seg id="7"> When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad.</seg>
<seg id="8"> When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal.</seg>
<seg id="9"> Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too.</seg>
<seg id="10"> At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school.</seg>
<seg id="11"> Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life.</seg>
<seg id="12"> She can have fun.</seg>
<seg id="13"> She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly.</seg>
<seg id="14"> But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort.</seg>
<seg id="15"> She is confined under the four walls of her home.</seg>
<seg id="16"> She is no more a free individual.</seg>
<seg id="17"> She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed.</seg>
<seg id="18"> And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family.</seg>
<seg id="19"> I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood.</seg>
<seg id="20"> So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor.</seg>
<seg id="21"> And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience.</seg>
<seg id="22"> A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive.</seg>
<seg id="23"> It is the criteria.</seg>
<seg id="24"> The role model good girl should be very quiet.</seg>
<seg id="25"> She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them.</seg>
<seg id="26"> Otherwise, she will be called disobedient.</seg>
<seg id="27"> And what happens at the end?</seg>
<seg id="28"> In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters.</seg>
<seg id="29"> And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on.</seg>
<seg id="30"> Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women.</seg>
<seg id="31"> Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored.</seg>
<seg id="32"> And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan.</seg>
<seg id="33"> Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her.</seg>
<seg id="34"> A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came -- and it was a coincidence -- he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors.</seg>
<seg id="35"> But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "Malala."</seg>
<seg id="36"> And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school.</seg>
<seg id="37"> You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school?</seg>
<seg id="38"> Yes, I must mention it.</seg>
<seg id="39"> It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl.</seg>
<seg id="40"> Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name.</seg>
<seg id="41"> Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life.</seg>
<seg id="42"> I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters.</seg>
<seg id="43"> And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document.</seg>
<seg id="44"> What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it.</seg>
<seg id="45"> I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter.</seg>
<seg id="46"> I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come.</seg>
<seg id="47"> I encouraged her to go with me to different meetings.</seg>
<seg id="48"> And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality.</seg>
<seg id="49"> And this was not only she, only Malala.</seg>
<seg id="50"> I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students and boy students as well.</seg>
<seg id="51"> I used education for emancipation.</seg>
<seg id="52"> I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience.</seg>
<seg id="53"> I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor.</seg>
<seg id="54"> Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society.</seg>
<seg id="55"> But we came across a new phenomenon.</seg>
<seg id="56"> It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights.</seg>
<seg id="57"> It was called Talibanization.</seg>
<seg id="58"> It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities.</seg>
<seg id="59"> Hundreds of schools were lost.</seg>
<seg id="60"> Girls were prohibited from going to school.</seg>
<seg id="61"> Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets.</seg>
<seg id="62"> Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed.</seg>
<seg id="63"> Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights.</seg>
<seg id="64"> It's really the most scary thing.</seg>
<seg id="65"> At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education.</seg>
<seg id="66"> She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could.</seg>
<seg id="67"> And her voice was the most powerful voice.</seg>
<seg id="68"> It spread like a crescendo all around the world.</seg>
<seg id="69"> And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range.</seg>
<seg id="70"> It was a doomsday for my family and for me.</seg>
<seg id="71"> The world turned into a big black hole.</seg>
<seg id="72"> While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, "Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter?"</seg>
<seg id="73"> And she abruptly told me, "Please don't blame yourself.</seg>
<seg id="74"> You stood for the right cause.</seg>
<seg id="75"> You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you.</seg>
<seg id="76"> You both were on the right path and God will protect her."</seg>
<seg id="77"> These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again.</seg>
<seg id="78"> When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife.</seg>
<seg id="79"> But my daughter never complained.</seg>
<seg id="80"> She used to tell us, "I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face.</seg>
<seg id="81"> I'll be okay. Please don't worry."</seg>
<seg id="82"> She was a solace for us, and she consoled us.</seg>
<seg id="83"> Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl.</seg>
<seg id="84"> She cries when her homework is incomplete.</seg>
<seg id="85"> She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that.</seg>
<seg id="86"> People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised?</seg>
<seg id="87"> I tell them, don't ask me what I did.</seg>
<seg id="88"> Ask me what I did not do.</seg>
<seg id="89"> I did not clip her wings, and that's all.</seg>
<seg id="90"> Thank you very much.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="1939" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_could_future_devices_read_images_from_our_brains</url>
<keywords>talks, TED Conference, brain, creativity, neuroscience, science</keywords>
<speaker>Mary Lou Jepsen</speaker>
<talkid>1939</talkid>
<title>Mary Lou Jepsen: Could future devices read images from our brains?</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: As an expert on cutting-edge digital displays, Mary Lou Jepsen studies how to show our most creative ideas on screens. And as a brain surgery patient herself, she is driven to know more about the neural activity that underlies invention, creativity, thought. She meshes these two passions in a rather mind-blowing talk on two cutting-edge brain studies that might point to a new frontier in understanding how (and what) we think.</description>
<seg id="1"> I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine.</seg>
<seg id="2"> I'm actually an engineer.</seg>
<seg id="3"> So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery.</seg>
<seg id="4"> Are you still smart or not?</seg>
<seg id="5"> And if not, can you make yourself smart again?</seg>
<seg id="6"> Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours.</seg>
<seg id="7"> There have been several close calls.</seg>
<seg id="8"> But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed.</seg>
<seg id="9"> I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people.</seg>
<seg id="10"> One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed.</seg>
<seg id="11"> I was kind of extreme.</seg>
<seg id="12"> But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant.</seg>
<seg id="13"> I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way.</seg>
<seg id="14"> But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then.</seg>
<seg id="15"> What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow.</seg>
<seg id="16"> And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric -- how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios.</seg>
<seg id="17"> This kind of thinking isn't new.</seg>
<seg id="18"> Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly.</seg>
<seg id="19"> They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing.</seg>
<seg id="20"> There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking.</seg>
<seg id="21"> So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them.</seg>
<seg id="22"> And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster?</seg>
<seg id="23"> Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her?</seg>
<seg id="24"> Or a musician to get the music out of his head?</seg>
<seg id="25"> There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed.</seg>
<seg id="26"> So let me show you why I think we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups.</seg>
<seg id="27"> Both used fMRI technology -- functional magnetic resonance imaging technology -- to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard.</seg>
<seg id="28"> And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image.</seg>
<seg id="29"> The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image.</seg>
<seg id="30"> And the right column was created by subtracting the middle column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero.</seg>
<seg id="31"> This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result.</seg>
<seg id="32"> The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing.</seg>
<seg id="33"> Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley.</seg>
<seg id="34"> In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences.</seg>
<seg id="35"> Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded.</seg>
<seg id="36"> The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the individual was actually seeing.</seg>
<seg id="37"> On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip.</seg>
<seg id="38"> This is the jaw-dropper.</seg>
<seg id="39"> We are so close to being able to do this.</seg>
<seg id="40"> We just need to up the resolution.</seg>
<seg id="41"> And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan.</seg>
<seg id="42"> So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years.</seg>
<seg id="43"> Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse.</seg>
<seg id="44"> How do we do that?</seg>
<seg id="45"> There's a lot of techniques in this approach.</seg>
<seg id="46"> One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes.</seg>
<seg id="47"> I'm not for that.</seg>
<seg id="48"> There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology?</seg>
<seg id="49"> Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need.</seg>
<seg id="50"> I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets.</seg>
<seg id="51"> We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph.</seg>
<seg id="52"> So why does that matter?</seg>
<seg id="53"> A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right?</seg>
<seg id="54"> But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems.</seg>
<seg id="55"> Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies.</seg>
<seg id="56"> So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan.</seg>
<seg id="57"> And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream.</seg>
<seg id="58"> We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media.</seg>
<seg id="59"> Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought?</seg>
<seg id="60"> What would we be capable of then?</seg>
<seg id="61"> And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought?</seg>
<seg id="62"> You think the Internet was big.</seg>
<seg id="63"> These are huge questions.</seg>
<seg id="64"> It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills.</seg>
<seg id="65"> And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases.</seg>
<seg id="66"> We have little option but to open this door.</seg>
<seg id="67"> It's hard to imagine it taking much longer.</seg>
<seg id="68"> We need to learn how to take this step together.</seg>
<seg id="69"> Thank you.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="1932" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/ash_beckham_we_re_all_hiding_something_let_s_find_the_courage_to_open_up</url>
<keywords>talks, TEDx, culture, empathy, happiness</keywords>
<speaker>Ash Beckham</speaker>
<talkid>1932</talkid>
<title>Ash Beckham: We're all hiding something. Let's find the courage to open up</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: In this touching talk, Ash Beckham offers a fresh approach to empathy and openness. It starts with understanding that everyone, at some point in their life, has experienced hardship. The only way out, says Beckham, is to open the door and step out of your closet.</description>
<seg id="1"> I think we all have closets.</seg>
<seg id="2"> Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you're pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives.</seg>
<seg id="3"> All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal.</seg>
<seg id="4"> It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done.</seg>
<seg id="5"> Several years ago, I was working at the South Side Walnut Cafe, a local diner in town, and during my time there I would go through phases of militant lesbian intensity: not shaving my armpits, quoting Ani DiFranco lyrics as gospel.</seg>
<seg id="6"> And depending on the bagginess of my cargo shorts and how recently I had shaved my head, the question would often be sprung on me, usually by a little kid: "Um, are you a boy or are you a girl?"</seg>
<seg id="7"> And there would be an awkward silence at the table.</seg>
<seg id="8"> I'd clench my jaw a little tighter, hold my coffee pot with a little more vengeance.</seg>
<seg id="9"> The dad would awkwardly shuffle his newspaper and the mom would shoot a chilling stare at her kid.</seg>
<seg id="10"> But I would say nothing, and I would seethe inside.</seg>
<seg id="11"> So I promised myself, the next time, I would say something.</seg>
<seg id="12"> I would have that hard conversation.</seg>
<seg id="13"> So within a matter of weeks, it happens again.</seg>
<seg id="14"> "Are you a boy or are you a girl?"</seg>
<seg id="15"> I've got my Gloria Steinem quotes.</seg>
<seg id="16"> I've even got this little bit from "Vagina Monologues" I'm going to do.</seg>
<seg id="17"> So I take a deep breath and I look down and staring back at me is a four-year-old girl in a pink dress, not a challenge to a feminist duel, just a kid with a question: "Are you a boy or are you a girl?"</seg>
<seg id="18"> So I take another deep breath, squat down to next to her, and say, "Hey, I know it's kind of confusing.</seg>
<seg id="19"> My hair is short like a boy's, and I wear boy's clothes, but I'm a girl, and you know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress, and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies?</seg>
<seg id="20"> Well, I'm more of a comfy jammies kind of girl."</seg>
<seg id="21"> And this kid looks me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and says, "My favorite pajamas are purple with fish.</seg>
<seg id="22"> Can I get a pancake, please?"</seg>
<seg id="23"> How about that pancake?"</seg>
<seg id="24"> It was the easiest hard conversation I have ever had.</seg>
<seg id="25"> And why? Because Pancake Girl and I, we were both real with each other.</seg>
<seg id="26"> So like many of us, I've lived in a few closets in my life, and yeah, most often, my walls happened to be rainbow.</seg>
<seg id="27"> But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are.</seg>
<seg id="28"> You just know what it feels like to live in a closet.</seg>
<seg id="29"> So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours.</seg>
<seg id="30"> Sure, I'll give you 100 reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours, but here's the thing: Hard is not relative.</seg>
<seg id="31"> Hard is hard.</seg>
<seg id="32"> Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them?</seg>
<seg id="33"> Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your five-year-old you're getting a divorce?</seg>
<seg id="34"> There is no harder, there is just hard.</seg>
<seg id="35"> We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard.</seg>
<seg id="36"> At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door.</seg>
<seg id="37"> But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live.</seg>
<seg id="38"> Me, I had a ponytail, a strapless dress, and high-heeled shoes.</seg>
<seg id="39"> I was not the militant lesbian ready to fight any four-year-old that walked into the cafe.</seg>
<seg id="40"> I was frozen by fear, curled up in the corner of my pitch-black closet clutching my gay grenade, and moving one muscle is the scariest thing I have ever done.</seg>
<seg id="41"> My family, my friends, complete strangers -- I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose.</seg>
<seg id="42"> I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you.</seg>
<seg id="43"> One of my most memorable grenade tosses was at my sister's wedding.</seg>
<seg id="44"> And after a little small talk, one of the women shouted out, "I love Nathan Lane!"</seg>
<seg id="45"> And the battle of gay relatability had begun.</seg>
<seg id="46"> "Ash, have you ever been to the Castro?"</seg>
<seg id="47"> "Well, yeah, actually, we have friends in San Francisco."</seg>
<seg id="48"> "Well, we've never been there but we've heard it's fabulous."</seg>
<seg id="49"> "Ash, do you know my hairdresser Antonio?</seg>
<seg id="50"> He's really good and he has never talked about a girlfriend."</seg>
<seg id="51"> "Ash, what's your favorite TV show?</seg>
<seg id="52"> Our favorite TV show? Favorite: Will &amp; Grace.</seg>
<seg id="53"> And you know who we love? Jack.</seg>
<seg id="54"> Jack is our favorite."</seg>
<seg id="55"> And then one woman, stumped but wanting so desperately to show her support, to let me know she was on my side, she finally blurted out, "Well, sometimes my husband wears pink shirts."</seg>
<seg id="56"> I could go back to my girlfriend and my gay-loving table and mock their responses, chastise their unworldliness and their inability to jump through the politically correct gay hoops I had brought with me, or I could empathize with them and realize that that was maybe one of the hardest things they had ever done, that starting and having that conversation was them coming out of their closets.</seg>
<seg id="57"> Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they felt short.</seg>
<seg id="58"> It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge the fact that they were trying.</seg>
<seg id="59"> And what else can you ask someone to do but try?</seg>
<seg id="60"> If you're going to be real with someone, you gotta be ready for real in return.</seg>
<seg id="61"> So hard conversations are still not my strong suit.</seg>
<seg id="62"> Ask anybody I have ever dated.</seg>
<seg id="63"> But I'm getting better, and I follow what I like to call the three Pancake Girl principles.</seg>
<seg id="64"> Now, please view this through gay-colored lenses, but know what it takes to come out of any closet is essentially the same.</seg>
<seg id="65"> Number one: Be authentic.</seg>
<seg id="66"> Take the armor off. Be yourself.</seg>
<seg id="67"> That kid in the cafe had no armor, but I was ready for battle.</seg>
<seg id="68"> If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too.</seg>
<seg id="69"> Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off.</seg>
<seg id="70"> If you know you are gay, just say it.</seg>
<seg id="71"> If you tell your parents you might be gay, they will hold out hope that this will change.</seg>
<seg id="72"> Do not give them that sense of false hope.</seg>
<seg id="73"> You are speaking your truth.</seg>
<seg id="74"> Never apologize for that.</seg>
<seg id="75"> And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are.</seg>
<seg id="76"> And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you.</seg>
<seg id="77"> Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours.</seg>
<seg id="78"> That is their story, not yours.</seg>
<seg id="79"> The only story that matters is the one that you want to write.</seg>
<seg id="80"> So the next time you find yourself in a pitch-black closet clutching your grenade, know we have all been there before.</seg>
<seg id="81"> And you may feel so very alone, but you are not.</seg>
<seg id="82"> And we know it's hard but we need you out here, no matter what your walls are made of, because I guarantee you there are others peering through the keyholes of their closets looking for the next brave soul to bust a door open, so be that person and show the world that we are bigger than our closets and that a closet is no place for a person to truly live.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
<doc docid="1922" genre="lectures">
<url>http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_wissner_gross_a_new_equation_for_intelligence</url>
<keywords>talks, TEDx, intelligence, mind, physics, science</keywords>
<speaker>Alex Wissner-Gross</speaker>
<talkid>1922</talkid>
<title>Alex Wissner-Gross: A new equation for intelligence</title>
<description>TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Is there an equation for intelligence? Yes. It’s F = T ∇ Sτ. In a fascinating and informative talk, physicist and computer scientist Alex Wissner-Gross explains what in the world that means. (Filmed at TEDxBeaconStreet.)</description>
<seg id="1"> Intelligence -- what is it?</seg>
<seg id="2"> If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim."</seg>
<seg id="3"> Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing.</seg>
<seg id="4"> However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines.</seg>
<seg id="5"> And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence.</seg>
<seg id="6"> Let's take a step back.</seg>
<seg id="7"> Let's first begin with a thought experiment.</seg>
<seg id="8"> Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years.</seg>
<seg id="9"> And you observe a really strange effect.</seg>
<seg id="10"> You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth.</seg>
<seg id="11"> Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves.</seg>
<seg id="12"> We're trying to prevent an impact.</seg>
<seg id="13"> But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that.</seg>
<seg id="14"> And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence.</seg>
<seg id="15"> So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence.</seg>
<seg id="16"> And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads?</seg>
<seg id="17"> Is there a single equation for intelligence?</seg>
<seg id="18"> And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["F = T ∇ Sτ"] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen.</seg>
<seg id="19"> So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action.</seg>
<seg id="20"> It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau.</seg>
<seg id="21"> In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped.</seg>
<seg id="22"> Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open.</seg>
<seg id="23"> And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this?</seg>
<seg id="24"> How predictive is it?</seg>
<seg id="25"> Does it predict human-level intelligence?</seg>
<seg id="26"> Does it predict artificial intelligence?</seg>
<seg id="27"> So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation.</seg>
<seg id="28"> But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship?</seg>
<seg id="29"> What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it?</seg>
<seg id="30"> To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in.</seg>
<seg id="31"> Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so.</seg>
<seg id="32"> Here are some examples of Entropica in action.</seg>
<seg id="33"> Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart.</seg>
<seg id="34"> This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal.</seg>
<seg id="35"> It simply decided on its own to balance the pole.</seg>
<seg id="36"> This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies.</seg>
<seg id="37"> Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position.</seg>
<seg id="38"> This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture.</seg>
<seg id="39"> In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task.</seg>
<seg id="40"> This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields.</seg>
<seg id="41"> Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains.</seg>
<seg id="42"> For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming.</seg>
<seg id="43"> Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected.</seg>
<seg id="44"> This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence.</seg>
<seg id="45"> Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific.</seg>
<seg id="46"> By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation.</seg>
<seg id="47"> Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially.</seg>
<seg id="48"> This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance.</seg>
<seg id="49"> Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action.</seg>
<seg id="50"> Now, there's a profound irony here.</seg>
<seg id="51"> Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "RUR," there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt.</seg>
<seg id="52"> The machines would rise up against us.</seg>
<seg id="53"> One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse.</seg>
<seg id="54"> It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world.</seg>
<seg id="55"> Another important consequence is goal seeking.</seg>
<seg id="56"> I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework?</seg>
<seg id="57"> Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together.</seg>
<seg id="58"> My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future.</seg>
<seg id="59"> Thank you very much.</seg>
<reviewer href="http://www.ted.com/profiles/2064042">Mad Aronson</reviewer>
<translator></translator>
</doc>
</srcset>
</mteval>