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children are natural learners it's a real achievement to put that particular ability out or to stifle it curiosity is the engine of achievement now the reason i say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here if i can say so has been to de professionalize teachers
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but if nobody's learning anything she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it the role of a teacher is to facilitate learning that's it and part of the problem is i think that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning but testing
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we all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity instead what we have is a culture of standardization now it doesn't have to be that way it really doesn't finland regularly comes out on top in math science and reading now we only know that's what they do well at because that's all that's being tested
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they recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them their curiosity their individuality and their creativity that's how you get them to learn the second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession they recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development
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second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession they recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development investing in professional development is not a cost it's an investment and every other country that's succeeding well knows that whether it's australia canada south korea singapore hong kong or shanghai they know that to be the case and the third is they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done you see there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education that's what happens in some systems central or state governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do the trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings
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it's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time and the reason i think is this that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education it's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine tune it well enough if we just get it right it will all hum along perfectly into the future it won't and it never did
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point is that education is not a mechanical system it's a human system it's about people people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography they may find it boring they may find it irrelevant they may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school
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so i think we have to embrace a different metaphor we have to recognize that it's a human system and there are conditions under which people thrive and conditions under which they don't we are after all organic creatures and the culture of the school is absolutely essential culture is an organic term isn't it not far from where i live is a place called death valley death valley is the hottest driest place in america and nothing grows there
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where i live is a place called death valley death valley is the hottest driest place in america and nothing grows there nothing grows there because it doesn't rain hence death valley in the winter of it rained in death valley seven inches of rain fell over a very short period and in the spring of there was a phenomenon the whole floor of death valley was carpeted in flowers for a while what it proved is this that death valley isn't dead
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god we know is usually on the side of the big battalions the question is which god was it and the debate everybody in the century to realize that the hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion and it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of isaiah and yet jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by and there's a slight sense that isaiah knows this because he says this is god speaking of course i have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me i think it's recognized that cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from jehovah and equally he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from because interestingly of course cyrus is a good iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts
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make have one supreme quality they live longer than us we perish they survive we have one life they have many lives and in each life they can mean different things which means that while we all have one biography they have many i want this morning to talk about the story the biography or rather the biographies of one particular object one remarkable thing it doesn't i agree look very much it's about the size of a rugby ball
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is there i can tell step four is i then move the move the sky so the altitude of the star corresponds to the scale on the back okay so when that happens everything lines up i have here a model of the sky that corresponds to the real sky okay so it is in a sense holding a model of the universe in my hands and then finally i take a rule and move the rule to a date line which then tells me the time here right so that's how the device is used
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everyone knows that we can't drive or women are not allowed to drive in saudi arabia but maybe few know why allow me to help you answer this question there was this official study that was presented to the council it's the consultative council appointed by the king in saudi arabia and it was done by a local professor a university professor he claims it's done based on a unesco study and the study states the percentage of rape adultery illegitimate children even drug abuse prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive
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earlier that day i noticed some bruises on his face when he came from school he wouldn't tell me what happened but now he was ready to tell two boys hit me today in school they told me saw your mom on you and your mom should be put in jail i've never been afraid to tell anything i've been always a proud woman of my achievements
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thirteen years ago we set ourselves a goal to end poverty after some success we've hit a big hurdle the aftermath of the financial crisis has begun to hit aid payments which have fallen for two consecutive years my question is whether the lessons learned from saving the financial system can be used to help us overcome that hurdle and help millions can we simply print money for aid surely not it's a common reaction
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others channel john mcenroe you cannot be serious now i can't do the accent but i am serious thanks to these two children who as you'll learn are very much at the heart of my talk on the left we have pia she lives in england she has two loving parents one of whom is standing right here
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i'm not saying that there's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras the reasons usually just boil down to the which is the force feeding basically you take a goose or a duck and you force feed a ton of grain down its throat more grain in a couple of weeks than it would ever get in a lifetime its liver expands by eight times suffice to say it's like it's not the prettiest picture of sustainable farming the problem for us chefs is that it's so delicious
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it is fatty it's sweet it's silky it's unctuous it makes everything else you put it with taste incredible can we produce a menu that's delicious without foie gras yes sure you can also bike the tour de france without steroids right not a lot of people are doing it and for good reason
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and it's shockingly not a new idea his great started patera de sousa in and they've been doing it quietly ever since that is until last year when eduardo won the coup de coeur the coveted french gastronomic prize it's like the olympics of food products he placed first for his foie gras big big problem as he said to me that really pissed the french off
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you know foie gras by definition force feeding it's and that's what you get when you want foie gras that is until i went to farm in miles north of seville right on the portugal border i saw first hand a system that is incredibly complex and then at the same time like everything beautiful in nature is utterly simple and he said to me really from the first moment my life's work is to give the geese what they want he repeated that about times in the two days i was with him i'm just here to give the geese what they want actually when i showed up he was lying down with the geese with his cell phone taking pictures of them like his children in the grass amazing he's really just in love with he's at one with he's the goose
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but he found this wild plant called the lupin bush the lupin bush it's all around he let it go to seed he took the seeds he planted it on his acres all around and the geese love the lupin bush not for the bush but for the seeds and when they eat the seeds their foie gras turns yellow radioactive yellow bright yellow of the highest quality foie gras yellow i've ever seen
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watch this and this squadron of geese come over clapping and they're getting louder louder louder like really loud right over us and like airport traffic control as they start to go past us they're called back and they're called back and back and back and then they circle around and his geese are calling up now to the wild geese clapping and the wild geese are calling down clapping and it's getting louder and louder and they circle and circle and they land and i'm just saying no way
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to happiness they find it here they don't need anything more they stop they mate with his domesticated geese and his flock continues think about that for a minute it's brilliant right imagine i don't know imagine a hog farm in like north carolina and a wild pig comes upon a factory farm and decides to stay
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we went back out for the final tour of the farm and he showed me the wild pepper plants and the plants that he made sure existed on his farm for salinity he doesn't need salt and pepper and he doesn't need spices because he's got this potpourri of herbs and flavors that his geese love to gorge on i turned to him at the end of the meal and it's a question i asked several times and he hadn't kind of answered me directly but i said now look you're in spain some of the greatest chefs in the world are ferran adria the preeminent chef of the world today not that far from you how come you don't give him this how come no one's really heard of you and it may be because of the wine or it may be because of my excitement he answered me directly and he said because chefs don't deserve my foie gras
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because what i saw i'm convinced is the future of cooking ridiculous right foie gras and the future of cooking there's not a food today that's more maligned than foie gras right i mean it's crucified it was outlawed in chicago for a while it's pending here in california and just recently in new york it's like if you're a chef and you put it on your menu you risk being attacked really it happened here in san francisco to a famous chef i'm not saying that there's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras the reasons usually just boil down to the which is the force feeding
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so several months ago a friend of mine sent me this link to this guy eduardo sousa eduardo is doing what he calls natural foie gras natural foie gras what's natural about foie gras to take advantage of when the temperature drops in the fall geese and ducks gorge on food to prepare for the harsh realities of winter and the rest of the year they're free to roam around land and eat what they want
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was all over the papers i read about it it was in le monde spanish chef accused and the french accused him spanish chef accused of cheating they accused him of paying off the judges
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spanish chef accused of cheating they accused him of paying off the judges they implicated actually the spanish government amazingly huh amazing a huge scandal for a few weeks couldn't find a shred of evidence now look at the guy he doesn't look like a guy who's paying off french judges for his foie gras so that died down and very soon afterward new controversy
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he doesn't look like a guy who's paying off french judges for his foie gras so that died down and very soon afterward new controversy he shouldn't win because it's not foie gras it's not foie gras because it's not there's no force feeding so by definition he's lying and should be disqualified as funny as it sounds articulating it now and reading about it actually if we had talked about it before this controversy i would have said that's kind of true you know foie gras by definition force feeding it's and that's what you get when you want foie gras that is until i went to farm in miles north of seville right on the portugal border
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and he stopped doing this and amazingly the geese who were on the other side of the paddock when i was around get the hell away from this kid when i lowered my voice they all came right up to us right up to us like right up to here right along the fence line and fence line was amazing in itself the fence like this conception of fence that we have it's totally backward with him the electricity on this fiberglass fence is only on the outside he rewired it he invented it
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you electrify the inside he doesn't he electrifies only the outside why because he said to me that he felt like the geese and he proved this actually not just a conceit he proved this the geese felt manipulated when they were imprisoned in their little even though they were imprisoned in this garden of eden with figs and everything else he felt like they felt manipulated so he got rid of the electricity he got rid of current on the inside and kept it on the outside so it would protect them against coyotes and other predators now what happened they ate and he showed me on a chart how they ate about percent more feed to feed their livers the landscape is incredible
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you can see a modern road hardly years old it can break sometimes but this year old canal which draws water it is maintained for so many generations of course if you want to go inside the two doors are locked but they can be opened for ted people
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you can see person coming up with two canisters of water and the water level these are not empty canisters water level is right up to this it can envy many municipalities the color the taste the purity of this water and this is what they call zero b type of water because it comes from the clouds pure distilled water we stop for a quick commercial break and then we come back to the traditional systems the government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi million dollar project to bring water from the himalayas that's why i said that this is a commercial break
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so water from kilometers away soon it become like this in many portions water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything of course there are some areas where water is reaching i'm not saying that it is not reaching at all but the tail end the area you will notice in things like this where the water hyacinth couldn't grow the sand is flowing in these canals the bonus is that you can find wildlife around it
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and they have dubbed this water as the third one called unclear and there is a gypsum belt running below it and it was deposited by the great mother earth some three million years ago and where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water this is the same dry water body now you don't find any they are all submerged but when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year this year they have received only six centimeters six centimeter of rainfall and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city delhi bombay bangalore please come to our area of six centimeters we can give you water
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the last point we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert so you can find through your jeep a camel and a cart this tire comes from the airplane so look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater and also create something through a tire from a jet plane and used in a camel cart last picture it's a tattoo old tattoo they were using it on their body tattoo was at one time a kind of a blacklisted or con thing but now it is in thing
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for emotions we should not move quickly to the desert so first a small housekeeping announcement please switch off your proper english check programs installed in your brain so welcome to the golden desert indian desert it receives the least rainfall in the country lowest rainfall if you are well versed with inches nine inches centimeters centimeters
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it receives the least rainfall in the country lowest rainfall if you are well versed with inches nine inches centimeters centimeters the groundwater is feet deep meters and in most parts it is saline not fit for drinking so you can't install hand pumps or dig wells though there is no electricity in most of the villages but suppose you use the green technology solar pumps they are of no use in this area so welcome to the golden desert clouds seldom visit this area but we find different names of clouds in this dialect used here
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you can notice they have created a kind of false the desert is there sand dunes some small field and this is all big raised platform you can notice the small holes the water will fall on this and there is a slope sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms but here they will care properly and the water will go where it should go and then it is feet deep the waterproofing is done perfectly better than our city contractors because not a single drop should go waste in this
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so this was the terminal point for silk well connected years ago through europe none of us were able to go to europe but was well connected to it and this is the centimeter area such a limited rainfall and highest colorful life flourished in these areas you won't find water in this slide but it is invisible somewhere a stream or a is running through here or if you want to paint you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms
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but apart from this system they designed beautiful water bodies around this town and what we call private public partnership you can add estate also so estate public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body and it's a kind of water body for all seasons you will admire it just behold the beauty throughout the year whether water level goes up or down the beauty is there throughout
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another water body dried up of course during the summer period but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics with the heart these statues marvelous statues gives you an idea of water table when this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in english today mass communication this was for mass communication everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned so water will be there for seven months or nine months or months and then they will come and worship this pond pay respect their gratitude another small water body called the unclear
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so if you accept these two principles the o ring principle and the never principle then you agree with me there will be jobs does that mean there's nothing to worry about automation employment robots and jobs it'll all take care of itself no that is not my argument automation creates wealth by allowing us to do more work in less time there is no economic law that says that we will use that wealth well and that is worth worrying about consider two countries norway and saudi arabia both oil rich nations it's like they have money spurting out of a hole in the ground
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these predictions strike me as arrogant these self proclaimed oracles are in effect saying if i can't think of what people will do for work in the future then you me and our kids aren't going to think of it either i don't have the guts to take that bet against human ingenuity look i can't tell you what people are going to do for work a hundred years from now but the future doesn't hinge on my imagination if i were a farmer in iowa in the year and an economist from the century down to my field and said hey guess what farmer in the next hundred years agricultural employment is going to fall from percent of all jobs to two percent purely due to rising productivity what do you think the other percent of workers are going to do i would not have said oh we got this we'll do app development radiological medicine yoga instruction
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in the years since the introduction of the automated teller machine those vending machines that dispense cash the number of human bank tellers employed in the united states has roughly doubled from about a quarter of a million to a half a million a quarter of a million in to about a half a million today with added since the year these facts revealed in a recent book by boston university economist james raise an intriguing question what are all those tellers doing and why hasn't automation eliminated their employment by now if you think about it many of the great inventions of the last years were designed to replace human labor tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil assembly lines were engineered to replace inconsistent human handiwork with machine perfection
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i'm going to try to answer that question tonight and along the way i'm going to tell you what this means for the future of work and the challenges that automation does and does not pose for our society why are there so many jobs there are actually two fundamental economic principles at stake one has to do with human genius and creativity the other has to do with human or greed if you like i'm going to call the first of these the o ring principle and it determines the type of work that we do
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but banks quickly discovered that it also was cheaper to open new branches and the number of bank branches increased by about percent in the same time period the net result was more branches and more tellers but those tellers were doing somewhat different work as their cash handling tasks receded they became less like checkout clerks and more like salespeople forging relationships with customers solving problems and introducing them to new products like credit cards loans and investments more tellers doing a more demanding job there's a general principle here most of the work that we do requires a multiplicity of skills and brains and brawn technical expertise and intuitive mastery perspiration and inspiration in the words of thomas edison in general automating some subset of those tasks doesn't make the other ones unnecessary in fact it makes them more important it increases their economic value
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the same principle applies if we're building a building if we're diagnosing and caring for a patient or if we are teaching a class to a roomful of high schoolers as our tools improve technology magnifies our leverage and increases the importance of our expertise and our judgment and our creativity
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and not to have sex with anyone else ever he buys a ring she buys a dress they go shopping for all sorts of things she takes him to arthur murray for ballroom dancing lessons and the big day comes and they'll stand before god and family and some guy her dad once did business with and they'll vow that nothing not abject poverty not life threatening illness not complete and utter misery will ever put the tiniest damper on their eternal love and devotion
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that's right when you have a close couple friend split up it increases your chances of getting a divorce by percent now i have to say i don't get this one at all
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now if you're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return i can't tell you how to find a chore loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness who prefers horror movies and doesn't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce but i can only encourage you to try because the benefits as i've pointed out are significant the bottom line is whether you're in it or you're searching for it i believe marriage is an institution worth pursuing and protecting so i hope you'll use the information i've given you today to weigh your personal strengths against your own risk factors for instance in my marriage i'd say i'm doing ok one the one hand i have a husband who's lean and incredibly handsome so i'm obviously going to need fatten him up and like i said we have those divorced friends who may secretly or subconsciously be trying to break us up
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so what made these courses so different after all online course content has been available for a while what made it different was that this was real course experience it started on a given day and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments and these would be real homework assignments for a real grade with a real deadline you can see the deadlines and the usage graph these are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon
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these four things prospect theory hyperbolic discounting status quo bias base rate bias they're all well documented so they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior so here the video pauses and the student types in the answer into the box and submits obviously they weren't paying attention
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this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems around each one of our courses a community of students had formed a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor what you see here is a self generated map from students in our princeton sociology course where they have put themselves on a world map and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways first of all there was a question and answer forum where students would pose questions and other students would answer those questions and the really amazing thing is because there were so many students it means that even if a student posed a question at o'clock in the morning somewhere around the world there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem and so in many of our courses the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was minutes which is not a level of service i have ever offered to my stanford students
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because we cannot afford as a society to provide every student with an individual human tutor but maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a so the question is how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph from the blue curve to the right side with the green curve mastery is easy to achieve using a computer because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times and it doesn't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times we've seen that in many of the examples that i've shown you and even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you so the goal here is to try and push and see how far we can get towards the green curve so if this is so great are universities now obsolete well mark twain certainly thought so he said that college is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes without passing through the brains of either
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like many of you i'm one of the lucky people i was born to a family where education was pervasive i'm a third generation a daughter of two academics in my childhood i played around in my father's university lab so it was taken for granted that i attend some of the best universities which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity unfortunately most of the people in the world are not so lucky
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most of the people in the world are not so lucky in some parts of the world for example south africa education is just not readily accessible in south africa the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority and as a consequence today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education that scarcity led to a crisis in january of this year at the university of johannesburg there were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions when the gates opened there was a stampede and people were injured and one woman died she was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life
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but even in parts of the world like the united states where education is available it might not be within reach there has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care what might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate for a total of percent since this makes education unaffordable for many people finally even for those who do manage to get the higher education the doors of opportunity might not open only a little over half of recent college graduates in the united states who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education this of course is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions but for many others they do not get the value for their time and their effort
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tom friedman in his recent new york times article captured in the way that no one else could the spirit behind our effort he said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary i've talked about what's desperately necessary let's talk about what's suddenly possible what's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big stanford classes each of which had an enrollment of people or more so to understand this let's look at one of those classes the machine learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder andrew ng andrew teaches one of the bigger stanford classes
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and in that time i have seen a lot of changes now that statistic is quite shocking and i want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of english
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you may be asking yourselves that very question now i know of course we have to make a living but nobody in this room thinks that that's the answer to the question why do we work for folks in this room the work we do is challenging it's engaging it's stimulating it's meaningful and if we're lucky it might even be important so we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid but that's not why we do what we do and in general i think we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that we do when we say of somebody that he's in it for the money we are not just being descriptive
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so the question is why and here's the answer the answer is technology now i know i know yeah yeah yeah technology automation screws people blah blah that's not what i mean i'm not talking about the kind of technology that has enveloped our lives and that people come to ted to hear about i'm not talking about the technology of things profound though that is i'm talking about another technology i'm talking about the technology of ideas i call it idea technology how clever of me
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now i think this is totally obvious but the very of it raises what is for me an incredibly profound question why if this is so obvious why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning how is it that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous meaningless and soul deadening why is it that as capitalism developed it created a mode of production of goods and services in which all the satisfactions that might come from work were eliminated workers who do this kind of work whether they do it in factories in call centers or in fulfillment warehouses do it for pay there is certainly no other earthly reason to do what they do except for pay
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in addition to creating things science creates ideas science creates ways of understanding and in the social sciences the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves and they have an enormous influence on how we think what we aspire to and how we act if you think your poverty is god's will you pray if you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy you shrink into despair
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you think your poverty is god's will you pray if you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy you shrink into despair and if you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination then you rise up in revolt whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty this is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings and this is why idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us and there's something special about idea technology that makes it different from the technology of things with things if the technology sucks it just vanishes right bad technology disappears with ideas false ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true
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i want you to put off your preconceptions your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles because that is the only way i'm going to get my story across to you and by the way if i come across as a sort of rabid hippie conservationist it's purely a figment of your imagination
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but in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures it was necessary for us to actually insert a small radio transmitter inside each snake now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets where the babies go after they hatch and remarkable things like this you're about to see this was just a few days ago in i had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra who had caught a venomous pit viper and it does it in such a way that it doesn't get bitten itself and king cobras feed only on snakes this little snake was kind of a bit for it what we'd call a or a donut or something like that
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is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it for one thing as i said it's just like a little snack for him you know usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes or even cobras but this guy who we're following right now is in the deep jungle whereas other king cobras very often come into the human interface you know the plantations to find big rat snakes and stuff this guy specializes in pit vipers and the guy who is working there with them he's from maharashtra he said i think he's after the
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okay we are actually the first species on earth to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival and i know we've all seen images enough to make us numb of the tragedies that we're perpetrating on the planet we're kind of like greedy kids using it all up aren't we and today is a time for me to talk to you about water it's not only because we like to drink lots of it and its marvelous derivatives beer wine etc
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i was a kid growing up in new york i was smitten by snakes the same way most kids are smitten by tops marbles cars trains cricket balls and my mother brave lady was partly to blame taking me to the new york natural history museum buying me books on snakes and then starting this infamous career of mine which has culminated in of course arriving in india years ago brought by my mother doris norden and my stepfather rama it's been a roller coaster ride two animals two reptiles really captivated me very early on one of them was the remarkable this crocodile which grows to almost feet long in the northern rivers and this charismatic snake the king cobra
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one of them was the remarkable this crocodile which grows to almost feet long in the northern rivers and this charismatic snake the king cobra what my purpose of the talk today really is is to sort of indelibly scar your minds with these charismatic and majestic creatures because this is what you will take away from here a with nature i hope the king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons what you're seeing here is very recently shot images in a forest nearby here of a female king cobra making her nest here is a limbless animal capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves and then laying her eggs inside to withstand to meters of rainfall in order that the eggs can incubate over the next days and hatch into little baby king cobras so she protects her eggs and after three months the babies finally do hatch out a majority of them will die of course
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my first experience with king cobras was in at a magical place called in this state and it is a marvelous rain forest this first encounter was kind of like the boy who kills the lion to become a warrior it really changed my life totally and it brought me straight into the conservation fray i ended up starting this research and education station in which you are all of course invited to visit
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also at the millennium scale we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the bible and in this supposed source of our moral values one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare such as the following from numbers and they against the as the lord commanded moses and they slew all the males and moses said unto them you saved all the women alive now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him but all the women children that have not know a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves in other words kill the men kill the children if you see any virgins then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them you can find four or five passages in the bible of this ilk also in the bible one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality adultery blasphemy idolatry talking back to your parents and picking up sticks on the sabbath
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according to non governmental organizations that keep such statistics since in europe and the americas there has been a steep decline in interstate wars in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms and in military coups even in south america worldwide there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars the yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from to the present and as you can see the death rate goes down from deaths per conflict per year in the to less than deaths per conflict per year in this decade as horrific as it is even in the year scale one can see a decline of violence since the end of the cold war there have been fewer civil wars fewer indeed a percent reduction since post world war highs and even a reversal of the uptick in homicide and violent crime this is from the uniform crime statistics you can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the and the then it soared upward for several decades and began a precipitous decline starting in the so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in president clinton if you're here thank you
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so the question is why are so many people so wrong about something so important i think there are a number of reasons one of them is we have better reporting the associated press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the earth than sixteenth century monks were there's a cognitive illusion we cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something the higher the probability that you assign to it things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age there are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets no one ever attracted observers advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better
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the second explanation is that in many times and places there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap in earlier times when suffering and early death were common in one's own life one has fewer about inflicting them on others and as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant one puts a higher value on life in general this was an argument from the political scientist james payne a third explanation invokes the concept of a sum game and was worked out in the book by the journalist robert wright wright points out that in certain circumstances cooperation or non violence can benefit both parties in an interaction such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in by allowing the trade of goods services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people the result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead and violence declines for selfish reasons as wright put it among the many reasons that i think that we should not bomb the japanese is that they built my mini van
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this has led to a common understanding of our situation namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from to our peril here is an example from an op ed on thanksgiving in the boston globe a couple of years ago where the writer wrote the indian life was a difficult one but there were no employment problems community harmony was strong substance abuse unknown crime nearly non existent what warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter now you're all familiar with this we teach it to our children
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now you're all familiar with this we teach it to our children we hear it on television and in storybooks now the original title of this session was everything you know is wrong and i'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong that in fact our ancestors were far more violent than we are that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence now in the decade of and iraq a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene but i'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture the decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon you can see it over millennia over centuries over decades and over years although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the age of reason in the sixteenth century one sees it all over the world although not
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and this is the state that's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony but the archaeologist lawrence keeley looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter gatherers which is our best source of evidence about this way of life has shown a rather different conclusion here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging or hunting and gathering societies the red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man as opposed to passing away of natural causes in a variety of foraging societies in the new guinea highlands and the amazon rainforest
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although we don't have statistics for warfare throughout the middle ages to modern times we know just from conventional history the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence for example any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were forms of criminal punishment the kind of infraction today that would give you a fine in those days would result in your tongue being cut out your ears being cut off you being blinded a hand being chopped off and so on there were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment burning at the stake breaking on the wheel being pulled apart by horses and so on the death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non violent crimes criticizing the king stealing a loaf of bread
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the question is how do they deal with this material and most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort ten percent of the species actually make a ball and this ball they roll away from the dung source usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls so this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball you can see it's a male because he's got a little hair on the back of his legs there and he's clearly very pleased about what he's sitting on there and then he's about to become a victim of a vicious smash
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so what we did was design a couple of arenas one was hot one was cold we shaded this one we left that one hot and then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera so what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball so the truth is if you look at the temperature over here dung is cool
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so watch this individual here and what he's trying to do is set up a nest and he doesn't like this first position but he comes up with a second position and about minutes later that nest is finished and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets and what i want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path and compare the two and by and large you'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path on the outward path he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung on the way home he knows where home is and he wants to go straight to it the important thing here is that this is not a one way trip as in most dung beetles the trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site and watch you're going to see another south african crime taking place right now
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let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test so there he is there he's about to head home and look what happens shame it hasn't a clue it starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food but it is clearly completely lost so we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it
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and what i want to do today is share my passion for poo with you which might be quite difficult but i think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo so this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice and yet it can do things that you and i couldn't possibly entertain the idea of doing and basically it's all evolved to handle its food source which is dung so the question is where do we start this story and it seems appropriate to start at the end because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living and so dung beetles eat dung and their larvae are also dung feeders they are grown completely in a ball of dung
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so this dung pat was actually well it was a dung pat minutes before this photograph was taken and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well adapted to rolling balls of dung so what you've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the african its head is down it's walking backwards it's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat
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it's walking backwards it's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat this is africa it's hot so what i want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems so watch this beetle and there's two things that i would like you to be aware of the first is how it deals with this obstacle that we've put in its way see look it does a little dance and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place a little dance and then heads off in a particular direction
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see look it does a little dance and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place a little dance and then heads off in a particular direction so clearly this animal knows where it's going and it knows where it wants to go and that's a very very important thing because if you think about it you're at the dung pile you've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line so we gave them some more tasks to deal with and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet and watch its response so this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet it's turned by degrees but it doesn't flinch it knows exactly where it wants to go and it heads off in that particular direction
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compare this to cutting edge human performance so what i'm going to show you is emily fox winning the world record for cup stacking now the americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking it's a high school sport where you have cups you have to stack and against the clock in a prescribed order and this is her getting the world record in real time
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now i happen to know my children don't lie so i thought as a neuroscientist it was important how i could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths and we hypothesize based on the study that when one child hits another they generate the movement command they predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off so they actually think they've hit the person less hard than they have rather like the whereas the passive recipient doesn't make the prediction feels the full blow so if they retaliate with the same force the first person will think it's been escalated so we decided to test this in the lab
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i'm a neuroscientist and in neuroscience we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain but i want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life because it's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function and that is why do we and other animals have brains not all species on our planet have brains so if we want to know what the brain is for let's think about why we evolved one now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think and that's completely wrong
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and that is why do we and other animals have brains not all species on our planet have brains so if we want to know what the brain is for let's think about why we evolved one now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think and that's completely wrong if you think about this question for any length of time it's obvious why we have a brain we have a brain for one reason and one reason only and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements there is no other reason to have a brain think about it movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you now that's not quite true there's one other way and that's through sweating
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we're going to kind of go in a different direction right now i hope you all realize that so i'll just give you my message up front try not to go extinct
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well go to a museum you'll see see how many baby dinosaurs there are people assumed and this was actually a problem people assumed that if they had little dinosaurs if they had juvenile dinosaurs they'd be easy to identify you'd have a big dinosaur and a littler dinosaur
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and it comes down to a couple of things first off scientists have egos and scientists like to name dinosaurs they like to name anything everybody likes to have their own animal that they named
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people ask me a lot in fact one of the most asked questions i get is why do children like dinosaurs so much what's the fascination and i usually just say well dinosaurs were big different and gone they're all gone well that's not true but we'll get to the goose in a minute so that's sort of the theme big different and gone
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and so every time they found something that looked a little different they named it something different and what happened of course is we ended up with a whole bunch of different dinosaurs in a light went on in somebody's head dr peter dodson at the university of pennsylvania actually realized that dinosaurs grew kind of like birds do which is different than the way reptiles grow and in fact he used the cassowary as an example and it's kind of cool if you look at the cassowary or any of the birds that have crests on their heads they grow to about percent adult size before the crest starts to grow
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and in fact he used the cassowary as an example and it's kind of cool if you look at the cassowary or any of the birds that have crests on their heads they grow to about percent adult size before the crest starts to grow now think about that they're basically retaining their juvenile characteristics very late in what we call ontogeny so ontogeny is relative skull growth so you can see that if you actually found one that was percent grown and you didn't know that it was going to grow up to a cassowary you would think they were two different animals so this was a problem and peter dodson pointed this out using some duck billed dinosaurs then called and he showed that if you were to take a baby and an adult and make an average of what it should look like if it grew in sort of a linear fashion it would have a crest about half the size of the adult but the actual at percent had no crest at all
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so here are dinosaurs and we want to look at these three first so these are dinosaurs that are called and everybody knows that these three animals are related and the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever but no one ever considered that they might be more closely related
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and the assumption is that they're related like cousins or whatever but no one ever considered that they might be more closely related in other words people looked at them and they saw the differences and you all know that if you are going to determine whether you're related to your brother or your sister you can't do it by looking at differences you can only determine by looking for similarities so people were looking at these and they were talking about how different they are has a big thick dome on its head and it's got some little bumps on the back of its head and it's got a bunch of gnarly things on the end of its nose and then another dinosaur from the same age lived at the same time has spikes sticking out the back of its head it's got a little tiny dome and it's got a bunch of gnarly stuff on its nose
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