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4,994 |
it's the ideas it's the institutions this must be true because a scotsman said it and i think i'm the only scotsman here at the edinburgh ted so let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a scotsman he was adam smith not billy connolly not sean connery though he is very smart indeed
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it's the same with institutions there are six which i think explain the great divergence one competition two the scientific revolution three property rights four modern medicine five the consumer society and six the work ethic you can play a game and try and think of one i've missed at or try and boil it down to just four but you'll lose
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scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the oriental world in a number of crucial ways the most important being that through the experimental method it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before example benjamin robins's extraordinary application of newtonian physics to ballistics once you do that your artillery becomes accurate think of what that means that really was a killer application
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let's talk about billions let's talk about past and future billions we know that about billion people have ever lived and we know that most of them are dead and we also know that most of them live or lived in asia and we also know that most of them were or are very poor did not live for very long
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and we also know that most of them live or lived in asia and we also know that most of them were or are very poor did not live for very long let's talk about billions let's talk about the billion dollars of wealth in the world today we know that most of that wealth was made after the year and we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call westerners europeans north americans percent of the world's population today westerners own two thirds of its wealth economic historians call this the great divergence and this slide here is the best simplification of the great divergence story i can offer you
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economic historians call this the great divergence and this slide here is the best simplification of the great divergence story i can offer you it's basically two ratios of per capita per capita gross domestic product so average income one the red line is the ratio of british to indian per capita income and the blue line is the ratio of american to chinese and this chart goes back to and you can see here that there's an exponential great divergence they start off pretty close together in fact in the average chinese was richer than the average north american
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some of you are sitting here thinking what planet are these people on why on earth are you crocheting a reef and wetness aren't exactly two concepts that go together why not chisel a coral reef out of marble cast it in bronze but it turns out there is a very good reason why we are crocheting it because many organisms in coral reefs have a very particular kind of structure the frilly forms that you see in corals and kelps and sponges and is a form of geometry known as hyperbolic geometry and the only way that mathematicians know how to model this structure is with crochet it happens to be a fact it's almost impossible to model this structure any other way and it's almost impossible to do it on computers so what is this hyperbolic geometry that corals and sea slugs embody the next few minutes is we're all going to get raised up to the level of a sea slug
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i'm here today as june said to talk about a project that my twin sister and i have been doing for the past three and half years we're crocheting a coral reef and it's a project that we've actually been now joined by hundreds of people around the world who are doing it with us indeed thousands of people have actually been involved in this project in many of its different aspects it's a project that now reaches across three continents and its roots go into the fields of mathematics marine biology feminine handicraft and environmental activism it's true
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this provides a slightly more statistical look at things this is showing the world's most common feelings overall right now dominated by better then bad then good then guilty and so on weather causes the feelings to assume the physical traits of the weather they represent so the sunny ones swirl around the cloudy ones float along the rainy ones fall down and the snowy ones flutter to the ground you can also stop a raindrop and open the feeling inside finally location causes the feelings to move to their spots on a world map giving you a sense of their geographic distribution so i'll show you now some of my favorite from we feel fine these are the images that are automatically constructed i feel like i'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe
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i can feel my cancer grow i feel pretty i feel skinny but i'm not i'm and a recovering meth and heroin addict and feel absolutely blessed to still be alive i can't wait to see them racing for the first time at daytona next month because i feel the need for speed
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and it leads to just a completely different value system it's an incredibly non materialistic culture where people don't have a lot but they're incredibly happy so i went around and i talked to people about some of these ideas so i did a number of things i asked people a number of set questions and took a number of set photographs and interviewed them with audio and also took pictures i would start by asking people to rate their happiness between one and which is kind of inherently absurd and then when they answered i would inflate that number of balloons and give them that number of balloons to hold so you have some really happy person holding balloons and some really sad soul holding one balloon but you know even holding one balloon is like kind of happy
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so i'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways this is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life you might enjoy the awkwardly tight cut off pajama bottoms with balloons anyway it was a time when i was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories so this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings i ever made and recently i've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality so real stories
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so this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings i ever made and recently i've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality so real stories and specifically i'm interested in collecting my own stories stories from the internet and then recently stories from life which is kind of a new area of work that i've been doing recently so i'll be talking about each of those today so first of all my own stories these are two of my sketchbooks i have many of these books and i've been keeping them for about the last eight or nine years they accompany me wherever i go in my life and i fill them with all sorts of things records of my lived experience so watercolor paintings drawings of what i see dead flowers dead insects pasted ticket stubs rusting coins business cards writings and in these books you can find these short little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that i meet
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they accompany me wherever i go in my life and i fill them with all sorts of things records of my lived experience so watercolor paintings drawings of what i see dead flowers dead insects pasted ticket stubs rusting coins business cards writings and in these books you can find these short little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that i meet and you know after keeping these books for a number of years i started to become very interested in collecting not only my own personal artifacts but also the artifacts of other people so i started collecting found objects this is a photograph i found lying in a gutter in new york city about years ago on the front you can see the tattered black photo of a woman's face and on the back it says to judy the girl with the bill bailey voice have fun in whatever you do and i really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody's life as opposed to knowing the whole story just knowing a little bit of the story and then letting your own mind fill in the rest
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and i really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody's life as opposed to knowing the whole story just knowing a little bit of the story and then letting your own mind fill in the rest and that idea of a partial glimpse is something that will come back in a lot of the work i'll be showing later today so around this time i was studying computer science at princeton university and i noticed that it was suddenly possible to collect these sorts of personal artifacts not just from street corners but also from the internet and that suddenly people en masse were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives posts photographs thoughts feelings opinions all of these things were being expressed by people online and leaving behind trails so i started to write computer programs that study very very large sets of these online footprints one such project is about a year and a half old it's called we feel fine
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it's monday morning you're at the office you're settling in for the day at work and this guy that you sort of recognize from down the hall walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair doesn't say a word just rolls away with it doesn't give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs that are out there doesn't acknowledge the fact that you might need your chair to get some work done today you wouldn't stand for it you'd make a stink you'd follow that guy back to his cubicle and you'd say why my chair okay so now it's tuesday morning and you're at the office and a meeting invitation pops up in your calendar
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but there's no agenda there's no information about why you were invited to the meeting and yet you accept the meeting invitation and you go and when this highly unproductive session is over you go back to your desk and you stand at your desk and you say boy i wish i had those two hours back like i wish i had my chair back
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familiar yeah it sounds familiar to me too a couple of weeks after i put that online people in dozens of countries i mean dozens of countries watched this video and three years later it's still getting thousands of views every month it's close to about a million right now and in fact some of the biggest companies in the world companies that you've heard of but i won't name have asked for my permission to use this video in their new hire training to teach their new employees how not to run a meeting at their company
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no mas works it's very simple first of all the next time you get a meeting invitation that doesn't have a lot of information in it at all click the tentative button it's okay you're allowed that's why it's there it's right next to the accept button or the maybe button or whatever button is there for you not to accept immediately
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yeah i already have fans here that's great now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways from the standpoint of calculation they're as easy to understand as one plus one which is two then one plus two is three two plus three is five three plus five is eight and so on
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actually brought this up with my wife she's a musical instrument maker and she does a lot of wood carving for a living so i asked her could you like literally carve some ears out of an apple for us and she did so i took her ears to the lab we then started preparing them yeah i know
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also really cool here is it's not that hard to make these things the equipment you need can be built from garbage and the key processing step only requires soap and water so what we did was put all the instructions online as open source and then we founded a mission driven company and we're developing kits to make it easier for anyone with a sink and a soldering iron to make these things at home what i'm really curious about is if one day it will be possible to repair rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen speaking of kitchens here's some asparagus they're tasty and they make your pee smell funny
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now i was in my kitchen and i was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus what you can see are all these tiny little vessels and when we image them in the lab you can see how the cellulose forms these structures this image reminds me of two things our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord so here's the question can we grow axons and neurons down these channels because if we can then maybe we can use asparagus to form new connections between the ends of damaged and severed nerves or maybe even a spinal cord don't get me wrong this is exceptionally challenging and really hard work to do and we are not the only ones working on this but we are the only ones using asparagus
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i do have a fetish for cd rom drives each one's got three different motors so now you can build things that move there's switches so you can turn things on and off there's even a freaking laser so you can make a cool robot into an awesome robot now i've built a lot of stuff out of garbage and some of these things have even been kind of useful but here's the thing for me garbage is just a chance to play to be creative and build things to amuse myself this is what i love doing so i just made it part of my day job i lead a university based biological research lab where we value curiosity and exploration above all else we aren't focused on any particular problem and we're not trying to solve any particular disease
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apple that's right it's an apple now i actually want you to notice as well that this is a lot redder than most apples and that's because we grew human cells into it we took a totally innocent macintosh apple removed all the apple cells and and then implanted human cells and what we're left with after removing all the apple cells is this cellulose scaffold
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listen my lab is not in the ear manufacturing business people have actually been working on this for decades here's the issue commercial scaffolds can be really expensive and problematic because they're from proprietary products animals or cadavers we used an apple and it cost pennies
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after about three months of detention the north korean court sentenced me to years in a labor camp so i was just sitting in my room to be transferred at that time i really had nothing else to do so i paid attention to these two female guards and listened to what they were talking about guard a was older and she studied english she seemed like she came from an affluent family she often showed up with these colorful dresses and then loved to show off and guard b was the younger one and she was a really good singer she loved to sing celine my heart will go on sometimes too much she knew just how to torture me without knowing
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and this girl spent a lot of time in the morning to put on makeup like you can see in any young girl's life and they loved to watch this chinese drama a better quality production i remember guard b said i can no longer watch our tv shows after watching this she got scolded for degrading her own country's produced tv shows guard b had more of a free mind than guard a and she often got scolded by guard a whenever she expressed herself one day they invited all these female colleagues i don't know where they came from to where i was held and they invited me to their guard room and asked if one night stands really happen in the us
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i recently read about what the young generation of workers want in harvard business review one thing that stuck out to me was don't just talk about impact but make an impact i'm a little bit older than you maybe much older than you but this is exactly the same goal that i had when i was in college i wanted to make my own impact for those who live under injustice it's the reason that i became a documentary journalist the reason i became a prisoner in north korea for days it was march it is st patrick's day for all of you but it was the day that turned my life upside down
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this is something that we're using today to search for e t and the electronics have gotten very much better too this is frank electronics in this is the allen telescope array electronics today some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately trillion times better than they were in trillion times better that's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card okay but something that's not appreciated by the public is in fact that the experiment continues to get better and consequently tends to get faster this is a little plot and every time you show a plot you lose percent of the audience i have of these
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i had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour eleven they're all sitting in a little semi circle looking up at me with big eyes and i started there was a white board behind me and i started off by writing a one with zeroes after it and i said all right now look this is the number of stars in the visible universe and this number is so big there's not even a name for it and one of these kids shot up his hand and he said well actually there is a name for it it's a something or other right now that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude but there was no doubt about it these kids were smart okay so i stopped giving the lecture all they wanted to do was ask questions in fact my last comments to these kids at the end i said you know you kids are smarter than the people i work with now they didn't even care about that
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eleven they're all sitting in a little semi circle looking up at me with big eyes and i started there was a white board behind me and i started off by writing a one with zeroes after it and i said all right now look this is the number of stars in the visible universe and this number is so big there's not even a name for it and one of these kids shot up his hand and he said well actually there is a name for it it's a something or other right now that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude but there was no doubt about it these kids were smart okay so i stopped giving the lecture all they wanted to do was ask questions in fact my last comments to these kids at the end i said you know you kids are smarter than the people i work with now they didn't even care about that what they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions
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t out there well i work at the seti institute that's almost my name seti search for extraterrestrial intelligence in other words i look for aliens and when i tell people that at a cocktail party they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face
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now a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic ridiculous maybe even hopeless but i just want to talk to you a little bit about why i think that the job i have is actually a privilege okay and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work if that's what you call it this thing whoops can we go back hello come in earth there we go all right this is the owens valley radio observatory behind the sierra and in i was working there collecting data for my thesis
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this is the owens valley radio observatory behind the sierra and in i was working there collecting data for my thesis now it's kinda lonely it's kinda tedious just collecting data so i would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself because you know at night i would be the only hominid within about miles so here are pictures of myself the observatory had just acquired a new book written by a russian by the name of joseph and then expanded and translated and edited by a little known cornell astronomer by the name of carl sagan and i remember reading that book and at in the morning i was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas i was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate to send bits of information from one star system to another now at o'clock in the morning when you're all alone haven't had much sleep that was a very romantic idea but it was that idea the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using this same technology that appealed to me so much that years later i took a job at the seti institute now i have to say that my memory is notoriously porous and i've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story or i was just you know something but i recently just blew up this old negative of mine and sure enough there you can see the and sagan book underneath that analog calculating device so it was true
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i worked for an italian ngo and every single project that we set up in africa failed and i was distraught i thought age that we italians were good people and we were doing good work in africa instead everything we touched we killed our first project the one that has inspired my first book ripples from the was a project where we italians decided to teach zambian people how to grow food so we arrived there with italian seeds in southern zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the river and we taught the local people how to grow italian tomatoes and zucchini and and of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that so we paid them to come and work and sometimes they would show up
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we had these magnificent tomatoes in italy a tomato would grow to this size in zambia to this size and we could not believe and we were telling the look how easy agriculture is when the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red overnight some hippos came out from the river and they ate everything
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this as a tryout in in western australia i was a doing a ph d at the time trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do and so what i did in that first year was to just walk the streets and in three days i had my first client and i helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage was a maori guy and i helped him to sell to the restaurant in perth to get organized and then the fishermen came to me to say you the guy who helped maori can you help us and i helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in albany for cents a kilo but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to japan for dollars a kilo and the farmers came to talk to me said hey you helped them can you help us in a year i had projects going on and the government came to see me to say how can you do that how can you do and i said i do something very very very difficult i shut up and listen to them
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there was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of new york in and in this group of people came together and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of new york in years and the conclusion was unanimous the city of new york would not exist in years why because they looked at the curve and said if the population keeps growing at this rate to move the population of new york around they would have needed six million horses and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with they were already drowning in manure
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i thought it was only us italians blundering around africa but then i saw what the americans were doing what the english were doing what the french were doing and after seeing what they were doing i became quite proud of our project in zambia because you see at least we fed the hippos you should see the rubbish you should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting african people you want to read the book read dead aid by zambian woman economist the book was published in
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you want to read the book read dead aid by zambian woman economist the book was published in we western donor countries have given the african continent two trillion american dollars in the last years i'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done just go and read her book read it from an african woman the damage that we have done we western people are imperialist colonialist missionaries and there are only two ways we deal with people we either patronize them or we are paternalistic the two words come from the latin root pater which means father but they mean two different things
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the two words come from the latin root pater which means father but they mean two different things paternalistic i treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children i love you so much patronizing i treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants that's why the white people in africa are called boss i was given a slap in the face reading a book small is beautiful written by schumacher who said above all in economic development if people do not wish to be helped leave them alone this should be the first principle of aid the first principle of aid is respect
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we don't work from offices we meet at the cafe we meet at the pub
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we don't work from offices we meet at the cafe we meet at the pub we have zero infrastructure and what we do we become friends and we find out what that person wants to do the most important thing is passion you can give somebody an idea if that person doesn't want to do it what are you going to do the passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing the passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing
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you can give somebody an idea if that person doesn't want to do it what are you going to do the passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing the passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing and then we help them to go and find the knowledge because nobody in the world can succeed alone the person with the idea may not have the knowledge but the knowledge is available so years and years ago i had this idea why don't we for once instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do why don't for once listen to them but not in community meetings let me tell you a secret there is a problem with community meetings entrepreneurs never come and they never tell you in a public meeting what they want to do with their own money what opportunity they have identified
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and god says throw it down and if you saw the movie you know he throws it down and it becomes a snake and then god says pick it up and he picks it back up again and it becomes a staff again now i'm reading this thing and i'm going what is that all about ok what's that all about well i do know a couple of things number one god never does a miracle to show off it's not just wow isn't that cool and by the way my god doesn't have to show up on cheese bread you know if god's going to show up he's not going to show up on cheese bread
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and i think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease i think inside at some point we put our heads down on the pillow and we go there's got to be more to life than this get up in the morning go to work come home and watch tv go to bed get up in the morning go to work come home watch tv go to bed go to parties on weekends a lot of people say i'm living no you're not living that's just existing just existing i really think that there's this inner desire
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growing up in kenya i knew i always wanted to study biochemistry see i had seen the impact of the high prevalence of diseases like malaria and i wanted to make medicines that would cure the sick so i worked really hard got a scholarship to the united states where i became a cancer researcher and i loved it for someone who wants to cure diseases there is no higher calling ten years later i returned to kenya to do just that a freshly minted ready to take on this horrific illness which in kenya was almost certainly a death sentence but instead of landing a job in a pharmaceutical company or a hospital i found myself drawn to a different kind of lab working with a different kind of patient a patient whose illness was so serious it impacted every single person in my country a patient who needed to get healthy fast that patient was my government
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in korea it took days if you wanted to get a construction permit so you could put up a building in kenya it was going to take you days in singapore which is ranked first that would only take you days god forbid you had to go to court to get help in being able to settle a dispute to enforce a contract because that process alone would take you days and if that wasn't bad enough you would lose percent of your claim in just fees legal fees enforcement fees court fees now i know what you're thinking for there to exist such inefficiencies in an african country there must be corruption the very cells that run the show must be corrupt to the bone i thought so too actually when we started out i thought i was going to find so much corruption i was literally going to either die or get killed in the process
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and in recognition of the significant reforms we've been able to implement in such a short time kenya was recognized to be among the top three global reformers in the world two years in a row are we fully healthy no we have some serious work still to do i like to think about these two years like a weight loss program
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and kenya was no exception when i returned to kenya in there was percent youth unemployment and nairobi the major business hub was rated on the quality of living index it was bad now an economy is only as healthy as the entities that make it up so when government one of its most vital entities is weak or unhealthy everyone and everything suffers
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now an economy is only as healthy as the entities that make it up so when government one of its most vital entities is weak or unhealthy everyone and everything suffers sometimes you might put a band aid in place to try and temporarily stop the pain maybe some of you here have participated in a band aid operation to an african country setting up alternative schools building hospitals digging wells because governments there either weren't or couldn't provide the services to their citizens we all know this is a temporary solution there are just some things band aids can't fix like providing an environment where businesses feel secure that they'll have an equal opportunity to be able to run and start their businesses successfully or there are systems in place that would protect the private property that they create i would argue only government is capable of creating these necessary conditions for economies to thrive economies thrive when business are able to quickly and easily set up shop
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fortunately he came to the right place we're not just a band aid kind of team we're a group of computer scientists mathematicians engineers and a cancer researcher who understood that in order to cure the sickness of a system as big as government we needed to examine the whole body and then we needed to drill down all the way from the organs into the tissues all the way to single cells so that we could properly make a diagnosis so with our marching orders from the president himself we embarked on the purest of the scientific method collecting data all the data we could get our hands on making hypotheses creating solutions one after the other so we met with hundreds of individuals who worked at government agencies from the tax agency the lands office utilities company the agency that's responsible for registering companies and with each of them we observed them as they served customers we documented their processes most of them were manual we also just went back and looked at a lot of their previous paperwork to try and really understand to try and diagnose what bodily malfunctions had occurred that lead to that spot on the world bank list
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and i remember at the time that the talks weren't put online i think they were given to in a box a box set of which they put on their shelves where they are now
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and actually chris called me a week after i'd given my talk and said we're going to start putting them online can we put yours online and i said sure and four years later it's been downloaded four million times so i suppose you could multiply that by or something to get the number of people who've seen it and as chris says there is a hunger for videos of me
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al gore spoke at the ted conference i spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis and i referenced that at the end of my last talk so i want to pick up from there because i only had minutes frankly
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you see he's right i mean there is a major climate crisis obviously and i think if people don't believe it they should get out more
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but i believe there is a second climate crisis which is as severe which has the same origins and that we have to deal with with the same urgency and you may say by the way look i'm good i have one climate crisis i don't really need the second one
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i believe fundamentally as many speakers have said during the past few days that we make very poor use of our talents very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be or if they have any to speak of i meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything actually i kind of divide the world into two groups now jeremy the great utilitarian philosopher once spiked this argument he said there are two types of people in this world those who divide the world into two types and those who do not
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one of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy for the most part it means challenging what we take for granted things that we think are obvious the great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense things that people think it can't be done differently that's how it's done i came across a great quote recently from abraham lincoln who i thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point
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he said this in december to the second annual meeting of congress i ought to explain that i have no idea what was happening at the time we don't teach american history in britain
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we suppress it you know this is our policy
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but i also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else if you said don't do this anymore they'd wonder what you're talking about
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but i also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else if you said don't do this anymore they'd wonder what you're talking about it isn't what they do it's who they are they say but this is me you know it would be foolish to abandon this because it speaks to my most authentic self and it's not true of enough people in fact on the contrary i think it's still true of a minority of people and i think there are many possible explanations for it and high among them is education because education in a way very many people from their natural talents
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and i think there are many possible explanations for it and high among them is education because education in a way very many people from their natural talents and human resources are like natural resources they're often buried deep you have to go looking for them they're not just lying around on the surface you have to create the circumstances where they show themselves and you might imagine education would be the way that happens but too often it's not every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough reform is no use anymore because that's simply improving a broken model what we need and the word's been used many times in the past few days is not evolution but a revolution in education
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not rise to it rise with it as our case is new so we must think anew and act anew
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we create our lives as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us but you know we have become obsessed with this linear narrative
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5,100 |
there are two models of quality assurance in catering one is fast food where everything is standardized
| 0 |
5,101 |
and if you're doing the thing that you love to do that you're good at time takes a different course entirely my wife's just finished writing a novel and i think it's a great book but she disappears for hours on end
| 0 |
5,102 |
and if you're doing the thing that you love to do that you're good at time takes a different course entirely my wife's just finished writing a novel and i think it's a great book but she disappears for hours on end you know this if you're doing something you love an hour feels like five minutes if you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit five minutes feels like an hour and the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit it doesn't feed their energy or their passion so i think we have to change metaphors we have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education a manufacturing model which is based on and conformity and people we have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture we have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process it's an organic process
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5,103 |
we have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture we have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process it's an organic process and you cannot predict the outcome of human development all you can do like a farmer is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish so when we look at reforming education and transforming it it isn't like cloning a system there are great ones like it's a great system there are many great models it's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching and doing that i think is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum
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5,104 |
now in this room there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business in multimedia in the internet these technologies combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education and i urge you to get involved in it because it's vital not just to ourselves but to the future of our children but we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model where each school can be flourishing tomorrow that's where children experience life or at home if that's what they choose to be educated with their families or friends there's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of these few days
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5,105 |
and i wanted to just very quickly i was very struck by natalie merchant's songs last night recovering old poems i wanted to read you a quick very short poem from w b yeats who some of you may know he wrote this to his love maud and he was the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him and he says i've got something else but it may not be for you he says this had i the embroidered cloths with gold and silver light the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light i would spread the cloths under your feet but i being poor have only my dreams i have spread my dreams under your feet tread softly because you tread on my dreams and every day everywhere our children spread their dreams beneath our feet and we should tread softly
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5,106 |
when you pull the plug on a sink it makes a vortex and then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma and it compresses it it gets hotter like a laser and then it makes fusion so it's a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion so those have a couple of very good advantages the liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall and therefore there's no damage to the machine the liquid metal gets hot so you can pump that in a heat exchanger make some steam spin a turbine so that's a very convenient way of doing this part of the process and finally all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam powered pistons which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils now this was all very good except for the problem that it didn't quite work
| 1 |
5,107 |
wow this is bright it must use a lot of power well flying you all in here must have cost a bit of energy too so the whole planet needs a lot of energy and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel we've been burning gas it's been a good run
| 0 |
5,110 |
so we're here i'll do what i can i'll do what i can i've got to warn you the sense in which my is upbeat has always been kind of subtle sometimes even elusive
| 1 |
5,113 |
and there's something i worry about especially which is that this dynamic will lead to a kind of a feedback cycle that puts us on a slippery slope what i have in mind is terrorism happens here we overreact to it that you know we're not sufficiently surgical in our retaliation leads to more hatred abroad more terrorism we overreact because being human we feel like retaliating and it gets worse and worse and worse you could call this the positive feedback of negative vibes but i think in something so spooky we really shouldn't have the word positive there at all even in a technical sense so let's call it the death spiral of negativity
| 1 |
5,114 |
i think we're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world i think you're just going to have to see less hatred among groups less bigotry and you know racial groups religious groups whatever i've got to admit i feel silly saying that it sounds so kind of i feel like rodney king you know saying why can't we all just get along but hey i don't really see any alternative given the way i read the situation there's going to have to be moral progress there's going to have to be a lessening of the amount of hatred in the world given how dangerous it's becoming in my defense i'd say as naive as this may sound it's ultimately grounded in cynicism that is to say thank you thank you
| 1 |
5,116 |
uplift i'm just doing what i can here
| 1 |
5,118 |
now i want to stress that to understand you know there are people who don't like this whole business of understanding the grassroots the root causes of things they don't want to know why people hate us i want to understand it the reason you're trying to understand why they hate us is to get them to quit hating us the idea when you go through this moral exercise of really coming to appreciate their humanity and better understand them is part of an effort to get them to appreciate your humanity in the long run i think it's the first step toward that that's the long term goal there are people who worry about this and in fact i myself apparently was denounced on national tv a couple of nights ago because of an op ed i'd written it was kind of along these lines and the allegation was that i have quote affection for terrorists now the good news is that the person who said it was ann coulter
| 1 |
5,120 |
ok today that's if i succeed i'll see what i can do ok now in one sense the claim that history has a direction is not that controversial if you're just talking about social structure ok clearly that's gotten more complex a little over the last years has reached higher and higher levels and in fact that's actually sustaining a long standing trend that predates human beings ok that biological evolution was doing for us
| 0 |
5,121 |
so what threatens to happen with this unfolding apocalypse is the collapse of global social organization now first let me remind you how much work it took to get us where we are to be on the brink of true global social organization originally you had the most complex societies the hunter gatherer village
| 0 |
5,122 |
now first let me remind you how much work it took to get us where we are to be on the brink of true global social organization originally you had the most complex societies the hunter gatherer village stonehenge is the remnant of a chiefdom which is what you get with the invention of agriculture multi village polity with centralized rule with the invention of writing you start getting cities this is blurry i kind of like that because it makes it look like a one celled organism and reminds you how many levels organic organization has already moved through to get to this point and then you get to you know you get empires i want to stress you know social organization can transcend political bounds this is the silk road connecting the chinese empire and the roman empire
| 0 |
5,124 |
assuming that a few of you did not do the assigned reading very quickly the key idea is the distinction between zero sum games in which correlations are inverse always a winner and a loser non games in which correlations can be positive ok so like in tennis usually it's win lose it always adds up to zero but if you're playing doubles the person on your side of the net they're in the same boat as you so you're playing a non game with them it's either for the better or for the worse ok a lot of forms of non behavior in the realm of economics and so on in everyday life often leads to cooperation the argument i make is basically that well non games have always been part of life you have them in hunter gatherer societies but then through technological evolution new forms of technology arise that facilitate or encourage the playing of non games involving more people over larger territory social structure adapts to accommodate this possibility and to harness this productive potential so you get cities you know and you get all the non games you don't think about that are being played across the world
| 0 |
5,128 |
and you have to read your ancient history to realize what a revolution that has been ok this was not a prevalent view few thousand years ago and i attribute it to this non dynamic i think that's the reason there is as much tolerance toward nationalities religions as there is today if you asked me you know why am i not in favor of bombing japan well i'm only half joking when i say they built my car we have this non relationship and i think that does lead to a kind of a tolerance to the extent that you realize that someone else's welfare is positively correlated with yours you're more likely to cut them a break i kind of think this is a kind of a business class morality unfortunately i don't fly trans atlantic business class often enough to know or any other kind of business class really but i assume that in business class you don't hear many expressions of you know bigotry about racial groups or ethnic groups because the people who are flying trans atlantic business class are doing business with all these people they're making money off all these people and i really do think that in that sense at least capitalism has been a constructive force and more fundamentally it's a non that has been a constructive force in expanding people's realm of moral awareness i think the non dynamic which is not only economic by any means it's not always commerce but it has driven us to the verge of a moral truth which is the fundamental equality of everyone
| 0 |
5,130 |
and you may wonder ok that's all fine sounds great moral direction in history but what about this so called clash of civilizations well first of all i would emphasize that it fits into the non framework ok if you look at the relationship between the so called muslim world and western world two terms i don't like but can't really avoid in such a short span of time they're efficient if nothing else it is non and by that i mean if people in the muslim world get more hateful more resentful less happy with their place in the world it'll be bad for the west if they get more happy it'll be good for the west so that is a non dynamic and i would say the non dynamic is only going to grow more intense over time because of technological trends but more intense in a kind of negative way it's the downside correlation of their fortunes that will become more and more possible and one reason is because of something i call the growing lethality of hatred more and more it's possible for grassroots hatred abroad to manifest itself in the form of organized violence on american soil
| 0 |
5,131 |
so what do we do well first of all we can do a lot more with arms control the international regulation of dangerous technologies i have a whole global governance sermon that i will spare you right now because i don't think that's going to be enough anyway although it's essential i think we're going to have to have a major round of moral progress in the world i think you're just going to have to see less hatred among groups less bigotry and you know racial groups religious groups whatever i've got to admit i feel silly saying that
| 0 |
5,132 |
this is in this context i'm going to tell you about video games when we say video games most of you think about children it's true ninety percent of children do play video games but let's be frank when the kids are in bed who is in front of the playstation most of you the average age of a gamer is years old not eight years old and in fact if we look at the projected demographics of video game play the video game players of tomorrow are older adults
| 1 |
5,134 |
most kids are happy it's actually recess but a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat everybody begins to move around and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who didn't so i'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid it's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes you can track you can track and then when it stops and there is a question mark and i ask you did this kid have a coat or not was it yellow initially or blue i hear a few yellow good so most of you have a brain
| 1 |
5,135 |
please don't move your eyes keep your eyes fixated and expand pull your attention that's the only way you can actually do it if you move your eyes you're doomed
| 1 |
5,136 |
yellow or blue audience yellow good so your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention that's what we just did your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention which is what is shown in this video here that's for you guys action video game players a bit more challenging right yellow or blue blue we have some people that are serious out there yeah
| 1 |
5,137 |
well we're working on it but here is a challenge there are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects and that's what i'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation there is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can't resist that's the chocolate side of the equation the issue is we need to put the two together and it's a little bit like with food who really wants to eat chocolate covered broccoli none of you
| 1 |
5,140 |
so what we are asking in the lab is how can we leverage that power now i want to step back a bit i know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games the name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you right and i'm almost sure most of you have thought oh come on can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies i'd like you to put this kind of knee jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing or your boy reading shakespeare right most parents would find that great well i'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health it's not and binging is never good but i'm going to argue that in reasonable doses actually the very game i showed you at the beginning those action packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior there's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you right you're all bombarded with that i'd like to put this kind of friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab
| 0 |
5,141 |
not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you right you're all bombarded with that i'd like to put this kind of friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab what we do in the lab is actually measure directly in a quantitative fashion what is the impact of video games on the brain and so i'm going to take a few examples from our work one first saying that i'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse that's a statement about vision there may be vision scientists among you we actually know how to test that statement we can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is
| 0 |
5,143 |
the issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week hours per week hours per week by that statement their vision should be really bad right guess what their vision is really really good it's better than those that don't play and it's better in two different ways the first way is that they're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses you can actually do it with just your eyesight the other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray imagine you're driving in a fog that makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident or getting into an accident so we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better
| 0 |
5,144 |
well what might be causing this clustering there are at least three possibilities one possibility is that as i gain weight it causes you to gain weight a kind of induction a kind of spread from person to person another possibility very obvious is or birds of a feather flock together here i form my tie to you because you and i share a similar body size and the last possibility is what is known as confounding because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on and here the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain nor that i preferentially form a tie with you because you and i share the same body size but rather that we share a common exposure to something like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time when we studied these data we found evidence for all of these things including for induction and we found that if your friend becomes obese it increases your risk of obesity by about percent in the same given time period there can be many mechanisms for this effect one possibility is that your friends say to you something like you know they adopt a behavior that spreads to you like they say let's go have muffins and beer which is a terrible combination
| 1 |
5,146 |
i think the headline in the new york times was are you packing it on blame your fat friends what was interesting to us is that the european headline writers had a different take they said are your friends gaining weight perhaps you are to blame
| 1 |
5,147 |
why do we show our emotions i mean there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside you know anger or happiness but we don't just experience them we show them and not only do we show them but others can read them and not only can they read them but they copy them there's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations and so this function of emotions suggests that in addition to any other purpose they serve they're a kind of primitive form of communication and that in fact if we really want to understand human emotions we need to think about them in this way now we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way in simple sort of brief periods of time so for example i was giving this talk recently in new york city and i said you know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you and you just instinctively smile back and they looked at me and said we don't do that in new york city
| 1 |
5,148 |
is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon again a social network but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between and if you look at this image you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people again spreading to three degrees of separation and you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network there's a middle and an edge to this network and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges so to invoke another metaphor if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity i'm connected to you and you to her on out endlessly into the distance this fabric is actually like an old fashioned american quilt and it has patches on it happy and unhappy patches and whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch
| 1 |
5,151 |
so when i die my wife's risk of death can double for instance in the first year and i had gone to take care of one particular patient a woman who was dying of dementia and in this case unlike this couple she was being cared for by her daughter and the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother and the daughter's husband he also was sick from his wife's exhaustion and i was driving home one day and i get a phone call from the husband's friend calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend so here i get this call from this random guy that's having an experience that's being influenced by people at some social distance and so i suddenly realized two very simple things first the effect was not restricted to husbands and wives and second it was not restricted to pairs of people
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