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i didn't understand a thing i found it unnecessary useless hard to understand it looked like a camera it didn't have menu options it was the first time i felt the gap that sometimes exists between kids and adults but it was also an opportunity to do the right thing to leave my comfort zone to force myself i never thought i'd ever use but then i asked my teenage cousin to show me how to use it i also asked why she used it what was fun about it we had a really nice talk she showed me her she told me things we got closer we laughed today i use it
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content viewer discretion is advised this is nina profile this person had three different profiles and kids between and years old among her friends list these are excerpts of a chat with one of those kids this is an exact copy of the chat
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these are excerpts of a chat with one of those kids this is an exact copy of the chat it's part of the case file this kid started sending private photos until his family realized what was going on the police report and subsequent investigation lead them to a house this was the girl's bedroom nina was actually a old man that used to do this with lots of kids micaela ortega was years old when she went to meet her new friend also de river was her name
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get started the battery was invented about years ago by a professor alessandro volta at the university of padua in italy his invention gave birth to a new field of science and new technologies such as electroplating perhaps overlooked invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor
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for me the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table enunciated by another professor dimitri everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here and that includes our own bodies i recall the very moment one day when i was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance different opposite density and high mutual reactivity i felt the thrill of realization when i knew i'd come upon the answer magnesium for the top layer and for the bottom layer you know i've got to tell you one of the greatest benefits of being a professor colored chalk
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theater was generated just moments ago because the way things stand today electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply if in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately but coal plants nuclear plants can't respond fast enough a giant battery could with a giant battery we'd be able to address the problem of that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal gas and nuclear do today
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you see the battery is the key enabling device here with it we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine and that changes everything because then such as wind and solar come out from the wings here to center stage today i want to tell you about such a device it's called the liquid metal battery it's a new form of energy storage that i invented at mit along with a team of my students and post
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the first battery a stack of coins zinc and silver separated by cardboard soaked in brine this is the starting point for designing a battery two electrodes in this case metals of different composition and an in this case salt dissolved in water the science is that simple admittedly i've left out a few details now i've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid level storage is compelling but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid namely uncommonly high power long service lifetime and super low cost we need to think about the problem differently
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i would have no way of knowing how focused or relaxed i was in any tangible way as we know our feelings about how we're feeling are notoriously unreliable we've all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who didn't deserve it and then we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier this new awareness opens up vast possibilities for applications that help improve our lives and ourselves we're trying to create technology that uses the insights to make our work more efficient our breaks more relaxing and our connections deeper and more fulfilling than ever i'm going to share some of these visions with you in a bit but first i want to take a look at how we got here by the way feel free to check in on my head at any time
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but with disappear there's really no analogies so evan what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out okay same sort of drill so one two three go okay let's try that oh my goodness he's just too good let's try that again losing concentration
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up until now our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms whether it's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch or even as complex as programming robotics we have always had to give a command to a machine or even a series of commands in order for it to do something for us communication between people on the other hand is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed we observe facial expressions body language and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another this actually forms a large part of our decision making process our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction into human computer interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences
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million americans were incarcerated in and that's gone up since then but we don't have the numbers yet so i wanted to show million prison uniforms and in the actual print of this piece each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge they're tiny they're barely visible as a piece of material and to show million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print and so i had to divide it up into multiple panels that are feet tall by feet wide this is that piece installed in a gallery in new york those are my parents looking at the piece
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we just dismiss it out of our consciousness and knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes we continue to allow our children our sons and daughters to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking and this is what the next piece is about this is just lots and lots of cigarettes cigarettes which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month and every month in the u s more than children in the united states aged and under begin smoking every year one more strange epidemic in the united states that i want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs this is an image i've made out of lots and lots of well actually i only had one that i scanned lots and lots of times
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my work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level and what i mean by that it's the behaviors that we're in denial about and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness and as individuals we all do these things all the time everyday it's like when you're mean to your wife because you're mad at somebody else or when you drink a little too much at a party just out of anxiety or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt or whatever
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or when you drink a little too much at a party just out of anxiety or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt or whatever and when we do these kind of things when million people do unconscious behaviors then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants and no one intended and that's what i look at with my photographic work this is an image i just recently completed that is when you stand back at a distance it looks like some kind of neo gothic cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution and as you get a little bit closer it starts looking like lots of pipes like maybe a chemical plant or a refinery or maybe a hellish freeway interchange and as you get all the way up close you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups and in fact this is one million plastic cups which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the united states every six hours we use four million cups a day on airline flights and virtually none of them are reused or recycled
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now we were inspired by the terminator scene for and we thought why couldn't a printer operate in this fashion where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object okay just like the movies and could we be inspired by hollywood and come up with ways to actually try to get this to work and that was our challenge and our approach would be if we could do this then we could fundamentally address the three issues holding back printing from being a manufacturing process one printing takes forever there are mushrooms that grow faster than printed parts
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i'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years and it's in the area of additive manufacturing also known as printing you see this object here it looks fairly simple but it's quite complex at the same time it's a set of concentric geodesic structures with linkages between each one in its context it is not by traditional manufacturing techniques it has a symmetry such that you can't injection mold it
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how does this work basically i send people signals at random points throughout the day and then i ask them a bunch of questions about their moment experience at the instant just before the signal the idea is that if we can watch how people's happiness goes up and down over the course of the day minute to minute in some cases and try to understand how what people are doing who they're with what they're thinking about and all the other factors that describe our day how those might relate to those changes in happiness we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness we've been fortunate with this project to collect quite a lot of data a lot more data of this kind than i think has ever been collected before over real time reports from over people and it's not just a lot of people it's a really diverse group people from a wide range of ages from to late a wide range of incomes education levels people who are married divorced widowed etc they collectively represent every one of occupational categories and hail from over countries what i'd like to do with the rest of my time with you today is talk a little bit about one of the areas that we've been investigating and that's mind wandering as human beings we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present this guy is sitting here working on his computer and yet he could be thinking about the vacation he had last month wondering what he's going to have for dinner maybe he's worried that he's going bald
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so how could this be happening i think part of the reason a big part of the reason is that when our minds wander we often think about unpleasant things and they are enormously less happy when they do that our worries our anxieties our regrets and yet even when people are thinking about something neutral they're still considerably less happy than when they're not mind wandering at all even when they're thinking about something they would describe as pleasant they're actually just slightly less happy than when they aren't mind wandering if mind wandering were a slot machine it would be like having the chance to lose dollars dollars or one dollar right you'd never want to play
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a few minutes ago i likened mind wandering to a slot machine you'd never want to play well how often do people's minds wander turns out they wander a lot in fact really a lot forty seven percent of the time people are thinking about something other than what they're currently doing how does that depend on what people are doing this shows the rate of mind wandering across activities ranging from a high of percent when people are taking a shower brushing their teeth to percent when they're working to percent when they're exercising all the way down to this one short bar on the right that i think some of you are probably laughing at ten percent of the time people's minds are wandering when they're having sex
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a lot of things out of life but i think more than anything else they want happiness aristotle called happiness the chief good the end towards which all other things aim according to this view the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn't that these things are intrinsically valuable it's that we expect them to bring us happiness now in the last years we americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want we're richer
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now in the last years we americans have gotten a lot of the things that we want we're richer we live longer we have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago the paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically we haven't actually gotten any happier maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven't delivered big benefits in terms of happiness there's been an increased interest in recent years in happiness itself people have been debating the causes of happiness for a really long time in fact for thousands of years but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved well as with many other domains in life i think the scientific method has the potential to answer this question in fact in the last few years there's been an explosion in research on happiness
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it allows us to learn and plan and reason in ways that no other species of animal can and yet it's not clear what the relationship is between our use of this ability and our happiness you've probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present be here now you've probably heard a hundred times maybe to really be happy we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment maybe these people are right
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what if we could do that now just suspend disbelief for a moment and let's think of what could happen if we could do that well we could protect very high value targets like clinics clinics are full of people that have malaria they're sick and so they're less able to defend themselves from the mosquitoes you really want to protect them of course if you do that you could also protect your backyard and farmers could protect their crops that they want to sell to whole foods because our photons are percent organic
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now it actually gets better than this you could if you're really smart you could shine a nonlethal laser on the bug before you zap it and you could listen to the wing beat frequency and you could measure the size and then you could decide is this an insect i want to kill or an insect i don't want to kill moore's law made computing cheap so cheap we can weigh the life of an individual insect and decide thumbs up or thumbs down
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mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs mosquitoes actually live their day nutrition comes from nectar from flowers in fact in the lab we feed ours raisins but the female needs the blood meal so this sounds really crazy right would you like to see it yeah okay so our legal department prepared a disclaimer and here it is
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what we have here is a tank on the other side of the stage and we have this computer screen can actually see the mosquitoes as they fly around and if he stirs up our mosquitoes a little bit we can see them flying around now that's a fairly straightforward image processing and let me show you how it works here you can see that the insects are being tracked as they're flying around which is kind of fun next we can actually light them up with a laser
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almost all vaccines need to be kept at refrigerator temperatures they go bad very quickly if you don't and if you don't have stable power grid this doesn't happen so kids die it's not just the loss of the vaccine that matters it's the fact that those kids don't get vaccinated this is one of the ways that vaccines are carried these are styrofoam chests these are being carried by people but they're also put on the backs of pickup trucks we've got a different solution now one of these styrofoam chests will last for about four hours with ice in it and we thought well that's not really good enough so we made this thing
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we thought well that's not really good enough so we made this thing this lasts six months with no power absolutely zero power because it loses less than a half a watt now this is our second generations prototype the third generation prototype is right now in uganda being tested now the reason we were able to come up with this is two key ideas one is that this is similar to a cryogenic dewar something you'd keep liquid nitrogen or liquid helium in they have incredible insulation so let's put some incredible insulation here the other idea is kind of interesting which is you can't reach inside anymore because if you open it up and reach inside you'd let the heat in the game would be over
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malaria is one of the great public health problems esther talked a little bit about this two hundred million people a year every seconds a child in africa dies will die during my talk and there's no way for us here in this country to grasp really what that means to the people involved another comment of was that we react when there's a tragedy like haiti but that tragedy is ongoing so what can we do about it well there are a lot of things people have tried for many years for solving malaria you can spray the problem is there are environmental issues you can try to treat people and create awareness
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you can spray the problem is there are environmental issues you can try to treat people and create awareness that's great except the places that have malaria really bad they don't have health care systems a vaccine would be a terrific thing only they don't work yet people have tried for a long time there are a couple of interesting candidates it's a very difficult thing to make a vaccine for you can distribute bed nets and bed nets are very effective if you use them you don't always use them for that
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they don't always get to everyone and bed nets have an effect on the epidemic but you're never going to make it extinct with bed nets now malaria is an incredibly complicated disease we could spend hours going over this it's got this sort of soap opera like lifestyle they have sex they burrow into your liver they tunnel into your blood cells it's an incredibly complicated disease but that's actually one of the things we find interesting about it and why we work on malaria there's a lot of potential ways in one of those ways might be better diagnosis
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so we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the middle kingdom at this site we also have evidence of an elite workshop showing that whatever was there was a very important city no was here yet but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out and even more importantly we have funding to train young egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well so i wanted to end with my favorite quote from the middle kingdom it was probably written at the city of four thousand years ago sharing knowledge is the greatest of all there's nothing like it in the land so as it turns out ted was not founded in ad
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they're covered in sand they're difficult to see however over time i got used to looking for them i started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them this grew into a passion for finding things a love for the past and archaeology
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this grew into a passion for finding things a love for the past and archaeology and eventually when i started studying egyptology i realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough because all of the sudden in egypt my beach had grown from a tiny beach in maine to one eight hundred miles long next to the nile and my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities this is really what brought me to using satellite imagery for trying to map the past i knew that i had to see differently so i want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared this is a site located in the eastern egyptian delta called mendes
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i dedicated the past two years to understanding how people achieve their dreams when we think about the dreams we have and the dent we want to leave in the universe it is striking to see how big of an overlap there is between the dreams that we have and projects that never happen
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fourth tip and that's really important believe the fault is someone else's i constantly see people saying yes i had this great idea but no investor had the vision to invest oh i created this great product but the market is so bad the sales didn't go well or i can't find good talent my team is so below expectations if you have dreams it's your responsibility to make them happen yes it may be hard to find talent yes the market may be bad but if no one invested in your idea if no one bought your product for sure there is something there that is your fault
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and your journey is simple it's made of steps some steps will be right on sometimes you will trip if it's right on celebrate because some people wait a lot to celebrate and if you tripped turn that into something to learn if every step becomes something to learn or something to celebrate you will for sure enjoy the journey so five tips believe in overnight success believe someone else has the answers for you believe that when growth is guaranteed you should settle down believe the fault is someone else's and believe that only the goals themselves matter believe me you do that and you will destroy your dreams
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so i'm here to talk to you today about five ways how not to follow your dreams believe in overnight success you know the story right the tech guy built a mobile app and sold it very fast for a lot of money you know the story may seem real but i bet it's incomplete if you go investigate further the guy has done apps before and he has done a master's on the topic a
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this is really interesting i myself have a story in brazil that people think is an overnight success i come from a humble family and two weeks before the deadline to apply for mit i started the application process and i got in people may think it's an overnight success but that only worked because for the years prior to that i took life and education seriously
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believe someone else has the answers for you constantly people want to help out right all sorts of people your family your friends your business partners they all have opinions on which path you should take and let me tell you go through this pipe but whenever you go inside there are other ways you have to pick as well and you need to make those decisions yourself no one else has the perfect answers for your life
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but whenever you go inside there are other ways you have to pick as well and you need to make those decisions yourself no one else has the perfect answers for your life and you need to keep picking those decisions right the pipes are infinite and you're going to bump your head and it's a part of the process three and it's very subtle but very important decide to settle when growth is guaranteed so when your life is going great you have put together a great team and you have growing revenue and everything is set time to settle when i launched my first book i worked really really hard to distribute it everywhere in brazil with that over three million people downloaded it over people bought physical copies when i wrote a sequel some impact was guaranteed
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i want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away however i've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous so i've decided to recruit some of my ted friends to read my words aloud for me i will start with my wife chaz chaz ebert it was chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak going into the first surgery for a recurrence of cancer in i expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show and roeper at the movies i had pre taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation the doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw my tongue larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected
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there was no particular day when anyone told me i would never speak again it just sort of became obvious human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system we need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds therefore the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air because i had lost my jaw i could no longer form a seal and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless at first for a long time i wrote messages in notebooks then i tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice this was faster and nobody had to try to read my handwriting i tried out various computer voices that were available online and for several months i had a british accent which chaz called sir lawrence
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the voice was created by a company in scotland named it makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while i was commenting on casablanca and citizen kane this is the first voice they've created for an individual there are several very good voices available for computers but they all sound like somebody else while this voice sounds like me i plan to use it on television radio and the internet people who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built in speaking systems many blind people use them to read pages on the web to themselves but i've got to say in first grade they said i talked too much and now i still can
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i doubt on that day years ago they even dreamed of what salman khan has accomplished but that's not the point the point is plato was only years ago an instant in time it continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers until only five years ago i have learned from that starting with that humble beginning plato established forums message boards online testing email chat rooms picture languages instant messaging remote screen sharing and multiple player games since the first web browser was also developed in urbana it appears that my hometown in downstate illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual online universe we occupy today but i'm not here from the chamber of commerce
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all of this has happened in my lifetime i started writing on a computer back in the when one of the first systems was installed at the chicago sun times i was in line at radio shack to buy one of the first model and when i told the people in the press room at the academy awards that they'd better install some phone lines for internet connections they didn't know what i was talking about when i bought my first desktop it was a dec rainbow does anybody remember that the sun times sent me to the cannes film festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the i joined compuserve when it had fewer numbers than i currently have followers on
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this whole adventure has been a learning experience every time there was a surgery that failed i was left with a little less flesh and bone now i have no jaw left at all while harvesting tissue from both my shoulders the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily ironic that my legs are fine and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk when you see me today i look like the phantom of the opera but no you don't
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people talk loudly and slowly to me sometimes they assume i am deaf there are people who don't want to make eye contact believe me he didn't mean this as anyway let me just read it
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it is human nature to look away from illness we don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality that's why writing on the internet has become a lifesaver for me my ability to think and write have not been affected and on the web my real voice finds expression i have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way one of my friends can type only with his toes one of the funniest on the web is written by a friend of mine named cripple
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wait i have one more thing to add a guy goes into a psychiatrist the psychiatrist says you're crazy the guy says i want a second opinion the psychiatrist says all right you're ugly
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these are my words but this is not my voice this is alex the best computer voice i've been able to find which comes as standard equipment on every macintosh for most of my life i never gave a second thought to my ability to speak it was like breathing in those days i was living in a fool's paradise after surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak eat or drink i was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me
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i was optimistic and all was right with the world the first surgery was a great success i saw myself in the mirror and i looked pretty good two weeks later i was ready to return home i was using my to play the leonard cohen song your for my doctors and nurses suddenly i had an episode of catastrophic bleeding
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there was a second surgery which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart and then a third attempt which also patched me back together pretty well until it failed a doctor from brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture and before i left the hospital after a year of being hospitalized i had seven ruptures of my carotid artery there was no particular day when anyone told me i would never speak again it just sort of became obvious human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system
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then apple released the alex voice which was the best i'd heard it knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark when it saw a period it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air there are all sorts of codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices and i've experimented with them for me they share a fundamental problem they're too slow when i find myself in a conversational situation i need to type fast and to jump right in
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but what value do we place on the sound of our own voice how does that affect who you are as a person when people hear alex speaking my words do they experience a disconnect does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next how did i feel not being able to speak i felt and i still feel a lot of distance from the human mainstream i've become uncomfortable when i'm separated from my laptop even then i'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties so chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my tv show voice from a period of years at first i was against it i thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer there was something comforting about a voice that was not my own but i decided then to just give it a try
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i'll let you hear a sample of that voice these are a few of the comments i recorded for use when chaz and i appeared on the oprah winfrey program and here's the voice we call roger jr or roger oprah i can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show we have been talking for a long time and now here we are again this is the first version of my computer voice
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we have been talking for a long time and now here we are again this is the first version of my computer voice it still needs improvement but at least it sounds like me and not like hal when i heard it the first time it sent chills down my spine when i type anything this voice will speak whatever i type when i read something it will read in my voice i have typed these words in advance as i didn't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing the voice was created by a company in scotland named it makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while i was commenting on casablanca and citizen kane
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as you can hear it sounds like me but the words jump up and down the flow isn't natural the good people in scotland are still improving my voice and i'm optimistic about it but so far the apple alex voice is the best one i've heard i wrote a about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played alex he said he recorded many long hours in various to be used in the voice
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all my life i was a now i have spoken my last words and i don't even remember for sure what they were i feel like the hero of that harlan ellison story titled i have no mouth and i must scream on wednesday david christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time span of the universe for almost all of its millions and billions of years there was no life on earth at all for almost all the years of life on earth there was no intelligent life
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louder i can't hear you sex again please don't be shy sex absolutely that's right it's sex
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raise your hand if any of this is sounding familiar to you from your part of the world yeah it's not as if the arab world has a monopoly on sexual hangups and although we don't yet have an arab kinsey report to tell us exactly what's happening inside bedrooms across the arab region it's pretty clear that something is not right double standards for men and women sex as a source of shame family control limiting individual choices and a vast gulf between appearance and reality what people are doing and what they're willing to admit to and a general reluctance to move beyond private whispers to a serious and sustained public discussion as one doctor in cairo summed it up for me here sex is the opposite of sport football everybody talks about it but hardly anyone plays but sex everybody is doing it but nobody wants to talk about it
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has opened on sex what we found is that arab societies appear to have been moving in the opposite direction in egypt and many of its neighbors this closing down is part of a wider closing in political social and cultural thought and it is the product of a complex historical process one which has gained ground with the rise of islamic conservatism since the late just say no is what conservatives around the world say to any challenge to the sexual status quo in the arab region they brand these attempts as a western conspiracy to undermine traditional arab and islamic values but what's really at stake here is one of their most powerful tools of control sex wrapped up in religion but history shows us that even as recently as our fathers' and day there have been times of greater pragmatism and tolerance and a willingness to consider other interpretations be it abortion or masturbation or even the incendiary topic of homosexuality it is not black and white as conservatives would have us believe in these as in so many other matters islam offers us at least shades of gray
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in casablanca not so long ago i met a young unmarried mother called showed me photos of her infant son and she told me the story of his conception pregnancy and delivery it was a remarkable tale but saved the best for last you know i am a virgin she told me i have two medical certificates to prove it this is the modern middle east where two millennia after the coming of christ virgin births are still a fact of life
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story is just one of hundreds i've heard over the years traveling across the arab region talking to people about sex now i know this might sound like a dream job or possibly a highly dubious occupation but for me it's something else altogether i'm half egyptian and i'm muslim but i grew up in canada far from my arab roots like so many who straddle east and west i've been drawn over the years to try to better understand my origins that i chose to look at sex comes from my background in as a writer and a researcher and an activist
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now sexuality is an incredibly powerful lens with which to study any society because what happens in our intimate lives is reflected by forces on a bigger stage in politics and economics in religion and tradition in gender and generations as i found if you really want to know a people you start by looking inside their bedrooms now to be sure the arab world is vast and varied but running across it are three red lines these are topics you are not supposed to challenge in word or deed the first of these is politics but the arab spring has changed all that in uprisings which have blossomed across the region since
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so we decided to put the project on and when we did we raised our funding goal in about two hours and all of a sudden had this money to make these kits but then we had to learn how to make them i mean we had to learn small batch manufacturing so we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation but we were able to do it we got all the kits made thanks a lot to which was a big help to us and we shipped these kits all over the world just before christmas of last year so it was just a few months ago but we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world including this shot from under the ice in antarctica we've also learned the penguins love robots
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so this video was taken at aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of key largo about feet below the surface nasa uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts and last year they invited us along for the ride all the footage was taken from our open which is a robot that we built in our garage so stands for remote operated vehicle which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra thin tether back to the computer it's open source meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design it's built with mostly off parts and costs about times cheaper than the james cameron used to explore the titanic
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here we are back to our hero the oyster and again it's this incredibly exciting animal it accepts algae and detritus in one end and through this beautiful glamorous set of stomach organs out the other end comes cleaner water and one oyster can filter up to gallons of water a day oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days they were key in our culture and our economy basically new york was built on the backs of and our streets were literally built over oyster shells this image is an image of an oyster cart which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today so again we got the short end of the deal there
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how does the reef work well it's very very simple a core concept here is that climate change isn't something that the answers won't land down from the moon and with a billion price tag we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what's in front of us so this image is simply showing it's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope what is fuzzy rope you ask it's just that it's this very inexpensive thing available practically at your hardware store and it's very cheap so we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project
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i am passionate about the american landscape and how the physical form of the land from the great central valley of california to the bedrock of manhattan has really shaped our history and our character but one thing is clear in the last years alone our country and this is a sprawl map of america our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet and so how i see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re imagine these connections and physically rebuild them this graph represents what we're dealing with now in the built environment and it's really a of urban population rising biodiversity plummeting and also of course sea levels rising and climate changing
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so when i also think about design i think about trying to rework and re engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way and you can see from the arrow here indicating you are here i'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way so the era of big infrastructure is over i mean these sort of top down mono functional capital intensive solutions are really not going to cut it we need new tools and new approaches similarly the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field devoid of context is really not the excuse me it's fairly blatant is really not the approach that we need to take so we need new stories new heroes and new tools
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time a window farm was no more than a technically complex idea that was going to require a lot of testing and i really wanted it to be an open project because is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the united states right now and could possibly become another area like monsanto where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food so i decided that instead of creating a product what i was going to do was open this up to a whole bunch of the first few systems that we created they kind of worked we were actually able to grow about a salad a week in a typical new york city apartment window and we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and cucumbers all kinds of stuff but the first few systems were these leaky loud power guzzlers that martha stewart would definitely never have approved
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so to bring on more what we did was we created a social media site on which we published the designs we explained how they worked and we even went so far as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems and then we invited people all over the world to build them and experiment with us so actually now on this website we have people and we have window farms all over the world what we're doing is what nasa or a large corporation would call or research and development but what we call it is or research and develop it yourself
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i like many of you am one of the two billion people on earth who live in cities and there are days i don't know about the rest of you but there are days when i palpably feel how much i rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life and some days that can even be a little scary but what i'm here to talk to you about today is how that same interdependence is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to help heal some of our deepest civic issues if we apply open source collaboration a couple of years ago i read an article by new york times writer michael pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment now at the time that i was reading this it was the middle of the winter and i definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my new york city apartment
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a couple of years ago i read an article by new york times writer michael pollan in which he argued that growing even some of our own food is one of the best things that we can do for the environment now at the time that i was reading this it was the middle of the winter and i definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt in my new york city apartment so i was basically just willing to settle for just reading the next wired magazine and finding out how the experts were going to figure out how to solve all these problems for us in the future but that was actually exactly the point that michael pollan was making in this article it's precisely when we hand over the responsibility for all these things to specialists that we cause the kind of messes that we see with the food system so i happen to know a little bit from my own work about how nasa has been using to explore growing food in space and that you can actually get optimal nutritional yield by running a kind of high quality liquid soil over plants' root systems now to a vegetable plant my apartment has got to be about as foreign as outer space but i can offer some natural light and year round climate control fast forward two years later we now have window farms which are vertical hydroponic platforms for food growing indoors
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a ghana airways pilot falls into the same predicament because of his uniform they speak to him differently and they explain to him that they're just following orders so he takes their radio talks to their boss and gets us all released what lessons would you take from an experience like this several for me leadership matters those men are following the orders of a superior officer i learned something about courage it was important not to look at those guns and i also learned that it can be helpful to think about girls
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like many of you here i am trying to contribute towards a renaissance in africa the question of transformation in africa really is a question of leadership africa can only be transformed by enlightened leaders and it is my contention that the manner in which we educate our leaders is fundamental to progress on this continent i want to tell you some stories that explain my view we all heard about the importance of stories yesterday
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one thing that this baby could be thinking about that could be going on in his mind is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby after all one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling and maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get we wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people now the question is how could we ask them babies after all can't talk and if you ask a three year old to tell you what he thinks what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that so how do we actually ask them the question well it turns out that the secret was broccoli what we did betty who was one of my students and i was actually to give the babies two bowls of food one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers now all of the babies even in berkley like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli
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and of course we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows we have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal we're smarter we're more flexible we can learn more we survive in more different environments we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space and our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species my son is
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there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program here's one from lab what did was use our detectors and what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't and then she showed them an anomaly and what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes boy how about this same as the other side okay so his first hypothesis has just been falsified
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this one lighted up and this one nothing okay he's got his experimental notebook out what's making this light up
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oh it's because this needs to be like this and this needs to be like this okay hypothesis two that's why oh
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if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults i think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before when we fall in love with someone new or when we're in a new city for the first time and what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts it expands so that those three days in paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking talking faculty meeting attending zombie back home and by the way that coffee that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs actually mimics the effect of those baby so what's it like to be a baby it's like being in love in paris for the first time after you've had three double
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baby's mind if you'd asked people this years ago most people including psychologists would have said that this baby was irrational illogical egocentric that he couldn't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect in the last years developmental science has completely overturned that picture so in some ways we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists let me give you just one example of this one thing that this baby could be thinking about that could be going on in his mind is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby
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and she would act as if she liked it or she didn't so half the time she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli just like a baby and any other sane person but half the time what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go broccoli i tasted the broccoli and then she would take a little bit of the crackers and she'd go yuck crackers
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the question is what would the baby give her what they liked or what she liked and the remarkable thing was that month old babies just barely walking and talking would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli on the other hand month olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli like they couldn't figure this out but then after they stared for a long time they would just give her the crackers what they thought everybody must like so there are two really remarkable things about this the first one is that these little month old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature that we don't always want the same thing and what's more they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted even more remarkably though the fact that month olds didn't do this suggests that these month olds had learned this deep profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were months old so children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought
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the question you might ask though is why do children learn so much and how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time i mean after all if you look at babies superficially they seem pretty useless and actually in many ways they're worse than useless because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive but if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies it turns out that there's actually an answer if we look across many many different species of animals not just us primates but also including other mammals birds even like kangaroos and wombats it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are
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and sort of the for this idea are the birds up there on one side is a new caledonian crow and crows and other ravens rooks and so forth are incredibly smart birds they're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects and this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food on the other hand we have our friend the domestic chicken and chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps
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a division of the library of congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity and playboy is always in the top few
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this on a lighter note is at george lucas' personal archive this is the death star and it's shown here in its true orientation in the context of star wars return of the its mirror image is presented they flip the negative and you can see the brass detailing and the painted acrylic facade in the context of the film this is a deep space battle station of the galactic empire capable of planets and civilizations and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet
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and oddly the most notable letter of rejection i ever received came from walt disney world a seemingly innocuous site and it read i'm just going to read a key sentence especially during these violent times i personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to photography threatens fantasy they didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities myths and beliefs and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth
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it was a critical moment in american history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information and i wanted to see the center with my own eyes but what i came away with is a photograph and it's just another place from which to observe and the understanding that there are no absolute all knowing insiders and the outsider can never really reach the core
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after this we wanted to see if we could implement this and automate the system so we used the same system but we added a structure to it so we could activate the machine so we used the same bladder inflated system and we took it for testing so this is happening in the netherlands we tried in the water without any skin or ballast just to see how it works and then we mounted a camera for controlling it but quickly we saw that we would need a lot more weight at the bottom so we had to take it back to the lab and then we built a skin around it we put batteries remote controllers and then we put it in the water and then we let it go in the water and see how well it would work so let some rope out and hope it's going to work and it worked okay but we still have a long way our small prototype has given us good insight that it's working very well but we still need to work a lot more on this so what we are doing is an accelerated evolution of sailing technology we went from a back rudder to a front rudder to two to multiple to the whole boat changing shape and the more we are moving forward and the more the design looks simple and cute
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i started this project alone in a garage in new orleans but quickly after i wanted to publish and share this information so i made a which is a crowd fundraising platform and in about one month we dollars with this money i hired a team of young engineers from all over the world and we rented a factory in rotterdam in the netherlands we were peer learning we were engineering we were making things but most importantly we were trying our prototypes in the water as often as possible to fail as quickly as possible to learn from this is a proud member of from korea and on the right side this is a multiple masts design proposed by a team in mexico this idea really appealed to gabriella levine in new york and so she decided to prototype this idea that she saw and she documented every step of the process and she published it on which is a website for sharing inventions less than one week after this is a team in eindhoven it's a school of engineering they made it but they eventually published a simplified design they also made it into an and in less than one week they had almost views and they got many new friends we're working on also simpler technology not that complex with younger people and also older people like this dinosaur is from mexico
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more than of these boats which are fishermen boats with oil absorbent in white and oil containment in orange were used but they only collected three percent of the oil on the surface and the health of the cleaners were very deeply affected i was working on a very interesting technology at mit but it was a very long term view of how to develop technology and it was going to be a very expensive technology and also it would be patented so i wanted to develop something that we could develop very fast that would be cheap and that would be open source so because oil spills are not only happening in the gulf of mexico and that would be using renewable energy
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where the grass is always redder on the other side that's because orbits a red star and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis it has different pigments and looks red enjoy the gravity on a super earth this planet is more massive than earth and has a higher surface gravity relax on where your shadow always has company
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that's a lot of oxygen but without plants and life there would be no oxygen virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere so oxygen is here because of life and our goal then is to look for gases in other planet gases that don't belong that we might be able to attribute to life but which molecules should we search for i actually told you how diverse are we expect that to continue in the future when we find other earths and that's one of the main things i'm working on now i have a theory about this it reminds me that nearly every day i receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such so please don't email me one of your crazy theories
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i'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life not little green arriving in shiny although that would be nice but it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away every star in our sky is a sun and if our sun has planets mercury venus earth mars etc surely those other stars should have planets also and they do and in the last two decades astronomers have found thousands of
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brain development takes place in the first few years of life back then years ago we didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development across the lifespan in the past decade or so mainly due to advances in brain imaging technology such as magnetic resonance imaging or have started to look inside the living human brain of all ages and to track changes in brain structure and brain function so we use structural if you'd like to take a snapshot a photograph at really high resolution of the inside of the living human brain and we can ask questions like how much gray matter does the brain contain and how does that change with age and we also use functional called to take a video a movie of brain activity when participants are taking part in some kind of task like thinking or feeling or perceiving something so many labs around the world are involved in this kind of research and we now have a really rich and detailed picture of how the living human brain develops and this picture has radically changed the way we think about human brain development by revealing that it's not all over in early childhood and instead the brain continues to develop right throughout adolescence and into the and so adolescence is defined as the period of life that starts with the biological hormonal physical changes of puberty and ends at the age at which an individual attains a stable independent role in society
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