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this three dimensional map of the crown structure of a redwood named made by steve marie antoine and their colleagues gives you an idea what you're seeing here is a hierarchical schematic development of the trunks of this tree as it has elaborated itself over time into six layers of fractal of trunks springing from trunks springing from trunks i asked steve to put a human being in this to give a sense of scale there's the person right there the person is waving to us i've wanted to ask craig venter if it would be possible to insert a synthetic chromosome into a human so that we could reiterate ourselves if we wanted to and if we were able to reiterate then the fingers of our hand would be people who looked like us and they would have people on their hands and so on and if we had redwood like biology we would have six layers of people on our hands as it were and it would be a lovely thing to be able to wave to someone and have all our wave at the same time
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the range of the species goes up to as much as feet tall that's stories tall these are trees that would stand out in midtown manhattan nobody knows how old the oldest living coast redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings and in any case the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow but it's believed that the oldest living redwoods are perhaps years old roughly the age of the parthenon although it's also suspected that there may be individual trees that are older than that you can see the range of the coast redwoods it's here in red the largest individuals of this species the of their kind live just on the north coast of california where the rain is really intense in recent historic times about percent of the coast redwood forest was cut down especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging clear cutting that took place in the through the early
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leadership you've had a chance to speak with so many people across the world i think for some of us i speak for myself i don't know if others feel this there's kind of been a disappointment of where are the leaders so many of us have been disappointed aung san suu kyi what's happened recently it's like no another one bites the dust you know it's heartbreaking
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but when i asked her about leadership and i gave a quick fire round of certain names i presented her with the name of the new french president emmanuel and she said i said so what do you think when i say his name and she said shaping up potentially to be a leader to fill our current leadership vacuum i thought that was really interesting yesterday i happened to have an interview with him i'm very proud to say i got his first international interview it was great it was yesterday and i was really impressed i don't know whether i should be saying that in an open forum but i was really impressed
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for you christiane tell us about ideas worth spreading if you could plant one idea into the minds of everyone here what would that be i would say really be careful where you get your information from really take responsibility for what you read listen to and watch make sure that you go to the trusted brands to get your main information no matter whether you have a wide eclectic intake really stick with the brand names that you know because in this world right now at this moment right now our crises our challenges our problems are so severe that unless we are all engaged as global citizens who appreciate the truth who understand science empirical evidence and facts then we are just simply going to be wandering along to a potential catastrophe so i would say the truth and then i would come back to emmanuel and talk about love i would say that there's not enough love going around and i asked him to tell me about love i said you know your marriage is the subject of global obsession
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you tell me about love what does it mean to you i've never asked a president or an elected leader about love i thought i'd try it and he said you know he actually answered it and he said i love my wife she is part of me we've been together for decades but here's where it really counted what really stuck with me he said it is so important for me to have somebody at home who tells me the truth so you see i brought it home it's all about the truth
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well look i think for journalists objectivity is the golden rule but i think sometimes we don't understand what objectivity means and i actually learned this very very young in my career which was during the balkan wars i was young then it was about years ago and what we faced was the wholesale violation not just of human rights but all the way to ethnic cleansing and genocide and that has been adjudicated in the highest war crimes court in the world so we know what we were seeing trying to tell the world what we were seeing brought us accusations of bias of siding with one side of not seeing the whole side and just you know trying to tell one story
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so we know what we were seeing trying to tell the world what we were seeing brought us accusations of bias of siding with one side of not seeing the whole side and just you know trying to tell one story i particularly and personally was accused of siding with for instance the citizens of sarajevo siding with the muslims because they were the minority who were being attacked by christians on the serb side in this area and it worried me it worried me that i was being accused of this i thought maybe i was wrong maybe i'd forgotten what objectivity was but then i started to understand that what people wanted was actually not to do anything not to step in not to change the situation not to find a solution and so their fake news at that time their lie at that time including our government's our democratically elected government's with values and principles of human rights their lie was to say that all sides are equally guilty that this has been centuries of ethnic hatred whereas we knew that wasn't true that one side had decided to kill slaughter and ethnically cleanse another side so that is where for me i understood that objectivity means giving all sides an equal hearing and talking to all sides but not treating all sides equally not creating a forced moral equivalence or a factual equivalence
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i wish that was true i wish that the proliferation of platforms upon which we get our information meant that there was a proliferation of truth and transparency and depth and accuracy but i think the opposite has happened you know i'm a little bit of a luddite i will confess even when we started to talk about the information superhighway which was a long time ago before social media and all the rest of it i was actually really afraid that that would put people into certain lanes and tunnels and have them just focusing on areas of their own interest instead of seeing the broad picture and i'm afraid to say that with algorithms with logarithms with whatever the are that direct us into all these particular channels of information that seems to be happening right now i mean people have written about this phenomenon
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could we get balloons the size of a house to stay up for more than days while costing less than five percent of what traditional long life balloons have cost to make yes in the end but i promise you you name it we had to try it to get there we made round silvery balloons we made giant pillow shaped balloons we made balloons the size of a blue whale we busted a lot of balloons
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in at rice university told the country about a dream he had a dream to put a person on the moon by the end of the decade the no one knew if it was possible to do but he made sure a plan was put in place to do it if it was possible that's how great dreams are great dreams aren't just visions they're visions coupled to strategies for making them real i have the incredible good fortune to work at a factory
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kick kick kick johnny don't do that kick kick kick i'm standing right here with my bag the father leans over grabs him like this and gives him ugly face and ugly face is this when you go face with a puppy or a child you say what are you doing now stop it stop it stop it and i went oh my god do i do something that child has lost everything that one of the two people he can trust in this world has absolutely pulled the rug from under his feet and i thought do i tell this jerk to quit it i thought ian stay out of it stay out of it you know walk on i walked to the back of the plane i sat down and a thought came to me if that had been a dog i would have laid him out
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dogs have interests they have interest sniffing each other chasing squirrels and if we don't make that a reward in training that will be a distraction it's always sort of struck me as really a scary thought that if you see a dog in a park and the owner is calling it and the owner says you know puppy come here come here and the dog thinks interesting i'm sniffing this other dog's rear end the owner's calling it's a difficult choice right rear end owner
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it's always sort of struck me as really a scary thought that if you see a dog in a park and the owner is calling it and the owner says you know puppy come here come here and the dog thinks interesting i'm sniffing this other dog's rear end the owner's calling it's a difficult choice right rear end owner rear end wins i mean you lose you cannot compete with the environment if you have an adolescent dog's brain so when we train we're always trying to take into account the dog's point of view now i'm here largely because there's kind of a rift in dog training at the moment that on one side we have people who think that you train a dog number one by making up rules human rules we don't take the dog's point of view into account
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however i did have a number of real moments of happiness in my life of you know i think what the conference brochure refers to as moments that take your breath away and since i'm a big list maker i actually listed them all
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so there are of course two different possibilities there's one from a consumer's point of view where i was happy while experiencing design and i'll just give you one example i had gotten my first walkman this is my brother had this great yamaha motorcycle that he was willing to borrow to me freely and the police's cassette had just been released and there was no helmet law in my hometown of so you could drive up into the mountains freely blasting the police on the new sony walkman
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under arcadia they showed things like this from the edo period a hundred ways to write happiness in different forms or they had this apple by yoko ono that of course later on was you know made into the label for the beatles
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under nirvana they showed this constable painting and there was a little an interesting theory about abstraction this is a blue field it's actually an yves klein painting and the theory was that if you abstract an image you really you know open as much room for the un and therefore you know are able to involve the viewer more then under desire they showed these paintings also from the edo period ink on silk and lastly under harmony they had this century from tibet now what i took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness
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now what i took away from the exhibit was that maybe with the exception of the most of the pieces in there were actually about the visualization of happiness and not about happiness and i felt a little bit cheated because the visualization that's a really easy thing to do and you know my studio we've done it all the time this is you know a book a happy dog and you take it out it's an aggressive dog it's a happy david byrne and an angry david byrne or a jazz poster with a happy face and a more aggressive face you know that's not a big deal to accomplish
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another new york project this is at p s a sculpture that's basically a square room by james turrell that has a retractable ceiling opens up at dusk and dawn every day you don't see the horizon you're just in there watching the incredible subtle changes of color in the sky
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well there was a question of course that was on my mind for a while you know can i do more of the things that i like doing in design and less of the ones that i don't like to be doing which brought me back to my list making you know just to see what i actually like about my job you know one is just working without pressure then working concentrated without being frazzled or as nancy said before like really immerse oneself into it try not to get stuck doing the same thing or try not get stuck behind the computer all day
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again we could supply the content for it so i just picked another one and this was two weeks ago we flew to arizona the designer who works with me and myself and photographed this one so it's trying to look good limits my life and then we did one more of these
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but there was one little boy very small for his age he was the son of one of the poorest families in the village and he wasn't doing that he was scribbling with chalk on the pavement and so i said i was annoyed i said what are you doing i want you to estimate the height of the building he said ok i measured the height of a brick i counted the number of bricks and now i'm multiplying well i hadn't thought of that one
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so it's not the final story but it's an incredibly powerful summary of everything we know about nature at the most basic level and apart from a few very important loose ends which you've heard about here like dark energy and dark matter this equation describes seems to describe everything about the universe and what's in it but there's one big puzzle remaining and this was most succinctly put to me by my primary school math teacher in tanzania who's a wonderful scottish lady who i still stay in touch with and she's now in her and when i try to explain my work to her she waved away all the details and she said neil there's only one question that really matters
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it was an incredible surprise to me to find out that there was actually an organization that cared about both parts of my life because basically i work as a theoretical physicist i develop and test models of the big bang using data and i've been moonlighting for the last five years helping with a project in africa and i get a lot of flak for this at cambridge people wonder you know how do you have time to do this and so on
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and i've been moonlighting for the last five years helping with a project in africa and i get a lot of flak for this at cambridge people wonder you know how do you have time to do this and so on and so it was simply astonishing to me to find an organization that actually appreciated both those sides so i thought i'd start off by just telling you a little bit about myself and why i lead this schizophrenic life well i was born in south africa and my parents were imprisoned for resisting the racist regime when they were released we left and we went as refugees to kenya and tanzania both were very young countries then and full of hope for the future we had an amazing childhood
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her sister her sister girl my sister and how can you avoid being annoyed by her i just take off my and i don't hear anything
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joseph is phenomenal he's brilliant he is now a medical student at yale university and he's contemplating a surgical career one of the first deaf individuals to consider a career in surgery there are almost no deaf surgeons anywhere and this is really unheard of stuff and this is all because of this technology and the fact that he can play the piano like that is a testament to his brain truth of the matter is you can play the piano without a cochlear implant because all you have to do is press the keys at the right time you don't actually have to hear it i know he doesn't hear well because i've heard him do karaoke
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we think of our senses we don't usually think of the reasons why they probably evolved from a biological perspective we don't really think of the evolutionary need to be protected by our senses but that's probably why our senses really evolved to keep us safe to allow us to live really when we think of our senses or when we think of the loss of the sense we really think about something more like this the ability to touch something luxurious to taste something delicious to smell something fragrant to see something beautiful this is what we want out of our senses we want beauty we don't just want function and when it comes to sensory restoration we're still very far away from being able to provide beauty
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likewise for hearing when we think about why we hear we don't often think about the ability to hear an alarm or a siren although clearly that's an important thing really what we want to hear is music so many of you know that that's beethoven's seventh symphony many of you know that he was deaf or near profoundly deaf when he wrote that now i'd like to impress upon you how unusual it is that we can hear music
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thank y'all this is going to be a motivational speech because imagine my motivation standing between this strong healthy crowd
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when i speak to businesspeople i frequently make them very upset when i contradict them and say that no your employees are not your most valuable asset your most valuable asset is the thousands of people who want to work for you for free and you don't let them they get very upset about that a swarm is a congregation of tens of thousands of volunteers that have chosen of their own will to converge on a common goal there's this quote when push comes to shove you gotta do what you love even if it's not a good idea
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hi i'm rick i'm a politician i'm sorry how many in here have heard of the swedish pirate party before let's see a show of hands ok that's practically everybody probably due to the fact that we are sweden's neighbor i frequently ask how many have heard of any other political party and there's always just scattered hands in the audience compared to this first question which is one half to two thirds
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so in i founded a new political party i led it for its first five years and the european elections the last european elections we became the largest party and the most coveted youth demographic and what's interesting is we did that on less than one percent of the competition's budget we had a campaign budget total of they had six million between them and we beat them
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i'll give you an example if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach and you fly it all the way across the continent and you drop it into a cage it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores and it'll down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away it'll do this for weeks until it kind of gradually loses the plot and it's incredible to watch but there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on it's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond usually with what's going on around it so we have this ability as well and in humans we call it the body clock you can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker deep underground for a couple of months
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so no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be they all show the same thing they get up just a little bit later every day say minutes or so and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks and so in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks rather than somehow sensing the day outside so fine we have a body clock and it turns out that it's incredibly important in our lives it's a huge driver for culture and i think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior we evolved as a species near the equator and so we're very well equipped to deal with hours of daylight and hours of darkness
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once you predict something about human behavior new factors emerge because conditions are constantly changing that's why it's a never ending cycle you think you know something and then something unknown enters the picture and that's why just relying on big data alone increases the chance that we'll miss something while giving us this illusion that we already know everything and what makes it really hard to see this paradox and even wrap our brains around it is that we have this thing that i call the quantification bias which is the unconscious belief of valuing the measurable over the immeasurable and we often experience this at our work maybe we work alongside colleagues who are like this or even our whole entire company may be like this where people become so fixated on that number that they can't see anything outside of it even when you present them evidence right in front of their face and this is a very appealing message because there's nothing wrong with quantifying it's actually very satisfying i get a great sense of comfort from looking at an excel spreadsheet even very simple ones
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it's very easy just to slip into silver bullet thinking as if some simple solution existed because this is a great moment of danger for any organization because oftentimes the future we need to predict it isn't in that haystack but it's that tornado that's bearing down on us outside of the barn there is no greater risk than being blind to the unknown it can cause you to make the wrong decisions it can cause you to miss something big but we don't have to go down this path it turns out that the oracle of ancient greece holds the secret key that shows us the path forward now recent geological research has shown that the temple of apollo where the most famous oracle sat was actually built over two earthquake faults and these faults would release these petrochemical fumes from underneath the earth's crust and the oracle literally sat right above these faults inhaling enormous amounts of ethylene gas these fissures
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when did this they unlocked a whole new way to transform their business is known for their really great recommendation algorithm and they had this million prize for anyone who could improve it and there were winners but discovered the improvements were only incremental so to really find out what was going on they hired an grant mccracken to gather thick data insights and what he discovered was something that they hadn't seen initially in the quantitative data he discovered that people loved to binge watch in fact people didn't even feel guilty about it they enjoyed it
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in ancient greece when anyone from slaves to soldiers poets and politicians needed to make a big decision on life's most important questions like should i get married or should we embark on this voyage or should our army advance into this territory they all consulted the oracle so this is how it worked you would bring her a question and you would get on your knees and then she would go into this trance it would take a couple of days and then eventually she would come out of it giving you her predictions as your answer
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she's so sweet so because of all of this our oracle is a billion industry
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now despite the size of this industry the returns are surprisingly low investing in big data is easy but using it is hard over percent of big data projects aren't even profitable and i have executives coming up to me saying we're experiencing the same thing we invested in some big data system and our employees aren't making better decisions and they're certainly not coming up with more breakthrough ideas so this is all really interesting to me because i'm a technology i study and i advise companies on the patterns of how people use technology and one of my interest areas is data
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is all really interesting to me because i'm a technology i study and i advise companies on the patterns of how people use technology and one of my interest areas is data so why is having more data not helping us make better decisions especially for companies who have all these resources to invest in these big data systems why isn't it getting any easier for them so i've witnessed the struggle firsthand in i started a research position with nokia and at the time nokia was one of the largest cell phone companies in the world dominating emerging markets like china mexico and india all places where i had done a lot of research on how low income people use technology and i spent a lot of extra time in china getting to know the informal economy so i did things like working as a street vendor selling dumplings to construction workers
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my name is harry baker harry baker is my name if your name was harry baker then our names would be the same
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a short introductory part yeah i'm harry i study i write poetry so i thought i'd start with a love poem about prime numbers
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this is called i was going to call it prime time loving that reaction is why i didn't
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but i loved it and i got involved in these slams and i became the u k slam champion and got invited to the poetry world cup in paris which was unbelievable it was people from all around the world speaking in their native languages to be judged by five french strangers
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but i wanna deal with all the paper people politics paper politicians with their paper thin policies broken promises without appropriate apologies be a little paper me and a little paper you and we could watch paper tv and it would all be pay
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me poetry has been the ultimate way of ideas without frontiers when i first started the people who inspired me were the ones with the amazing stories and i thought as an old with a happy life it was too normal but i could create these worlds where i could talk about my experiences and dreams and beliefs so it's amazing to be here in front of you today thank you for being here if you weren't here it would be pretty much like the sound check yesterday
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i like people i'd like some paper people be purple paper people maybe pop up purple paper people
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people like the persecuted palestinians people who go out of their way to make your life better and expect nothing in return you see people have potential to be powerful just because the people in power tend to pretend to be victims we need to succumb to that system and a paper population is no different
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but it also presented a gigantic challenge to investigative journalism think about it million documents containing the secrets of people from more than different countries where do you start with such a vast resource where do you even begin to tell a story that can trail off into every corner of the globe and that can affect almost any person in any language sometimes in ways they don't even know yet john doe had given the information to two journalists at the german newspaper zeitung he said he was motivated by and i quote the scale of the injustice that the documents would reveal but one user alone can never make sense of such a vast amount of information so the zeitung reached out to my organization in washington the international consortium of investigative journalists we decided to do something that was the very opposite of everything we'd been taught to do as journalists share
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a company in the british virgin islands that had actually belonged to the sitting icelandic prime minister i like to refer to johannes the icelandic reporter we invited to join the project as the man in the world for nine months he refused paid work and lived off the earnings of his wife he pasted tarps over the windows of his home to prevent prying eyes during the long icelandic winter and he soon ran out of excuses to explain his many absences as he worked red eyed night after night month after month in all that time he sat on information that would eventually bring down the leader of his country now when you're an investigative reporter and you make an amazing discovery such as your prime minster can be linked to a secret offshore company that that company has a financial interest in icelandic banks the very issue he's been elected on well your instinct is to scream out very loud instead as one of the few people that he could speak to johannes and i shared a kind of gallows humor is coming he used to say
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the panama papers quickly became one of the biggest stories of the year this is the scene in iceland the day after we published it was the first of many protests the icelandic prime minister had to resign it was a first of many resignations we spotlighted many famous people such as lionel the most famous soccer player in the world and there were some unintended consequences these alleged members of a mexican drug cartel were arrested after we published details about their hideout they'd been using the address to register their offshore company
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the technology the internet that has broken the business model is allowing us to reinvent journalism itself and this dynamic is producing unprecedented levels of transparency and impact we showed how a group of journalists can effect change across the world by applying new methods and old fashioned journalism techniques to vast amounts of leaked information we put all important context around what was given to us by john doe and by sharing resources we were able to dig deep much deeper and longer than most media organizations allow these days because of financial concerns now it was a big risk and it wouldn't work for every story but we showed with the panama papers that you can write about any country from just about anywhere and then choose your preferred battleground to defend your work try obtaining a court injunction that would prevent the telling of a story in different countries try stopping the inevitable shortly after we published i got a three word text from johannes has arrived
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the information behind million documents verify it and make sense of it that was a challenge that a group of journalists had to face late last year an anonymous person calling himself john doe had somehow managed to copy nearly years of records of the panamanian law firm fonseca this is one of many firms around the world that specialize in setting up accounts in offshore tax havens like the british virgin islands for rich and powerful people who like to keep secrets john doe had managed to copy every spreadsheet from this firm every client file every email from to the present day it represented the biggest cache of inside information into the tax haven system that anyone had ever seen
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by nature investigative reporters are lone wolves we fiercely guard our secrets at times even from our editors because we know that the moment we tell them what we have they'll want that story right away and to be frank when you get a good story you like to keep the glory to yourself but there's no doubt that we live in a shrinking world and that the media has largely been slow to wake up to this the issues we report on are more and more transnational giant corporations operate on a global level
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the issues we report on are more and more transnational giant corporations operate on a global level environmental and health crises are global so too are financial flows and financial crises so it seems staggering that journalism has been so late to cover stories in a truly global way and it also seems staggering that journalism has been so slow to wake up to the possibilities that technology brings rather than being frightened of it the reason journalists are scared of technology is this the profession's largest institutions are going through tough times because of the changing way that people are consuming news the advertising business models that have sustained reporting are broken and this has plunged journalism into crisis forcing those institutions to reexamine how they function
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he is an outstanding person because he's a small entrepreneur he runs a little shop in one of the back streets of he has this little meter store where so much is being done it's incredible because i couldn't believe my eyes when i once just happened to bump into him basically what he does is he has all these services for micro payments and booking tickets and all kinds of basic things that you would go online for but he does it for people and connects to the digital world more importantly he makes his money by selling these mobile recharge coupons you know for the prepaid subscriptions but then in the backside he's got this little nook with a few of his employees where they can fix almost anything any cell phone any gadget you can bring them they can fix it and it's pretty incredible because i took my there and he was like yeah do you want an upgrade yes
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yeah that's right okay so i'm going to start it up i hope it works it even beeps because it's an alarm clock after all so
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is essentially a small research group at c i d where we are looking to find alternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society that's what we're after and we do this because we actually believe that silicon technology today is mostly about a culture of excess it's about the fastest and the most efficient and the most dazzling gadget you can have while about two thirds of the world can hardly reach the most basic of this technology to even address fundamental needs in life including health care education and all these kinds of very fundamental issues so before i start i want to talk about a little anecdote a little story about a man i met once in
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but what i was amazed about is this reverse engineering and know how that's built into this little two meters of space they have figured out everything that's required to dismantle take things apart rewrite the circuitry re flash the do whatever you want to with the phone and they can fix anything so quickly you can hand over a phone this morning and you can go pick it up after lunch and it was quite incredible but then we were wondering whether this is a local phenomenon or is truly global and over time we started understanding and systematically researching what this tinkering ecosystem is about because that is something that's happening not just in one street corner in it's actually happening in all parts of the country
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i just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival it's a place where women run the show have sex to say hello and play rules the day where fun is serious business and no this isn't burning man or san francisco
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this is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of congo bonobos are together with chimpanzees your living closest relative that means we all share a common ancestor an evolutionary grandmother who lived around six million years ago now chimpanzees are well known for their aggression
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i don't know how you play but i want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild first it's a ball game style and i do not mean football so here we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game have a look what she's doing it might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase she's got him by the balls
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but unfortunately we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution but bonobos show us the other side of the coin while chimpanzees are dominated by big scary guys society is run by empowered females these guys have really worked something out since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet but unfortunately bonobos are the least understood of the great apes they live in the depths of the jungle and it has been very difficult to study them
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these cousins we know them as the make love not war apes since they have frequent promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues now i'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems since there's more to life than the kama bonobos like humans love to play throughout their entire lives play is not just child's games for us and them play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance it's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game play increases creativity and resilience and it's all about the generation of diversity diversity of interactions diversity of behaviors diversity of connections and when you watch play you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter dance and ritual play is the glue that binds us together
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and i want you to see this is a young female and she is quietly playing with water i think like her we sometimes play alone and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds and it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore drives us to interact and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity so these are just small tasters into the insights that give us to our past and present but they also hold a secret for our future a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation the secret is that play is the key to these capacities
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so these are just small tasters into the insights that give us to our past and present but they also hold a secret for our future a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation the secret is that play is the key to these capacities in other words play is our adaptive wildcard in order to adapt successfully to a changing world we need to play but will we make the most of our playfulness play is not frivolous play's essential for bonobos and humans alike life is not just red in tooth and claw in times when it seems least appropriate to play it might be the times when it is most urgent
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of course we're still working hard to improve our algorithms and it still has a lot to learn and the computer still makes mistakes computer a cat lying on a bed in a blanket so of course when it sees too many cats it thinks everything might look like a cat computer a young boy is holding a baseball bat
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or if it hasn't seen a toothbrush it confuses it with a baseball bat computer a man riding a horse down a street next to a building
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let me show you something girl okay that's a cat sitting in a bed the boy is petting the elephant those are people that are going on an airplane that's a big airplane li this is a three child describing what she sees in a series of photos
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li this is a three child describing what she sees in a series of photos she might still have a lot to learn about this world but she's already an expert at one very important task to make sense of what she sees our society is more technologically advanced than ever we send people to the moon we make phones that talk to us or customize radio stations that can play only music we like yet our most advanced machines and computers still struggle at this task so i'm here today to give you a progress report on the latest advances in our research in computer vision one of the most frontier and potentially revolutionary technologies in computer science yes we have cars that can drive by themselves but without smart vision they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road which can be run over and a rock that size which should be avoided we have made fabulous cameras but we have not delivered sight to the blind
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yes we have cars that can drive by themselves but without smart vision they cannot really tell the difference between a crumpled paper bag on the road which can be run over and a rock that size which should be avoided we have made fabulous cameras but we have not delivered sight to the blind drones can fly over massive land but don't have enough vision technology to help us to track the changes of the rainforests security cameras are everywhere but they do not alert us when a child is drowning in a swimming pool photos and videos are becoming an integral part of global life they're being generated at a pace that's far beyond what any human or teams of humans could hope to view and you and i are contributing to that at this ted yet our most advanced software is still struggling at understanding and managing this enormous content so in other words collectively as a society we're very much blind because our smartest machines are still blind why is this so hard you may ask
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so about three years ago i was in london and somebody called howard burton came to me and said i represent a group of people and we want to start an institute in theoretical physics we have about million dollars and we want to do it well we want to be in the forefront fields and we want to do it differently we want to get out of this thing where the young people have all the ideas and the old people have all the power and decide what science gets done it took me about seconds to decide that that was a good idea three years later we have the perimeter institute for theoretical physics in waterloo ontario its the most exciting job ever had and its the first time had a job where im afraid to go away because of everything going to happen in this week when im here
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so we think a lot about what really makes science work the first thing that anybody who knows science and has been around science is that the stuff you learn in school as a scientific method is wrong there is no method on the other hand somehow we manage to reason together as a community from incomplete evidence to conclusions that we all agree about and this is by the way something that a democratic society also has to do so how does it work well my belief is that it works because scientists are a community bound together by an ethics and here are some of the ethical principles im not going to read them all to you because im not in teacher mode im in entertain amaze mode
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and no place for an omniscient observer or an outside intelligence knowing everything and making everything so this is general relativity this is quantum theory this is also if you talk to legal scholars the foundations of new ideas in legal thought thinking about the same things and not only that they make the analogy to relativity theory and cosmology often so an interesting discussion going on there this last view of cosmology is called the relational view so the main slogan here is that nothing outside the universe which means that no place to put an explanation for something outside so in such a relational universe if you come upon something ordered and structured like this device here or that device there or something beautiful like all the living things all of you guys in the room guys in physics by the way is a generic term men and women
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if you think about democracy from this perspective a new pluralistic notion of democracy would be one that recognizes that there are many different interests many different agendas many different individuals many different points of view each one is incomplete because embedded in a network of relationships any actor in a democracy is embedded in a network of relationships and you understand some things better than other things and because of that a continual jostling and give and take which is politics and politics is in the ideal sense the way in which we continually address our network of relations in order to achieve a better life and a better society and i also think that science will never go away and im finishing on this line
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is that everybody who is part of the community gets to fight and argue as hard as they can for what they believe but were all disciplined by the understanding that the only people who are going to decide you know whether im right or somebody else is right are the people in our community in the next generation in and years so its this combination of respect for the tradition and community were in and rebellion that the community requires to get anywhere that makes science work and being in this process of being in a community that reasons from shared evidence to conclusions i believe teaches us about democracy not only is there a relationship between the ethics of science and the ethics of being a citizen in democracy but there has been historically a relationship between how people think about space and time and what the cosmos is and how people think about the society that they live in and i want to talk about three stages in that evolution
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and i want to talk about three stages in that evolution the first science of cosmology that was anything like science was aristotelian science and that was hierarchical the earth is in the center then there are these crystal spheres the sun the moon the planets and finally the celestial sphere where the stars are and everything in this universe has a place and law of motion was that everything goes to its natural place which was of course the rule of the society that aristotle lived in and more importantly the medieval society that through christianity embraced aristotle and blessed it and the idea is that everything is defined where something is is defined with respect to this last sphere the celestial sphere outside of which is this eternal perfect realm where lives god who is the ultimate judge of everything so that is both aristotelian cosmology and in a certain sense medieval society
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so that is both aristotelian cosmology and in a certain sense medieval society now in the century there was a revolution in thinking about space and time and motion and so forth of newton and at the same time there was a revolution in social thought of john locke and his collaborators and they were very closely associated in fact newton and locke were friends their way of thinking about space and time and motion on the one hand and a society on the other hand were closely related and let me show you in a newtonian universe no center thank you
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and let me show you in a newtonian universe no center thank you there are particles and they move around with respect to a fixed absolute framework of space and time its meaningful to say absolutely where something is in space because defined not with respect to say where other things are but with respect to this absolute notion of space which for newton was god now similarly in society there are individuals who have certain rights properties in a formal sense and those are defined with respect to some absolute abstract notions of rights and justice and so forth which are independent of what else has happened in the society of who else there is of the history and so forth there is also an omniscient observer who knows everything who is god who is in a certain sense outside the universe because he has no role in anything that happens but is in a certain sense everywhere because space is just the way that god knows where everything is according to newton ok so this is the foundations of whats called traditionally liberal political theory and newtonian physics now in the century we had a revolution that was initiated at the beginning of the century and which is still going on
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each project we use materials and designs that help encourage life a long lasting ph neutral cement provides a stable and permanent platform it is textured to allow coral polyps to attach we position them down current from natural reefs so that after spawning there's areas for them to settle the formations are all configured so that they aggregate fish on a really large scale even this beetle has an internal living habitat to encourage crustaceans such as lobsters and sea urchins so why exhibit my work in the ocean because honestly it's really not easy when you're in the middle of the sea under a hundred foot crane trying to lower eight tons down to the sea floor you start to wonder whether i shouldn't have taken up watercolor painting instead
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ten years ago i had my first exhibition here i had no idea if it would work or was at all possible but with a few small steps and a very steep learning curve i made my first sculpture called the lost correspondent teaming up with a marine biologist and a local dive center i submerged the work off the coast of grenada in an area decimated by hurricane ivan and then this incredible thing happened it transformed one sculpture became two
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my first findings was in the entrance of a cave facing the pacific ocean in this place we reported a new type of that grew only on top of the that covered the cave entrance have you ever seen a early in the morning it's covered with dew so this learned that in order to carry photosynthesis in the coast of the driest desert on earth they could use the so here they may access the water from the that regularly cover these areas in the morning in another cave we found a different type of this one is able to use ocean mist as a source of water and strikingly lives in the very bottom of a cave so it has adapted to live with less than percent of the amount of light that regular plants need these type of findings suggest to me that on mars we may find even life inside caves and by the way that's me
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now for almost years this region of discovered by nasa was thought to be the driest place of this desert but i knew that it was not how you already know the answer because i was born and raised in this desert so i remembered that i usually see in so after setting sensors in a number of places where i remember never seeing or clouds i reported four other sites much drier than with this one mara elena south being the truly driest place on earth as dry as mars and amazingly just a ride from the small mining town where i was born now in this search we were trying to actually find the dry limit for life on earth a place so dry that nothing was able to survive in it
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the point of these is also to remind people of some really important statistical concepts concepts like averages so let's say you hear a claim like the average swimming pool in the us contains fecal accidents that doesn't mean every single swimming pool in the country contains exactly so in order to show that i went back to the original data which comes from the who surveyed swimming facilities and i just spent one evening redistributing poop so you can kind of see how misleading averages can be
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all of these questions are great because they make you think about ways to find and communicate these numbers if someone asks you how much pee is a lot of pee which is a question that i got asked you really want to make sure that the visualization makes sense to as many people as possible these numbers aren't unavailable sometimes they're just buried in the appendix of an academic study and they're certainly not inscrutable if you really wanted to test these numbers on volume you could grab a bottle and try it for yourself
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it's also worth asking how the survey was carried out this was something called an opt in poll which means anyone could have found it on the internet and completed it there's no way of knowing if those people even identified as muslim and finally there were respondents in that poll there are roughly three million muslims in this country according to pew research center that means the poll spoke to roughly one in every muslims in this country this is one of the reasons why government statistics are often better than private statistics a poll might speak to a couple hundred people maybe a thousand or if you're l'oreal trying to sell skin care products in then you spoke to women to claim that they work
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i'm going to be talking about statistics today if that makes you immediately feel a little bit wary that's ok that doesn't make you some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist it makes you skeptical and when it comes to numbers especially now you should be skeptical but you should also be able to tell which numbers are reliable and which ones aren't so today i want to try to give you some tools to be able to do that but before i do i just want to clarify which numbers i'm talking about here
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so today i want to try to give you some tools to be able to do that but before i do i just want to clarify which numbers i'm talking about here i'm not talking about claims like out of women recommend this anti aging cream i think a lot of us always roll our eyes at numbers like that what's different now is people are questioning statistics like the us unemployment rate is five percent what makes this claim different is it doesn't come from a private company it comes from the government about out of americans distrust the economic data that gets reported by government among supporters of president trump it's even higher it's about out of i don't need to tell anyone here that there are a lot of dividing lines in our society right now and a lot of them start to make sense once you understand people's relationships with these government numbers
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among supporters of president trump it's even higher it's about out of i don't need to tell anyone here that there are a lot of dividing lines in our society right now and a lot of them start to make sense once you understand people's relationships with these government numbers on the one hand there are those who say these statistics are crucial that we need them to make sense of society as a whole in order to move beyond emotional anecdotes and measure progress in an objective way and then there are the others who say that these statistics are elitist maybe even rigged they don't make sense and they don't really reflect what's happening in people's everyday lives it kind of feels like that second group is winning the argument right now we're living in a world of alternative facts where people don't find statistics this kind of common ground this starting point for debate this is a problem there are actually moves in the us right now to get rid of some government statistics altogether right now there's a bill in congress about measuring racial inequality
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can we say about this democracy in usa land well as the supreme court said in citizens united we could say of course the people have the ultimate influence over the elected officials we have a general election but only after the funders have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election and number two obviously this dependence upon the funders produces a subtle understated camouflaged bending to keep the funders happy candidates for congress and members of congress spend between and percent of their time raising money to get back to congress or to get their party back into power and the question we need to ask is what does it do to them these humans as they spend their time behind the telephone calling people they've never met but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent as anyone would as they do this they develop a sixth sense a constant awareness about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money they become in the words of the x files shape as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money not on issues one to but on issues to leslie byrne a democrat from virginia describes that when she went to congress she was told by a colleague always lean to the green then to clarify she went on he was not an environmentalist
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there's nothing we can do when she said that i scrambled i tried to think how do i respond to that hopelessness what is that sense of hopelessness and what hit me was an image of my six son and i imagined a doctor coming to me and saying your son has terminal brain cancer and there's nothing you can do nothing you can do so would i do nothing would i just sit there accept it okay nothing i can do i'm going off to build glass of course not i would do everything i could and i would do everything i could because this is what love means that the odds are irrelevant and that you do whatever the hell you can the odds be damned and then i saw the obvious link because even we liberals love this country
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percent is named lester now in have this extraordinary power there are two elections every election cycle in one is called the general election the other is called the lester election and in the general election it's the citizens who get to vote but in the lester election it's the who get to vote and here's the trick in order to run in the general election you must do extremely well in the lester election you don't necessarily have to win but you must do extremely well
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they considered all the usual culprits and in less than hours they had selected their suspect francisco carrillo a old kid who lived about two or three blocks away from where the shooting occurred they found photos of him they prepared a photo array and the day after the shooting they showed it to one of the teenagers and he said that's the picture that's the shooter i saw that killed the father that was all a preliminary hearing judge had to listen to to bind mr carrillo over to stand trial for a first degree murder in the investigation that followed before the actual trial each of the other five teenagers was shown photographs the same photo array the picture that we best can determine was probably the one that they were shown in the photo array is in your bottom left hand corner of these mug shots the reason we're not sure absolutely is because of the nature of evidence preservation in our judicial system but that's another whole talk for later
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this is looking down to the east where the shooting vehicle sped off and this is the lighting directly behind the father and the teenagers as you can see it is at best poor no one's going to call this well lit good lighting and in fact as nice as these pictures are and the reason we take them is i knew i was going to have to testify in court and a picture is worth more than a thousand words when you're trying to communicate numbers abstract concepts like lux the international measurement of illumination the ishihara color perception test values when you present those to people who are not well versed in those aspects of science and that they become salamanders in the sun it's like talking about the tangent of the visual angle all right their eyes just glaze over all right a good forensic expert also has to be a good educator a good communicator and that's part of the reason why we take the pictures to show not only where the light sources are and what we call the spill the distribution but also so that it's easier for the trier of fact to understand the circumstances so these are some of the pictures that in fact i used when i testified but more importantly were to me as a scientist are those readings the photometer readings which i can then convert into actual predictions of the visual capability of the human eye under those circumstances and from my readings that i recorded at the scene under the same solar and lunar conditions at the same time so on and so forth right i could predict that there would be no reliable color perception which is crucial for face recognition and that there would be only vision which means there would be very little resolution what we call boundary or edge detection and that furthermore because the eyes would have been totally dilated under this light the depth of field the distance at which you can focus and see details would have been less than inches away i testified to that to the court and while the judge was very attentive it had been a very very long hearing for this petition for a retrial and as a result i noticed out of the corner of my eye that i thought that maybe the judge was going to need a little more of a nudge than just more numbers and here i became a bit audacious and i turned and i asked the judge i said your honor i think you should go out and look at the scene yourself now i may have used a tone which was more like a dare than a request but nonetheless it's to this man's credit and his courage that he said yes i will
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the murder happened a little over years ago january the in a small bedroom community of california just a few miles southeast of los angeles a father came out of his house to tell his teenage son and his five friends that it was time for them to stop horsing around on the front lawn and on the sidewalk to get home finish their schoolwork and prepare themselves for bed and as the father was administering these instructions a car drove by slowly and just after it passed the father and the teenagers a hand went out from the front passenger window and bam bam killing the father and the car sped off the police investigating officers were amazingly efficient
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so what's wrong straightforward fair trial full investigation oh yes no gun was ever found no vehicle was ever identified as being the one in which the shooter had extended his arm and no person was ever charged with being the driver of the vehicle and mr alibi which of those parents here in the room might not lie concerning the whereabouts of your son or daughter in an investigation of a killing sent to prison adamantly insisting on his innocence which he has consistently for years so what's the problem the problems actually for this kind of case come from decades of scientific research involving human memory first of all we have all the statistical analyses from the innocence project work where we know that we have what documented cases now where people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently exonerated some from death row on the basis of later analysis and you know that over three quarters of all of those cases of exoneration involved only eyewitness identification testimony during the trial that convicted them
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the other comes from an interesting aspect of human memory that's related to various brain functions but i can sum up for the sake of brevity here in a simple line the brain abhors a vacuum under the best of observation conditions the absolute best we only detect encode and store in our brains bits and pieces of the entire experience in front of us and they're stored in different parts of the brain so now when it's important for us to be able to recall what it was that we experienced we have an incomplete we have a partial store and what happens below awareness with no requirement for any kind of motivated processing the brain fills in information that was not there not originally stored from inference from speculation from sources of information that came to you as the observer after the observation but it happens without awareness such that you don't aren't even cognizant of it occurring it's called reconstructed memories
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