id
int64 | transcript
string | label
int64 |
|---|---|---|
4,188 |
but we have a challenge over the last year we've seen horrible headlines of incredible destruction going on to archaeological sites and massive looting by people like has destroyed temples at who blows up a temple they've destroyed the tomb of jonah and we've seen looting at sites so rampant it looks like craters of the moon knowing desire to destroy modern human lives it's a natural extension for them to destroy cultural identity as well countless invading armies have done the same throughout history
| 0 |
4,189 |
we know that is profiting from the looting of sites but we don't know the scale this means that any object purchased on the market today from the middle east could potentially be funding terrorism when a site is looted it's as if a puzzle already missing percent of it pieces has had the rest obscured beyond recognition this is ancient identity theft writ large we know that there are two kinds of looting going on looting by criminal elements like and then more local looting by those that are desperate for money we would all do the same to feed our families i don't blame the local looters i blame the middlemen the unethical traffickers and an international art market that exploits often ambiguous or even completely nonexistent laws
| 0 |
4,191 |
we are the generation with all the tools and all the technologies to stop looting but we're not working fast enough sometimes an archaeological site can surprise you with its resilience
| 0 |
4,214 |
so that was an immense shock for me and it was an immense shock for many people but it was also something that over the following several days created a complete political meltdown in my country there were calls for a second referendum almost as if following a sports match we could ask the opposition for a replay everybody was blaming everybody else people blamed the prime minister for calling the referendum in the first place they blamed the leader of the opposition for not fighting it hard enough the young accused the old the educated blamed the less well educated that complete meltdown was made even worse by the most tragic element of it levels of xenophobia and racist abuse in the streets of britain at a level that i have never seen before in my lifetime people are now talking about whether my country is becoming a little england or as one of my colleagues put it whether we're about to become a nostalgia theme park floating in the atlantic ocean
| 1 |
4,215 |
so it came as an immense shock to me when i woke up on the morning of june to discover that my country had voted to leave the european union my prime minister had resigned and scotland was considering a referendum that could bring to an end the very existence of the united kingdom so that was an immense shock for me and it was an immense shock for many people but it was also something that over the following several days created a complete political meltdown in my country there were calls for a second referendum almost as if following a sports match we could ask the opposition for a replay everybody was blaming everybody else
| 0 |
4,217 |
first what does represent hindsight is a wonderful thing teaches us many things about our society and about societies around the world it highlights in ways that we seem embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are the vote split along lines of age education class and geography young people didn't turn out to vote in great numbers but those that did wanted to remain
| 0 |
4,220 |
in ireland built the first straw bale houses in ireland and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing but all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model and moderating what comes in at one end and moderating the outputs at the other end and then i came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly and in order to introduce you to that i've got something here that i'm going to unveil which is one of the great marvels of the modern age and it's something so astounding and so astonishing that i think maybe as i remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate if you could help me with that it would be fantastic
| 1 |
4,221 |
another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan which is basically to develop a plan b for the town most of our local authorities when they sit down to plan for the next five years of a community still start by assuming that there will be more energy more cars more housing more jobs more growth and so on what does it look like if that's not the case and how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody as a friend of mine says life is a series of things you're not quite ready for and that's certainly been my experience with transition from three years ago it just being an idea this has become something that has swept around the world we're getting a lot of interest from government ed the energy minister of this country was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener which he did and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea
| 1 |
4,222 |
as a culture we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future and where we might move forward from this point some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling but i want to tell you a different story here today like all stories it has a beginning my work for a long time has been involved in education in teaching people practical skills for sustainability teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food how to build buildings using local materials how to generate their own energy and so on
| 0 |
4,223 |
this bottle of oil distilled over a hundred million years of geological time ancient sunlight contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor equivalent to about strong people coming round and working for you we can turn it into a dazzling array of materials medicine modern clothing laptops a whole range of different things it gives us an energy return that's unimaginable historically we've based the design of our settlements our business models our transport plans even the idea of economic growth some would argue on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity yet when we take a step back and look over the span of history at what we might call the petroleum interval it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material and then based a whole way of life around it but as we straddle the top of this energy mountain at this stage we move from a time where our economic success our sense of individual prowess and well being is directly linked to how much of this we consume to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability
| 0 |
4,224 |
we live in difficult and challenging economic times of course and one of the first victims of difficult economic times i think is public spending of any kind but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science and particularly curiosity led science and exploration so i want to try and convince you in about minutes that that's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do but i think to set the scene i want to show the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst ted slide in the history of ted but it is a bit of a mess
| 1 |
4,225 |
and it's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs because if i'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity driven science and exploration i should tell you how much it costs so this is a game called spot the science budgets this is the u k government spend you see there it's about billion a year the science budget is actually if you look to your left there's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs
| 0 |
4,233 |
now most of the time you think of pain as a symptom of a disease and that's true most of the time it's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation but about percent of the time after the patient has recovered from one of those events pain persists it persists for months and oftentimes for years and when that happens it is its own disease and before i tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it i want to show you how it feels for my patients so imagine if you will that i'm stroking your arm with this feather as i'm stroking my arm right now now i want you to imagine that i'm stroking it with this please keep your seat
| 1 |
4,235 |
that was the experience of my patient chandler whom you see in the photograph as you can see she's a beautiful young woman she was years old last year when i met her and she aspired to be a professional dancer and during the course of one of her dance rehearsals she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist now you would probably imagine as she did that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person's life wrap it in an ace bandage take some ibuprofen for a week or two and that's the end of the story but in chandler's case that was the beginning of the story this is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain
| 0 |
4,236 |
they intentionally have a head on collision with the wall so they don't slow down and can transition up it in milliseconds and they can do this in part because they have extraordinary and they're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another here's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach you see these plates and you see the compliant membrane my engineering colleague at berkeley designed with his students a novel manufacturing technique where you essentially the exoskeleton you laser cut it laminate it and you fold it up into a robot and you can do that now in less than minutes these robots called dash for dynamic autonomous sprawled are highly compliant robots and they're remarkably robust as a result of these features they're certainly incredibly damage resistant
| 1 |
4,237 |
so they can use their smart compliant body to transition up a wall in a very simple way they even have some of the beginnings of the rapid inversion behavior where they disappear now we want to know why they can go anywhere we discovered that they can go through three millimeter gaps the height of two pennies two stacked pennies and when they do this they can actually run through those confined spaces at high speeds although you never see it to understand it better we did a ct scan of the exoskeleton and showed that they can compress their body by over percent we put them in a materials testing machine to look at the stress strain analysis and showed that they can withstand forces times their body weight and after this they can fly and run absolutely normally so you never know where curiosity based research will lead and someday you may want a swarm of cockroach inspired robots to come at you
| 1 |
4,238 |
even nature's most disgusting creatures have important secrets but who would want a swarm of cockroaches coming towards them yet one of the greatest differences between natural and human technologies relates to robustness robust systems are stable in complex and new environments remarkably cockroaches can self stabilize running over rough terrain when we put a jet pack on them or give them a perturbation like an earthquake we discovered that their wonderfully tuned legs allow them to self stabilize without using any of their brainpower they can go over complex terrain like grass no problem and not get destabilized
| 0 |
4,239 |
robust systems can perform multiple tasks with the same structure here's a new behavior we've discovered the animals rapidly invert and disappear in less than milliseconds you never see them using the same structures that they use to run their legs they can run upside down very rapidly on rods branches and wires and if you perturb one of those branches they can do this they can perform gymnastic maneuvers like no robot we have yet and they have nearly unlimited maneuverability with that same structure and unprecedented access to a variety of different areas
| 0 |
4,240 |
strawberry is really fascinating because it's so beautiful i'd never thought about being a beautiful thing before before i saw it in this form a lot of people especially in the art community don't necessarily engage in science in this way i instantly joined after this and asked oliver if we can do this with strawberries can we do this with people about minutes later we were both spitting in vials coming up with a protocol for human extraction i started doing this on my own this is what my actually looks like and i was at a dinner party with some artist friends and i was telling them about this project and they couldn't believe that you could actually see so i said all right let's get out some supplies right now and i started having these bizarre dinner parties on friday nights where people would come over and we'd do extractions and i would capture them on video because it created this kind of funny portrait as well
| 1 |
4,241 |
these are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science you can kind of tell from their reactions
| 1 |
4,242 |
but they became fascinated by it and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science and so i started doing this regularly
| 1 |
4,244 |
it's an odd thing to do with your friday nights but this is what i started doing i started collecting a whole group of my friends' in small vials and categorizing them this is what that looked like and it started to make me think about a couple of things first this looked a lot like my wall so in a way i created sort of a genetic social network
| 0 |
4,245 |
and the second thing was one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like uh why are they numbered is this person more rare than the other one and i hadn't even thought about that they were just numbered because that was the order that i extracted the in but that made me think about collecting toys and what's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys and being able to collect these rare toys you buy these boxes but aren't sure what's going to be inside but when you open them you have different rarities of the toys
| 0 |
4,246 |
there's actually an even worse example of this kind of fine tuning of a dangerous number and this time it comes from the other end of the scale from studying the universe at vast distances one of the most important consequences of einstein's general theory of relativity was the discovery that the universe began as a rapid expansion of space and time billion years ago the big bang now according to early versions of the big bang theory the universe has been expanding ever since with gravity gradually putting the brakes on that expansion but in astronomers made the stunning discovery that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up the universe is getting bigger and bigger faster and faster driven by a mysterious repulsive force called dark energy now whenever you hear the word dark in physics you should get very suspicious because it probably means we don't know what we're talking about
| 1 |
4,247 |
i was very lucky that i joined the experiment i work on at the in just as we were switching on and there are people in my research group who have been working on it for three decades their entire careers on one machine so i think the first conversations about the were in and you start planning the machine without the technology that you know you're going to need to be able to build it so the computing power did not exist in the early when design work began in earnest one of the big detectors which record these collisions they didn't think there was technology that could withstand the radiation that would be created in the so there was basically a lump of lead in the middle of this object with some detectors around the outside but subsequently we have developed technology so you have to rely on people's ingenuity that they will solve the problems but it may be a decade or more down the line china just announced two or three weeks ago that they intend to build a supercollider twice the size of the i was wondering how you and your colleagues welcome the news size isn't everything bruno i'm sure
| 1 |
4,248 |
this month a old albert einstein stood up in front of the prussian academy of sciences in berlin to present a radical new theory of space time and gravity the general theory of relativity general relativity is unquestionably einstein's masterpiece a theory which reveals the workings of the universe at the grandest scales capturing in one beautiful line of algebra everything from why apples fall from trees to the beginning of time and space must have been an exciting year to be a physicist two new ideas were turning the subject on its head one was einstein's theory of relativity the other was arguably even more revolutionary quantum mechanics a mind strange yet stunningly successful new way of understanding the the world of atoms and particles over the last century these two ideas have utterly transformed our understanding of the universe
| 0 |
4,249 |
over the last century these two ideas have utterly transformed our understanding of the universe it's thanks to relativity and quantum mechanics that we've learned what the universe is made from how it began and how it continues to evolve a hundred years on we now find ourselves at another turning point in physics but what's at stake now is rather different the next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe for the first time in the history of science we could be facing questions that we cannot answer not because we don't have the brains or technology but because the laws of physics themselves forbid it this is the essential problem the universe is far far too interesting relativity and quantum mechanics appear to suggest that the universe should be a boring place it should be dark lethal and lifeless but when we look around us we see we live in a universe full of interesting stuff full of stars planets trees squirrels
| 0 |
4,266 |
that is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old fashioned industry something brought by sailboat with moby dicks and jack sparrows but shipping isn't that shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been shipping brings us percent of world trade shipping has quadrupled in size since we are more dependent on it now than ever and yet for such an enormous industry there are a working vessels on the sea it's become pretty much invisible now that sounds absurd in singapore to say that because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel
| 1 |
4,267 |
another thing that surprised me when i got on board kendal was who i was sitting next to not the queen i can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait but around that dining table in the officer's saloon i was sitting next to a burmese guy i was opposite a romanian a moldavian an indian on the next table was a chinese guy and in the crew room it was entirely filipinos so that was a normal working ship now how is that possible because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last years when most of the general public stopped noticing it was something called an open registry or a flag of convenience ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry you can get a flag from the landlocked nation of bolivia or mongolia or north korea though that's not very popular
| 1 |
4,269 |
and i learned these two facts and i thought what's going on in shipping and i thought would that happen in any other industry would we see airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months or a year would we see greyhound bus drivers it wouldn't happen so i started to get intrigued and i discovered another fact which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that i hadn't known it before at the age of that is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old fashioned industry something brought by sailboat with moby dicks and jack sparrows but shipping isn't that
| 0 |
4,272 |
the game of public policy today is rigged in many ways how else would more than half of federal tax breaks flow up to the wealthiest five percent of americans and our choices indeed are often terrible for many people across the political spectrum exhibit a is the presidential election but in any year you can look up and down the ballot and find plenty to be uninspired about but in spite of all this i still believe voting matters and crazy as it may sound i believe we can revive the joy of voting today i want to talk about how we can do that and why there used to be a time in american history when voting was fun when it was much more than just a grim duty to show up at the polls that time is called most of american history
| 1 |
4,273 |
the game is rigged my vote won't count the choices are terrible voting is for suckers perhaps you've thought some of these things
| 0 |
4,293 |
they're for interrupting people they don't really do the work so they make sure everyone else is doing work which is an interruption we have lots of managers in the world now and a lot of people in the world and a lot of interruptions by these managers they have to check in hey how's it going show me what's up this sort of thing they keep interrupting you at the wrong time while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do they tend to interrupt you that's kind of bad but what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all which is call meetings and meetings are just toxic terrible poisonous things during the day at work
| 1 |
4,295 |
because work like sleep happens in phases so you'll be going up doing some work and then you'll come down from that work and then maybe it's time to check that email or i m there are very very few things that are that urgent that need to happen that need to be answered right this second so if you're a manager start encouraging people to use more things like i m and email and other things that someone can put away and then get back to you on their own schedule and the last suggestion i have is that if you do have a meeting coming up if you have the power just cancel it just cancel that next meeting
| 1 |
4,296 |
so i'm going to talk about work specifically why people can't seem to get work done at work which is a problem we all kind of have but let's sort of start at the beginning so we have companies and non profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort and they expect these people who work for them to do great work i would hope at least at least good work hopefully at least it's good work hopefully great work and so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work
| 0 |
4,306 |
now may be a term you've heard of a is a billionth of a meter my area is the atomic nucleus which is the tiny dot inside an atom it's even smaller in scale this is the domain of quantum mechanics and physicists and chemists have had a long time to try and get used to it biologists on the other hand have got off lightly in my view they are very happy with their balls models of molecules
| 1 |
4,309 |
the puzzle the mystery was how does it do it well the only theory in town we don't know if it's the correct theory but the only theory in town is that it does it via something called quantum entanglement inside the robin's retina i kid you not inside the robin's retina is a protein called which is light sensitive within a pair of electrons are quantum entangled now quantum entanglement is when two particles are far apart and yet somehow remain in contact with each other even einstein hated this idea he called it spooky action at a distance
| 1 |
4,310 |
i'd like to introduce you to an emerging area of science one that is still speculative but hugely exciting and certainly one that's growing very rapidly quantum biology asks a very simple question does quantum mechanics that weird and wonderful and powerful theory of the subatomic world of atoms and molecules that so much of modern physics and chemistry also play a role inside the living cell in other words are there processes mechanisms phenomena in living organisms that can only be explained with a helping hand from quantum mechanics now quantum biology isn't new it's been around since the early but it's only in the last decade or so that careful experiments in biochemistry labs using spectroscopy have shown very clear firm evidence that there are certain specific mechanisms that require quantum mechanics to explain them quantum biology brings together quantum physicists molecular biologists it's a very interdisciplinary field
| 0 |
4,313 |
quantum mechanics was developed in the it is a set of beautiful and powerful mathematical rules and ideas that explain the world of the very small and it's a world that's very different from our everyday world made up of trillions of atoms it's a world built on probability and chance it's a fuzzy world it's a world of phantoms where particles can also behave like spread out waves if we imagine quantum mechanics or quantum physics then as the fundamental foundation of reality itself then it's not surprising that we say quantum physics organic chemistry after all it gives us the rules that tell us how the atoms fit together to make organic molecules organic chemistry scaled up in complexity gives us molecular biology which of course leads to life itself
| 0 |
4,315 |
in the last time the jordan black cement was released at a retail of dollars it sold out globally in minutes and that's because people were camped outside of sneaker stores for days before it went on sale and just minutes after that thousands of those pairs were on for two and three times retail in fact there's over pairs on right now four years later but here's the thing this happens every single saturday every week there's another release or two or three and every shoe has a story as rich and compelling as the jordan black cement this is nike building the marketplace for people who collect sneakers and my daughter
| 1 |
4,318 |
after starting three companies i took a job as a strategy consultant when i very quickly realized that i didn't know the first thing about data but i learned because i had to and i liked it so i thought i wonder if i could get ahold of some sneaker data just to play with for my own amusement the goal was to develop a price guide a real data driven view of the market and four years later we're analyzing over million transactions providing real time analytics on thousands of sneakers now check prices while camping out for releases others have used the data to validate insurance claims and the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry and here's the best part have sneaker portfolios
| 1 |
4,319 |
can track the value of their collection over time compare it to others and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account so dan builds his collection and identifies which are his he can see it's worth dollars frankly a modest collection at the asset level he can see gain loss by shoe here he's made over dollars on one pair i have one of those
| 1 |
4,324 |
now we have sneaker addictions in a market where in the past months there have been over nine million pairs of shoes resold in the united states alone at a value of billion dollars and that's a conservative estimate i should know i am a this is my collection in the pantheon of great collections mine doesn't even register i have about pairs but trust me i am small time
| 0 |
4,327 |
for a lot of people sneakers are a legal and accessible investment opportunity a democratized stock market but also unregulated which is why the story you're probably most familiar with is people killing each other for sneakers and while that definitely happens and is tragic it's not nearly the epidemic some media would have you believe in fact it's a very small piece of a much bigger and better story so sneakers have clear similarities to both the stock exchange and the illegal drug trade but perhaps the most fundamental is the existence of a central actor someone is making the rules
| 0 |
4,330 |
shoes that sell for dollars do so because they're very rare it's no different than any other collectible market only this isn't a market at all it's a false construct created by nike ingeniously created by nike in the most positive sense to sell more shoes and in the process it provided tens of thousands of people with life long passions myself included if nike wanted to kill the resell market they could do so tomorrow all they have to do is release more shoes but we certainly don't want them to nor is it in their best interest that's because unlike apple who will sell an to anyone who wants one nike doesn't make their money by just selling sneakers they sell millions of shoes to millions of people for dollars and are the ones who drive the marketing and the hype and the and the brand cachet and enable nike to sell millions of sneakers
| 0 |
4,334 |
the world population has doubled since i went to school and of course there's been economic growth in the west a lot of companies have happened to grow the economy so the western population moved over to here and now their aspiration is not only to have a car now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly so this is where they are today and the most successful of the developing countries they have moved on you know and they have become emerging economies we call them they are now buying cars and what happened a month ago was that the chinese company they acquired the volvo company and then finally the swedes understood that something big had happened in the world
| 1 |
4,335 |
i still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people and that was in i'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future but i will not use digital technology as i've done during my first five instead i have progressed and i am today launching a brand new analog teaching technology that i picked up from ikea this box this box contains one billion people and our teacher told us that the industrialized world had one billion people in the developing world she said they had two billion people
| 0 |
4,336 |
for example this beautiful blue shell this was actually used by the mayans as an artificial tooth replacement we're not quite sure why they did it it's hard it's durable but it also had other very nice properties in fact when they put it into the jawbone it could integrate into the jaw and we know now with very sophisticated imaging technologies that part of that integration comes from the fact that this material is designed in a very specific way has a beautiful chemistry has a beautiful architecture and i think in many ways we can sort of think of the use of the blue shell and the mayans as the first real application of the technology
| 1 |
4,337 |
this is a histology slide of what we see when we do that and essentially what we see is very large amounts of bone so in this picture you can see the middle of the leg so the bone marrow then you can see the original bone and you can see where that original bone finishes and just to the left of that is the new bone that's grown within that cavity and you can actually make it even larger and that demarcation that you can see between the original bone and the new bone acts as a very slight point of weakness so actually now the surgeon can come along can harvest away that new bone and the can grow back so you're left with the leg in the same sort of state as if you hadn't operated on it in the first place so it's very very low in terms of after pain compared to an crest harvest and you can grow different amounts of bone depending on how much gel you put in there so it really is an on demand sort of procedure now at the time that we did this this received a lot of attention in the press because it was a really nice way of generating new bone and we got many many contacts from different people that were interested in using this and i'm just going to tell you sometimes those contacts are very strange slightly unexpected and the very most interesting let me put it that way contact that i had was actually from a team of american that all wanted to have double thickness skulls made on their head and so you do get these kinds of contacts and of course being british and also growing up in france i tend to be very blunt and so i had to explain to them very nicely that in their particular case there probably wasn't that much in there to protect in the first place
| 1 |
4,338 |
but if we move on and think throughout history how people have used different materials in the body very often it's been physicians that have been quite creative they've taken things off the shelf one of my favorite examples is that of sir harold ridley who was a famous ophthalmologist or at least became a famous ophthalmologist and during world war what he would see would be pilots coming back from their missions and he noticed that within their eyes they had shards of small bits of material lodged within the eye but the very interesting thing about it was that material actually wasn't causing any inflammatory response so he looked into this and he figured out that actually that material was little shards of plastic that were coming from the canopy of the and this led him to propose that material as a new material for intraocular lenses
| 0 |
4,339 |
and that example i think is a really nice one because it helps remind us that in the early days people often chose materials because they were their very purpose was to perform a mechanical function you'd put them in the body and you wouldn't get an adverse response and what i want to show you is that in medicine we've really shifted away from that idea of taking a material we're actually actively looking for materials that will be that will interact with the body and that furthermore we can put in the body they'll have their function and then they'll dissolve away over time if we look at this schematic this is showing you what we think of as the typical tissue engineering approach
| 0 |
4,340 |
i have a question for you are you religious please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person let's see i'd say about three or four percent i had no idea there were so many believers at a ted conference
| 1 |
4,341 |
my talk today is about the main reason or one of the main reasons why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way shape or form my talk today is about self transcendence it's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away and when that happens the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings
| 0 |
4,342 |
this talk is about writing wrongs no the sound's not faulty writing wrongs the middle east is huge and with all our problems one thing's for sure we love to laugh i think humor is a great way to celebrate our differences we need to take our responsibilities seriously but not ourselves don't get me wrong it's not like we don't have comedy in the middle east i grew up at a time when actors from kuwait syria egypt used laughter to unite the region just as football can
| 1 |
4,346 |
this is the story of the rise and rise of stand up comedy in the middle east a stand up uprising if you will working in london as tv maker and writer i quickly realized that comedy connects audiences now the best breeding ground for good comic writing is the stand up comedy circuit where they just happen to say that you kill when you do well and you bomb when you do badly an unfortunate connection for us maybe but it reminds me that we'd like to thank one man for over the past decade working tirelessly to support comedians all around the world specifically comedians with a middle eastern background like my good friends dean and at the bottom of the screen who two years after started a festival to change the way middle easterners are perceived in the world it's still going strong with positive press to die for
| 0 |
4,349 |
now were the axis successful in five countries in just under a month we had thousands of fanatical fans come and see them live we had millions see them on tv and on tv news in jordan we had his majesty the king come and see them in fact they were so successful that you could buy a pirated copy of their even before it was released in the middle east anywhere you go so everywhere we went we auditioned amateurs we filmed that process and aired a documentary
| 0 |
4,360 |
and it's a wonderful setting as i hope you'll find and a great icon to the best of the victorian tradition it's very unlikely in this special setting and this collection of people but you might just find yourself talking to someone you'd rather wish that you weren't so here's what you do when they say to you what do you do you say i'm a statistician
| 1 |
4,361 |
it's one of the challenges in our profession to try and explain what we do we're not top on people's lists for dinner party guests and conversations and so on and it's something i've never really found a good way of doing but my wife who was then my girlfriend managed it much better than i've ever been able to many years ago when we first started going out she was working for the bbc in britain and i was at that stage working in america i was coming back to visit her she told this to one of her colleagues who said well what does your boyfriend do sarah thought quite hard about the things i'd explained and she concentrated in those days on listening
| 1 |
4,363 |
so when her colleague said what does he do she paused and said he models things well her colleague suddenly got much more interested than i had any right to expect and went on and said what does he model well sarah thought a little bit more about my work and said genes
| 1 |
4,365 |
some of the more mundane issues of thinking about uncertainty here's another quiz for you now suppose we've got a test for a disease which isn't infallible but it's pretty good it gets it right percent of the time and i take one of you or i take someone off the street and i test them for the disease in question let's suppose there's a test for the virus that causes aids and the test says the person has the disease what's the chance that they do the test gets it right percent of the time so a natural answer is percent who likes that answer come on everyone's got to get involved don't think you don't trust me anymore
| 1 |
4,366 |
or they'll suddenly become parched hungry and often both and sprint off for a drink and some food and you'll be left in peace to talk to the person you really want to talk to it's one of the challenges in our profession to try and explain what we do we're not top on people's lists for dinner party guests and conversations and so on
| 0 |
4,368 |
you've got to think and i'm going to ask you some questions so here's the scene for the first question i'm going to ask you can you imagine tossing a coin successively and for some reason which shall remain rather vague we're interested in a particular pattern here's one a head followed by a tail followed by a tail so suppose we toss a coin repeatedly then the pattern head that we've suddenly become fixated with happens here and you can count one two three four five six seven eight nine it happens after the toss so you might think there are more interesting things to do but humor me for the moment imagine this half of the audience each get out coins and they toss them until they first see the pattern head
| 0 |
4,369 |
so you might think there are more interesting things to do but humor me for the moment imagine this half of the audience each get out coins and they toss them until they first see the pattern head the first time they do it maybe it happens after the toss as here the second time maybe it's after the fourth toss the next time after the toss so you do that lots and lots of times and you average those numbers that's what i want this side to think about the other half of the audience doesn't like head they think for deep cultural reasons that's boring and they're much more interested in a different pattern head so on this side you get out your coins and you toss and toss and toss
| 0 |
4,371 |
it takes longer on average in fact the average number of tosses till head is and the average number of tosses until head is eight
| 0 |
4,373 |
are two ways of thinking about this i'll give you one of them so imagine let's suppose we're doing it on this side remember you're excited about head you're excited about head we start tossing a coin and we get a head and you start sitting on the edge of your seat because something great and wonderful or awesome might be about to happen the next toss is a tail you get really excited the on ice just next to you you've got the glasses chilled to celebrate
| 0 |
4,374 |
when this happened a part of me thought well what's the big deal so the media oversimplified a few things but in the end it's just a news story and i think a lot of scientists have this attitude but the problem is that this kind of thing happens all the time and it affects not just the stories you read in the news but also the products you see on the shelves when the headlines rolled what happened was the marketers came calling would i be willing to provide a scientific endorsement of a mood boosting bottled water or would i go on television to demonstrate in front of a live audience that comfort foods really do make you feel better i think these folks meant well but had i taken them up on their offers i would have been going beyond the science and good scientists are careful not to do this but nevertheless neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing here's one example neuro drinks a line of products including bliss here which according to its label helps reduce stress enhances mood provides focused concentration and promotes a positive outlook i have to say this sounds awesome
| 1 |
4,375 |
these studies are scientifically valid and they've been replicated but they're not the whole story other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy it increases gloating oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups and in some cases oxytocin can even decrease cooperation so based on these studies i could say oxytocin is an immoral molecule and call myself dr
| 1 |
4,377 |
a few years ago my colleagues and i were interested in how a brain chemical called serotonin would influence people's decisions in social situations specifically we wanted to know how serotonin would affect the way people react when they're treated unfairly so we did an experiment we manipulated people's serotonin levels by giving them this really disgusting tasting artificial lemon flavored drink that works by taking away the raw ingredient for serotonin in the brain this is the amino acid so what we found was when was low people were more likely to take revenge when they're treated unfairly
| 0 |
4,378 |
but equally whatever the world desires of us whatever our partner our child our colleague our industry our future demands of us will also not happen and what actually happens is this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you and this frontier of actual meeting between what we call a self and what we call the world is the only place actually where things are real but it's quite astonishing how little time we spend at this conversational frontier and not abstracted away from it in one strategy or another i was coming through immigration which is quite a dramatic border at the moment into the us last year and you know you get off an international flight across the atlantic and you're not in the best place you're not at your most spiritually mature you're quite impatient with the rest of humanity in fact so when you get up to immigration with your shirt collar out and a day's growth of beard and you have very little patience and the immigration officer looked at my passport and said what do you do mr whyte i said i work with the conversational nature of reality
| 1 |
4,380 |
and i said i'm sorry my powers as a poet and philosopher only go so far i'm not sure i can but before we knew it we were into a conversation about his marriage here he was in his uniform and the interesting thing was he was looking up and down the row of officers to make sure his supervisor didn't see that we was having a real conversation but all of us live at this conversational frontier with the future i'd like to put you in the shoes of my irish niece marlene mccormack standing on a cliff edge on the western coast of spain overlooking the broad atlantic twenty three years old she's just walked miles from saint jean pied de port on the french side of the pyrenees all the way across northern spain on this very famous old and contemporary pilgrimage called the camino de santiago de the path to santiago of and when you get to santiago actually it can be something of an because there are people living there who are not necessarily applauding you as you're coming into town
| 1 |
4,382 |
but she said i'm not interested in that anyway i don't want to teach drama i want to become a dramatist i want to write plays so i walked the camino in order to give myself some courage in order to walk into my future and i said what was the most powerful moment you had on the whole camino the very most powerful moment she said i had many powerful moments but you know the most powerful moment was post camino was the three days you go on from santiago and come to this cliff edge and you go through three rituals the first ritual is to eat a tapas plate of scallops or if you're vegetarian to contemplate the scallop shell
| 1 |
4,383 |
because the scallop shell has been the icon and badge of your walk and every arrow that you have seen along that way has been pointing underneath a scallop shell so really this first ritual is saying how did you get to this place how did you follow the path to get here how do you hold the conversation of life when you feel when you're when you're left to yourself how do you hold the conversation of life that brings you to this place and the second ritual is that you burn something that you've brought i said what did you burn marlene she said i burned a letter and two postcards i said astonishing twenty three years old and you have paper i can't believe it
| 1 |
4,385 |
because you had given up not because you had given up but because now you would find a different way to tread and because through it all part of you would still walk on no matter how over the waves for marlene mccormack who has already had her third play performed in off in dublin
| 1 |
4,386 |
you can somehow be immune to all of the difficulties and ill health and losses that humanity has been subject to since the beginning of time if we look out at the natural world there's no part of that world that doesn't go through cycles of first or but then growth fullness but then a beautiful to begin with disappearance and then a very austere full disappearance we look at that we say that's beautiful but can i just have the first half of the equation please and when the disappearance is happening i'll close my eyes and wait for the new cycle to come around which means most human beings are at war with reality percent of the time the mature identity is able to live in the full cycle the second illusion is i can construct a life in which i will not have my heart broken romance is the first place we start to do it when you're at the beginning of a new romance or a new marriage you say i have found the person who will not break my heart i'm sorry you have chosen them out unconsciously for that exact core competency
| 1 |
4,391 |
the youthful perspective on the future the present perspective on the future and the future mature perspective on the future i'd like to try and bring all those three together in one identity tonight and you could say that the poet in many ways looks at what i call the conversational nature of reality and you ask yourself what is the conversational nature of reality the conversational nature of reality is the fact that whatever you desire of the world whatever you desire of your partner in a marriage or a love relationship whatever you desire of your children whatever you desire of the people who work for you or with you or your world will not happen exactly as you would like it to happen but equally whatever the world desires of us whatever our partner our child our colleague our industry our future demands of us will also not happen and what actually happens is this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you
| 0 |
4,392 |
it will engage the flashlight imbue it with color and disappear in a firework of flames but you either bring a letter or you write one there and you burn it and of course we know intuitively what is on those letters and postcards it's a form of affection and love that is now no longer extant yeah and then the third ritual between all these fires are large piles of clothes and you leave an item of clothing that has helped you to get to this place
| 0 |
4,393 |
and then the third ritual between all these fires are large piles of clothes and you leave an item of clothing that has helped you to get to this place and i said to marlene what did you leave at the cliff edge she said i left my boots the very things that i walked in actually they were beautiful boots i loved those boots but they were finished after seven weeks of walking so i walked away in my trainers but i left my boots there she said it was really incredible the most powerful moment was the sun was going down but the full moon was coming up behind me and the full moon was illuminated by the dying sun in such a powerful way that even after the sun had dropped below the horizon the moon could still see that sun
| 0 |
4,394 |
she said it was really incredible the most powerful moment was the sun was going down but the full moon was coming up behind me and the full moon was illuminated by the dying sun in such a powerful way that even after the sun had dropped below the horizon the moon could still see that sun and i had a moon shadow and i was looking at my moon shadow walking across the atlantic across this ocean and i thought that's my new self going into the future but suddenly i realized the sun was falling further the moon was losing its reflection and my shadow was disappearing the most powerful moment i had on the whole camino was when i realized i myself had to walk across that unknown sea into my future well i was so taken by this story i wrote this piece for her
| 0 |
4,399 |
but if you're sincere about your work it should break your heart you should get to thresholds where you do not know how to proceed you do not know how to get from here to there what does that do it puts you into a proper relationship with reality why because you have to ask for help heartbreak we don't have a choice about heartbreak we only have a choice of having our hearts broken over people and things and projects that we deeply care about and the last illusion is i can somehow plan enough and arrange things that i will be able to see the path to the end right from where i'm standing right to the horizon but when you think about it the only environment in which that would be true would be a flat desert empty of any other life
| 0 |
4,400 |
and the last illusion is i can somehow plan enough and arrange things that i will be able to see the path to the end right from where i'm standing right to the horizon but when you think about it the only environment in which that would be true would be a flat desert empty of any other life but even in a flat desert the curvature of the earth would take the path away from you so no you see the path and then you don't and then you see it again so this is santiago the supposed arrival which is a kind of return to the beginning all at the same time we have this experience of the journey which is in all of our great spiritual traditions of pilgrimage but just by actually standing in the ground of your life fully not trying to abstract yourself into a strategic future that's actually just an escape from present heartbreak the ability to stand in the ground of your life and to look at the horizon that is pulling you in that moment you are the whole journey you are the whole conversation santiago
| 0 |
4,405 |
there is a natural hair movement that is sweeping the country and also in some places in europe millions of women are exploring what it means to transition to natural hair and they're cutting off years and years of dry damaged ends in order to restore their natural curl pattern i know because i have been an advocate and an ambassador for this movement for roughly the last three years after years of excessive heat and harsh chemicals my hair was beginning to show extreme signs of wear and tear it was breaking off it was thinning looking just extremely dry and brittle all those years of chasing that conventional image of beauty that we saw earlier was finally beginning to take its toll i wanted to do something about it and so i started what i called the no heat challenge where i would refrain from using heat styling tools on my hair for six months and like a good millennial i documented it on social media
| 1 |
4,407 |
the room froze silence jenny and rosie's mom was not too far away she was in the kitchen and she overheard the conversation and she was mortified she said rosie you can't ask people questions like that
| 0 |
4,434 |
you know we were just a small group of crazy students in serbia when we made this big skit we put the big petrol barrel with a portrait of mr president on it in the middle of the main street there was a hole in the top so you could literally come put a coin in get a baseball bat and hit his face sounds loud and within minutes we were sitting in a nearby having coffee and there was a queue of people waiting to do this lovely thing well that's just the beginning of the show the real show starts when the police appears
| 1 |
4,435 |
good afternoon i'm proud to be here at i'll try to speak a little bit today about a phenomenon which can and actually is changing the world and whose name is people power i'll start with an anecdote or for those of you who are monty python lovers a monty python type of sketch here it is it is december somebody gives you a bet you will look at a crystal ball and you will see the future the future will be accurate
| 0 |
4,437 |
and then i thought well this is fun so i went out and i bought a lot of pins that would in fact reflect what i thought we were going to do on any given day so that's how it all started so how large is the collection pretty big it's now traveling at the moment it's in indianapolis but it was at the smithsonian and it goes with a book that says read my pins
| 1 |
4,438 |
it is for all of us men and women finding our ways of defining our roles and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future how did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother a grandmother nurturing and so how did you handle that well the interesting part was i was asked what it was like to be the first woman secretary of state a few minutes after i'd been named and i said well i've been a woman for years but i've only been secretary of state for a few minutes so it evolved
| 1 |
4,440 |
and when i was there there were countries in the u n now there are but it was one of the first times that i didn't have to cook lunch myself so i said to my assistant invite the other women permanent representatives and i thought when i'd get to my apartment that there'd be a lot of women there i get there and there are six other women out of so the countries that had women representatives were canada kazakhstan trinidad tobago jamaica lichtenstein and me so being an american i decided to set up a caucus
| 1 |
4,441 |
more leadership positions and even other places some barriers are being brought down but there's still so much violence still so many problems and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren't when there was maybe you one voice maybe one or two others do you believe and can you tell us why there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis well i do think when there are more women that the tone of the conversation changes and also the goals of the conversation change but it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women if you think that you've forgotten high school
| 1 |
4,442 |
ceiling oh that was well chosen i would say for most of the time i spend when i get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen and none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for saddam hussein
| 0 |
4,444 |
but people did pay attention to what clothes i had what was interesting was that before i went up to new york as u n ambassador i talked to jeane kirkpatrick who'd been ambassador before me and she said you've got to get rid of your professor clothes go out and look like a diplomat so that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping but still there were all kinds of questions about did you wear a hat how short was your skirt and one of the things if you remember rice was at some event and she wore boots and she got criticized over that and no guy ever gets criticized but that's the least of it
| 0 |
4,446 |
think we're slowly changing but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different and therefore it means that we have to remember that while many of us have had huge opportunities and pat you have been a real leader in your field is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women and so what i have felt and i have looked at this from a national security issue when i was secretary of state i decided that women's issues had to be central to american foreign policy not just because i'm a feminist but because i believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered that values are passed down the health situation is better education is better there is greater economic prosperity so i think that it behooves us those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice that we need to help other women and i really dedicated myself to that both at the u n and then as secretary of state and did you get from making that a central tenant of foreign policy from some people i think that they thought that it was a soft issue
| 0 |
4,447 |
for instance when i started there were wars in the balkans the women in bosnia were being raped we then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues and by the way one of the things that i did at that stage was i had just arrived at the u n and when i was there there were countries in the u n now there are but it was one of the first times that i didn't have to cook lunch myself
| 0 |
4,449 |
professor keller was curious about many things why dribble or how earthworms wriggle until a few months ago i hadn't heard of joseph keller i read about him in the new york times in the obituaries the times had half a page of editorial dedicated to him which you can imagine is premium space for a newspaper of their stature i read the obituaries almost every day my wife understandably thinks i'm rather morbid to begin my day with scrambled eggs and a let's see who died today
| 1 |
4,451 |
and so we looked at the data editorial non paid obituaries over a period between and what did these deaths rather lives teach us well first we looked at words this here is an obituary headline this one is of the amazing lee kuan yew
| 0 |
4,468 |
so then i got really curious myself as a toxicologist and i donated some blood to my lab and said okay let's do it well we detected different compounds in my blood and i must say if any of you would have this done you'd probably find a similar profile or cocktail as they call it but i was the recipient of a lot of flame retardant material for some reason and just to point out the levels americans have to times higher levels of these compounds in our bodies than the europeans why because we are flame retarding everything and we have weak regulations for toxic chemicals but lo and behold i'm one of the high end individuals lucky me but then i thought well in case of a fire i might be the last one to ignite
| 1 |
4,471 |
i'm sorry to have a sad slide like this but not everything is all that happy especially in my work they are loaded with toxic chemicals in their body hundreds of compounds all kinds of compounds it's staggering and they're dying off rather regularly tens of thousands around the world it's predicted they may go extinct about a third of them within about years so my project is along the northwest atlantic it's called seals as sentinels we're tracking pollution at the top of the food web in marine mammals and fish it's a region wide eco toxicological investigation we're looking at a lot of compounds but recently been quite interested in the flame the flame that are in many many things that we use in our everyday life from the cushions in the chairs we're all sitting on to the plastic casings of our computers our television sets and so on
| 0 |
4,472 |
the will to live life differently can start in some of the most unusual places this is where i come from it's a market town in the north of england people between leeds and manchester fairly normal market town it used to look like this and now it's more like this with fruit and and herbs sprouting up all over the place we call it propaganda gardening
| 1 |
4,475 |
we've even invented a new form of tourism it's called vegetable tourism and believe it or not people come from all over the world to poke around in our raised beds even when there's not much growing
| 1 |
4,477 |
we tried to answer this simple question can you find a unifying language that cuts across age and income and culture that will help people themselves find a new way of living see spaces around them differently think about the resources they use differently interact differently can we find that language and then can we replicate those actions and the answer would appear to be yes and the language would appear to be food so three and a half years ago a few of us sat around a kitchen table and we just invented the whole thing
| 1 |
4,478 |
this is about sharing and investing in kindness and for those people that don't want to do either of those things maybe they can cook so we pick them seasonally and then we go on the street or in the pub or in the church or wherever people are living their lives this is about us going to the people and saying we are all part of the local food jigsaw we are all part of a solution and then because we know we've got vegetable tourists and we love them to bits and they're absolutely fantastic we thought what could we do to give them an even better experience so we invented without asking of course the incredible edible green and this is a of exhibition gardens and edible and bee friendly sites and the story of and it's a that we designed that takes people through the whole of our town past our cafes and our small shops through our market not just to and fro from the supermarket and we're hoping that in changing people's footfall around our town we're also changing their behavior
| 0 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.