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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." As a teacher, I've internalized this message. Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war. In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth. And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth. And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so. So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity. I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between. But one year, I gave up speaking. I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago. I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence. When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice. I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing. I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one. When the woman at the fundraising gala said "I'm so proud of you. It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids," I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity. We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't. Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue. It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs. Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left. It is the sound after the noose is already tied. It is charring. It is chains. It is privilege. It is pain. There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you. I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision. I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance. I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human. I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "The Wire" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids. So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition. Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice? Thank you. (Applause)

I am in search of another planet in the universe where life exists. I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. But I know that it's there. And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it. On our planet, where there's water, there's life. So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. What I do picks up where their job ends. I model the possible climates of exoplanets. And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life. Take the planet Venus. It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. That's hot enough to melt lead. Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life. We don't know what the atmospheres of these planets are like because the planets are so small and dim compared to their stars and so far away from us. For example, one of the closest planets that could support surface water -- it's called Gliese 667 Cc -- such a glamorous name, right, nice phone number for a name -- it's 23 light years away. So that's more than 100 trillion miles. Trying to measure the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet passing in front of its host star is hard. It's like trying to see a fruit fly passing in front of a car's headlight. OK, now imagine that car is 100 trillion miles away, and you want to know the precise color of that fly. So I use computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need to have a suitable climate for water and life. Here's an artist's concept of the planet Kepler-62f, with the Earth for reference. It's 1,200 light years away, and just 40 percent larger than Earth. Our NSF-funded work found that it could be warm enough for open water from many types of atmospheres and orientations of its orbit. So I'd like future telescopes to follow up on this planet to look for signs of life. Ice on a planet's surface is also important for climate. Ice absorbs longer, redder wavelengths of light, and reflects shorter, bluer light. That's why the iceberg in this photo looks so blue. The redder light from the sun is absorbed on its way through the ice. Only the blue light makes it all the way to the bottom. Then it gets reflected back to up to our eyes and we see blue ice. My models show that planets orbiting cooler stars could actually be warmer than planets orbiting hotter stars. There's another contradiction -- that ice absorbs the longer wavelength light from cooler stars, and that light, that energy, heats the ice. Using climate models to explore how these contradictions can affect planetary climate is vital to the search for life elsewhere. And it's no surprise that this is my specialty. I'm an African-American female astronomer and a classically trained actor who loves to wear makeup and read fashion magazines, so I am uniquely positioned to appreciate contradictions in nature -- (Laughter) (Applause) ... and how they can inform our search for the next planet where life exists. My organization, Rising Stargirls, teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. That's another contradiction -- science and art don't often go together, but interweaving them can help these girls bring their whole selves to what they learn, and maybe one day join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions, and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe. Thank you. (Applause)

Good morning. So magic is an excellent way for staying ahead of the reality curve, to make possible today what science will make a reality tomorrow. As a cyber-magician, I combine elements of illusion and science to give us a feel of how future technologies might be experienced. You've probably all heard of Google's Project Glass. It's new technology. You look through them and the world you see is augmented with data: names of places, monuments, buildings, maybe one day even the names of the strangers that pass you on the street. So these are my illusion glasses. They're a little bigger. They're a prototype. And when you look through them, you get a glimpse into the mind of the cyber-illusionist. Let me show you what I mean. All we need is a playing card. Any card will do. Like this. And let me mark it so we can recognize it when we see it again. All right. Very significant mark. And let's put it back into the deck, somewhere in the middle, and let's get started. (Music) Voice: System ready. Acquiring image. Marco Tempest: For those of you who don't play cards, a deck of cards is made up of four different suits: hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades. The cards are amongst the oldest of symbols, and have been interpreted in many different ways. Now, some say that the four suits represent the four seasons. There's spring, summer, autumn and — Voice: My favorite season is winter.MT: Well yeah, mine too. Winter is like magic. It's a time of change, when warmth turns to cold, water turns to snow, and then it all disappears. There are 13 cards in each suit. (Music) Voice: Each card represents a phase of the 13 lunar cycles. MT: So over here is low tide, and over here is high tide, and in the middle is the moon. Voice: The moon is one of the most potent symbols of magic. MT: There are two colors in a deck of cards. There is the color red and the color black, representing the constant change from day to night. Voice: Marco, I did not know you could do that. (Laughter) MT: And is it a coincidence that there are 52 cards in a deck of cards, just as there are 52 weeks in a year? (Music) Voice: If you total all the spots on a deck of cards, the result is 365. MT: Oh, 365, the number of days in a year, the number of days between each birthday. Make a wish. (Blowing noise) Voice: Don't tell, or it won't come true. MT: Well, as a matter of fact, it was on my sixth birthday that I received my first deck of cards, and ever since that day, I have traveled around the world performing magic for boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives, even kings and queens. (Applause) Voice: And who are these?MT: Ah, mischief-makers. Watch. Wake up. Joker: Whoa.MT: Are you ready for your party piece? Joker: Ready!MT: Let me see what you've got. Joker: Presenting my pogo stick.MT: Ah. Watch out. Joker: Whoa, whoa, whoa, oh! (Music) MT: But today, I am performing for a different kind of audience. I'm performing for you. Voice: Signed card detected.MT: Well, sometimes people ask me how do you become a magician? Is it a 9-to-5 job? Of course not! You've got to practice 24/7. I don't literally mean 24 hours, seven days a week. 24/7 is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it does take practice. Now, some people will say, well, magic, that must be the work of some evil supernatural force. (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Whoa. Well, to this, I just say, no no. Actually, in German, it's nein nein. (Laughter) Magic isn't that intense. I have to warn you, though, if you ever play with someone who deals cards like this, don't play for money. (Music) Voice: Why not? That's a very good hand. The odds of getting it are 4,165 to one. MT: Yeah, but I guess my hand is better. We beat the odds. Voice: I think you got your birthday wish.MT: And that actually leaves me with the last, and most important card of all: the one with this very significant mark on it. And unlike anything else we've just seen, virtual or not.Voice: Signed card detected. Digital MT: This is without a question the real thing. MT: Bye bye. (Music) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)

It's pretty simple. There are nine, sort of, rules that I discovered after 35 years of rock climbing. Most of them are pretty basic. Number one: don't let go -- very sure success method. But really, truly -- often you think about letting go way before your body does. So hang in there, and you come up with some pretty peculiar solutions. Number two: hesitation is bad. This is a friction climb, up in Tuolumne Meadows, in the Yosemite high country. Friction climbing doesn't have any sort of hard positive edges. You're climbing on little dimples and nubbins in the rock. The most friction you have is when you first put your hand or your foot on the rock. And then from that point on, you're basically falling. So momentum is good. Don't stop. Rule number three: have a plan. This is a climb called the Naked Edge, in El Dorado Canyon, outside of Boulder. This climber is on the last pitch of it. He's actually right about where I fell. There is about 1,000 feet of air below him. And all the hard pitches are actually below him. Often what happens is you're planning so hard for like, "How do I get through the hardest part? How do I get through the hardest part?" And then what happens? You get to the last pitch. It's easy. And you're completely flamed out. Don't do it. You have to plan ahead to get to the top. But you also can't forget that each individual move you have to be able to complete. This is a climb called the Dike Route, on Pywjack Dome, up in the Yosemite high country. The interesting thing about this climb is it's not that hard. But if you're the leader on it, at the hardest move, you're looking at about 100 foot fall, onto some low angle slabs. So you've got to focus. You don't want to stop in the middle like Coleridge's Kubla Kahn. You've got to keep going. Rule number five: know how to rest. It's amazing. The best climbers are the ones that in the most extreme situations can get their bodies into some position where they can rest, regroup, calm themselves, focus, and keep going. This is a climb in the Needles, again in California. Fear really sucks because what it means is you're not focusing on what you're doing. You're focusing on the consequences of failing at what you're doing because any given move should require all your concentration and thought processes to execute it effectively. One of the things in climbing is, most people sort of take it straight on. And they follow the most obvious solution. This is the Devils Tower in Wyoming, which is a columnar basalt formation that most of you probably know from "Close Encounters." With this, typically crack climbers would put their hands in and their toes in and just start climbing. The cracks are too small to get your toes into so the only way to climb is using your fingertips in the cracks, and using opposing pressure and forcing yourself up. Rule number eight: strength doesn't always equal success. In the 35 years I've been a climbing guide and taught on indoor walls, and stuff like that, the most important thing I've learned was, guys will always try to do pull-ups. Beginning guys, it's like, they thrash, they thrash, they get 15 feet up -- and they can do about 15 pull-ups right -- And then they just flame out. Women are much more in balance because they don't have that idea that they're going to be able to do 100 pull-ups. They think about how to get the weight over their feet because it's sort of natural -- they carry you all day long. So balance is really critical, and keeping your weight on your feet, which is your strongest muscle. And of course there is rule number nine. I came up with rule number nine after I actually didn't plan for a fall, and went about 40 feet and cracked a rib. Once you get to that point where you know it's going to happen, you need to start thinking about how you're going to let go because that is the critical piece of not getting hurt -- how you're going to fall onto the rope, or if you're climbing without a rope, fall to a place where you can actually control the fall. So don't hang on till the bitter end. Thank you very much. (Applause)

It's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me. I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. I'd seen my life slip away and become restricted. It was like having an enormous new toy. I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating. But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me. It was as if they couldn't see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like "limitation," "fear," "pity" and "restriction." I realized I'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level. A part of me had become alienated from myself. I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people's responses to me. As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives to reclaim my identity. ["Finding Freedom: 'By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do 'official' narratives.' — Davis 2009, TEDx Women"] I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair -- a power chair -- to negotiate the world. I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with. When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. It showed that an arts practice can remake one's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar. So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people's responses to the wheelchair. So I thought, "I wonder what'll happen if I put the two together?" (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years. So to give you an idea of what that's like, I'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it's taken me on. (Music) (Applause) It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I've experienced in life. I literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom. And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too. Their eyes literally light up, and they say things like, "I want one of those," or, "If you can do that, I can do anything." And I'm thinking, it's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way. And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people's lives. For me, this means that they're seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair "Portal," because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness. And the other thing is, that because nobody's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. You're all part of the artwork too. (Applause)

[Non English] ... and that's one of the things that I enjoy most about this convention. It's not so much, as so little as to do with what everything is. (Laughter) But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves. (Laughter) The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. (Laughter) Common knowledge, but important nonetheless. (Laughter) As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear. It's hard to imagine or measure. The background radiation is simply too static to be able to be seen under the normal spectral analysis. But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us -- you know what I'm say'n? But -- you know what I'm say'n? Cuz, like, as a hip hop thing, you know what I'm say'n, TED be rock'n -- you know what I'm say'n. Like so I wrote a song, and I hope you guys dig it. It's a song about people and sasquatches -- (Laughter) -- and other French science stuff. That's French science. Okay, here we go. ♫ I've been trying inside ♫ ♫ I know that I'm in trouble by myself ♫ ♫ But every time it gets me ♫ ♫ [unclear] ♫ (Music) ♫ And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in ♫ ♫ And you're the one that I want to be so saucy ♫ ♫ And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby ♫ ♫ And you can do anything ♫ ♫ as long as you don't get hurt along the way back ♫ ♫ If I survive, I'm gonna tell you what is wrong ♫ ♫ Because if you were [unclear] ♫ ♫ And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] ♫ ♫ I give you what I want to be ♫ (Music) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want. (Applause) And the computer models, no matter how many that you have and how many people that you use, are never going to be able to arrive at the same conclusions. Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion. (Laughter) Tomorrow is another day. (Laughter) Not just any day, but it is a day. It will get here, there's no question. And the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one. It's believable, it's tactile. You can reach out -- things are solid. You can move objects from one area to another. You can feel your body. You can say, "I'd like to go over to this location," and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location at will. (Laughter) That's something you live inside of every day. Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from. (Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin. (Laughter) Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see. Ha Ha Ha. This is my final piece. And just remember everything you are -- it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be. So please, without further ado. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) This is a fun one. It goes like this. (Music) Okay, for the last piece I'd like to do, this one goes very similar to this. I hope you guys recognize it. Here we go. Okay, that still works. Okay, good. All right, here we go. (Laughter) (Music) Here we go. (Music) ♫ Yeah, yo, yo, yo ♫ (Music) Thank you. Enjoy the rest. Thank you. (Applause)

We are going to talk today about the sequel of "Inconvenient Truth." It's time again to talk about "Inconvenient Truth," a truth that everyone is concerned about, but nobody is willing to talk about. Somebody has to take the lead, and I decided to do it. If you are scared by global warming, wait until we learn about local warming. We will talk today about local warming. Important health message: blogging may be hazardous to your health, especially if you are a male. This message is given as a public service. Blogging affects your posture. We start with the posture. This is the posture of ladies who are not blogging; this is the posture of ladies who are blogging. (Laughter) This is the natural posture of a man sitting, squatting for ventilation purposes. (Laughter) And this is the natural posture of a standing man, and I think this picture inspired Chris to insert me into the lateral thinking session. This is male blogging posture sitting, and the result is, "For greater comfort, men naturally sit with their legs farther apart than women, when working on laptop. However, they will adopt a less natural posture in order to balance it on their laps, which resulted in a significant rise of body heat between their thighs." This is the issue of local warming. (Laughter) This is a very serious newspaper; it's Times of England -- very serious. This is a very -- (Laughter) -- gentlemen and ladies, be serious. This is a very serious research, that you should read the underline. And be careful, your genes are in danger. Will geeks become endangered species? The fact: population growth in countries with high laptop -- (Laughter) I need Hans Rosling to give me a graph. (Applause) Global warming fun. (Laughter) But let's keep things in proportion. How to take care in five easy steps: first of all, you can use natural ventilation. You can use body breath. You should stay cool with the appropriate clothing. You should care about your posture -- this is not right. Can you extract from Chris another minute and a half for me, because I have a video I have to show you. (Applause) You are great. This is the correct posture. Another benefit of Wi-Fi, we learned yesterday about the benefits of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi enables you to avoid the processor. And there are some enhanced protection measures, which I would like to share with you, and I would like, in a minute, to thank Philips for helping. This is a research which was done in '86, but it's still valid. Scrotal temperature reflects intratesticular temperature and is lowered by shaving. By the way, I must admit, my English is not so good, I didn't know what is scrotal; I understand it's a scrotum. I guess in plural it's scrotal, like medium and media. Digital scrotum, digital media. And only last year I recognized that I'm a proud scrotum owner. (Laughter) And this research is being precipitated by the U.S. government, so you can see that your tax man is working for good causes. Video: Man: The Philips Bodygroom has a sleek, ergonomic design for a safe and easy way to trim those scruffy underarm hairs, the untidy curls on and around your [bleep], as well as the hard to reach locks on the underside of your [bleep] and [bleep]. Once you use the Bodygroom, the world looks different. And so does your [bleep]. These days, with a hair-free back, well-groomed shoulders and an extra optical inch on my [bleep], well, let's just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy. Yossi Vardi: This is one of the most popular viral advertisement of last year, known as the optical inch by Philips. Let's applaud Philips -- (Applause) -- for this gesture for humanity. And this is how they are promoting the product. This is -- I didn't touch it, this is original. Laptop use to solve overpopulation. And if everything failed, there are some secondary uses. And then our next talk, our next TED if you invite me will be why you should not carry a cell phone in your pocket. And this is what the young generation says. (Applause) And I just want to show you that I'm not just preaching, but I also practice. (Laughter) 4 am in the morning. (Laughter) You cannot use this picture. (Applause) Now, I have some mini TED Prizes, this is the Philips Bodygroom, one for our leader. (Applause) Anybody feels threatened, anybody really need it? (Laughter) Any lady, any lady? Thank you very much. (Applause)

B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter) It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside, but when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton: promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user, focus-grouping new product launches, territorial expansion. But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive. It's a lot harder than you might think. Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you'd pay on the street, and second, you don't make a lot of money. I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month. So how do you survive? Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles. There's legal hustles. You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. You charge another inmate to clean his cell. There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in, you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography, cell phones, and just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars. You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks. You want a dirty magazine? Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars. So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses. But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison, no one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the Internet, even. And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years. Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it. But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had. So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. But I don't buy anything new. I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. Aww, thank you. Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. I mean, what am I going to find today? Is it going to be my size? Will I like the color? Will it be under $20? If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won. I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought. I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear -- (Laughter) that means I found a few things. And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. Does that sound good? (Applause) So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new. So let's start with Sunday. I call this "Shiny Tiger." You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. You can almost always look phenomenal for under $50. This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week. Monday: Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. (Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. Just be who you are. If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it. Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. I like to smile and say, "Thank you." Thursday: Confidence is key. If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience. We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. Thank you. (Applause) Friday: A universal truth -- five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything. And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations. So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms. Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us. What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors? Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems. And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures. The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment. And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us. We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here -- environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning. Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health. At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air. And we looked at three different types of rooms. We looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated, which are the data points in the blue. We looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated, where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable, but they made them operable for our study. And we also sampled the outdoor air. If you look at the x-axis of this graph, you'll see that what we commonly want to do -- which is keeping the outdoors out -- we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation. So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types. But if you look at the blue data points, which is mechanically ventilated air, it's not as diverse. But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health. If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors. So to understand why this was the case, we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram, which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples. The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart. And the first things that you can see from this graph is, if you look at the blue data points, which are the mechanically ventilated air, they're not simply a subset of the green data points, which are the outdoor air. What we've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans. It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth, our spit. And this is because we're all constantly shedding microbes. So all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another. And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt. Why does this matter? It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States. Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings. And the model that we're working with in hospitals, and also with many, many different buildings, is to keep the outdoors out. And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health. And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections, or hospital-acquired infections, this is a clue that it's a good time to reconsider our current practices. So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors. I've heard somebody say that you're as healthy as your gut. And for this reason, many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora. And what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside. Thank you. (Applause)

So it was about four years ago, five years ago, I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia, I think it was, with a bag similar to this. And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag. And I was saying, you don't know this molecule really well, but your body knows it extremely well. And I was thinking that your body hated it, at the time, because we are very immune to this. This is called alpha-gal epitope. And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily. Actually our body doesn't hate these. Our body loves these. It eats them. I mean, the cells in our immune system are always hungry. And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things on the cell, it means "that's food." Now, I was thinking about that and I said, you know, we've got this immune response to this ridiculous molecule that we don't make, and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff. But I said we can't get rid of it, because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can't get rid of that immunity. And I said, why don't you use that? What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs? I mean I could immediately tap into an immune response that was already there, where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it -- it was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on. It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you, like when you're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A., and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car, and then charges you for possession of marijuana. It's like this very fast, very efficient way to get people off the street. (Laughter) So you can take a bacteria that really doesn't make these things at all, and if you could clamp these on it really well you have it taken off the street. And for certain bacteria we don't have really efficient ways to do that anymore. Our antibiotics are running out. And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now -- streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant -- because we won't be here. But if we are -- (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria. So I started working with this thing, with a bunch of collaborators. And trying to attach this to things that were themselves attached to certain specific target zones, bacteria that we don't like. And I feel now like George Bush. It's like "mission accomplished." So I might be doing something dumb, just like he was doing at the time. But basically what I was talking about there we've now gotten to work. And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them. This thing can be stuck, like that little green triangle up there, sort of symbolizing this right now. You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer. And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically to a target that you have selected for it. So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like, like Staphylococcus -- I don't like it in particular, because it killed a professor friend of mine last year. It doesn't respond to antibiotics. So I don't like it. And I'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it. That will know how to find Staph when it's in your body, and will alert your immune system to go after it. Here's what happened. See that line on the very top with the little dots? That's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned by our scientist friends down in Texas, at Brooks Air Base, with anthrax. And they had also been treated with a drug that we made that would attack anthrax in particular, and direct your immune system to it. You'll notice they all lived, the ones on the top line -- that's a 100 percent survival rate. And they actually lived another 14 days, or 28 when we finally killed them, and took them apart and figured out what went wrong. Why did they not die? And they didn't die because they didn't have anthrax anymore. So we did it. Okay? (Applause) Mission accomplished! (Applause)

I'm a blogger, a filmmaker and a butcher, and I'll explain how these identities come together. It started four years ago, when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City. Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets. It was an FBI agent's wet dream. (Laughter) But being a part of this community, we knew how welcoming this space was. For years, I'd seen photos of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith, much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience. Frustrated by this myopic view, my friend and I had this crazy idea: Let's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog. We called it "30 Mosques in 30 Days," and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities, ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina. What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America. The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities, but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey. There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so. And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world, I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film. My codirector, Omar, and I were at a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film. The movie is called "These Birds Walk," and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family. We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord, but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film "more relevant," essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols. Of course, we didn't listen to them, and instead, we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth. The agenda behind our cinematic immersion was only empathy, an emotion that's largely deficient from films that come from our region of the world. And as "These Birds Walk" played at film festivals and theaters internationally, I finally had my feet planted at home in New York, and with all the extra time and still no real money, my wife tasked me to cook more for us. And whenever I'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat, something felt off. For those that don't know, halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines. Unfortunately, the majority of halal meat in America doesn't rise to the standard that my faith calls for. The more I learned about these unethical practices, the more violated I felt, particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy. So, with emotions running high, and absolutely no experience in butchery, some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district. (Laughter) We call it Honest Chops, and we're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic, humanely raised animals, and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families. There's really nothing like it in America. The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim. For many, it is their first time interacting with Islam on such an intimate level. So all these disparate projects -- (Laughter) -- are the result of a restlessness. They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community, and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules. We must fight with an inventive approach. With the trust, with the access, with the love that only we can bring, we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image, in every cut of meat, because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal, not only will we fail, but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories. But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance. It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful. They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected. Thank you. (Applause)

Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature -- enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. You are ready? Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. You get a mouth. This is a person going for a walk. Person. If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "Help! I'm on fire!" -- This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. This is a tree. Tree. This is a mountain. The sun. The moon. The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. I call these eight characters radicals. They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. A person. If someone walks behind, that is "to follow." As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "It was this big." The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. Three trees together, we create the forest. Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "idiot." (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. Remember fire? Two fires together, I get really hot. Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. Two suns together, prosperous. Three together, that's sparkles. Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. Knock knock. Is anyone home? This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. On the left, we have a woman. Two women together, they have an argument. (Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. So we have gone through almost 30 characters. By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. A person behind Japan, what do we get? A Japanese person. The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. (Applause)

Please close your eyes, and open your hands. Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe your wallet. Now open your eyes. What about a life? What you see here is a premature baby. He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive because he can't regulate his own body temperature. This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to stay warm. Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world. Four million of these babies die annually. But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. The reason is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. Imagine: Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm. That is the primary function of an incubator. But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars. So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. As a result, parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies' bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here -- methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. I've seen this firsthand over and over again. On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby, Rani. She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator. But that hospital was over four hours away, and Sevitha didn't have the means to get there, so her baby died. Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use, given that the majority of births still take place in the home. We needed something that was portable, something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs. So, this is what we came up with. What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby. You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. There's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily. But the magic is in this pouch of wax. This is a phase-change material. It's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. So, you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby. Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. We plan to launch this product in India in 2010, and the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator. Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth. This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact. In designing this we followed a few basic principles. We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people like Sevitha. We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. In doing this, I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses. And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace.

Two years ago, I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. The curator had only one condition: I had to use the Arabic script for my artwork. Now, as an artist, a woman, an Arab, or a human being living in the world in 2010, I only had one thing to say: I wanted to say no. And in Arabic, to say "no," we say "no, and a thousand times no." So I decided to look for a thousand different noes. on everything ever produced under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years, from Spain to the borders of China. I collected my findings in a book, placed them chronologically, stating the name, the patron, the medium and the date. Now, the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation, which stood three by seven meters, in Munich, Germany, in September of 2010. Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded. Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square. The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed. I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street. So I took one "no" off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and I added a message to it: "no to military rule." And I started spraying that on the streets in Cairo. But that led to a series of no, coming out of the book like ammunition, and adding messages to them, and I started spraying them on the walls. So I'll be sharing some of these noes with you. No to a new Pharaoh, because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator. No to violence: Ramy Essam came to Tahrir on the second day of the revolution, and he sat there with this guitar, singing. One month after Mubarak stepped down, this was his reward. No to blinding heroes. Ahmed Harara lost his right eye on the 28th of January, and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November, by two different snipers. No to killing, in this case no to killing men of religion, because Sheikh Ahmed Adina Refaat was shot on December 16th, during a demonstration, leaving behind three orphans and a widow. No to burning books. The Institute of Egypt was burned on December 17th, a huge cultural loss. No to stripping the people, and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street, and the footprint reads, "Long live a peaceful revolution," because we will never retaliate with violence. No to barrier walls. On February 5th, concrete roadblocks were set up in Cairo to protect the Ministry of Defense from protesters. Now, speaking of walls, I want to share with you the story of one wall in Cairo. A group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall. It's one to one. In front of this tank there's a man on a bicycle with a breadbasket on his head. To any passerby, there's no problem with this visual. After acts of violence, another artist came, painted blood, protesters being run over by the tank, demonstrators, and a message that read, "Starting tomorrow, I wear the new face, the face of every martyr. I exist." Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank and adds a message: "Army and people, one hand. Egypt for Egyptians." Another artist comes, paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank. Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank, leaves the suit, and throws a bucket of black paint just to hide the face of the monster. So I come with my stencils, and I spray them on the suit, on the tank, and on the whole wall, and this is how it stands today until further notice. (Laughter) Now, I want to leave you with a final no. I found Neruda scribbled on a piece of paper in a field hospital in Tahrir, and I decided to take a no of Mamluk Mausoleum in Cairo. The message reads, [Arabic] "You can crush the flowers, but you can't delay spring." Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Shukran. (Applause)

I got a visit almost exactly a year ago, a little over a year ago, from a very senior person at the Department of Defense. Came to see me and said, "1,600 of the kids that we've sent out have come back missing at least one full arm. Whole arm. Shoulder disarticulation. And we're doing the same thing we did for -- more or less, that we've done since the Civil War, a stick and a hook. And they deserve more than that." And literally, this guy sat in my office in New Hampshire and said, "I want you to give me something that we can put on these kids that'll pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, they'll be able to put it in their mouth without destroying either one, and they'll be able to know the difference without looking at it." You know, had efferent, afferent, and haptic response. He finishes explaining that, and I'm waiting for the big 300 pound paper proposal, and he said, "That's what I want from you." I said, "Look, you're nuts. That technology's just not available right now. And it can't be done. Not in an envelope of a human arm, with 21 degrees of freedom, from your shoulder to your fingertips." He said, "About two dozen of these 1,600 kids have come back bilateral. You think it's bad to lose one arm? That's an inconvenience compared to having both of them gone." I got a day job, and my nights and weekends are already filled up with things like, let's supply water to the world, and power to the world, and educate all the kids, which, Chris, I will not talk about. I don't need another mission. I keep thinking about these kids with no arms. He says to me, "We've done some work around the country. We've got some pretty amazing neurology and other people." I said, "I'll take a field trip, I'll go see what you got." Over the next month I visited lots of places, some out here, around the country, found the best of the best. I went down to Washington. I saw these guys, and said, "I did what you asked me. I looked at what's out there. I still think you're nuts. But not as nuts as I thought." I put a team together, a little over 13 months ago, got up to 20 some-odd people. We said, we're going to build a device that does what he wants. We have 14 out of the 21 degrees of freedom; you don't need the ones in the last two fingers. We put this thing together. A couple of weeks ago we took it down to Walter Reed, which is unfortunately more in the news these days. We showed it to a bunch of guys. One guy who described himself as being lucky, because he lost his left arm, and he's a righty. He sat at a table with seven or eight of these other guys. Said he was lucky, because he had his good arm, and then he pushed himself back from the table. He had no legs. These kids have attitudes that you just can't believe. So I'm going to show you now, without the skin on it, a 30-second piece, and then I'm done. But understand what you're looking at we made small enough to fit on a 50th percentile female, so that we could put it in any of these people. It's going to go inside something that we use in CAT scans and MRIs of whatever is their good arm, to make silicon rubber, then coat it, and paint it in 3D -- exact mirror image of their other limb. So, you won't see all the really cool stuff that's in this series elastic set of 14 actuators, each one which has its own capability to sense temperature and pressure. It also has a pneumatic cuff that holds it on, so the more they put themselves under load, the more it attaches. They take the load off, and it becomes, again, compliant. I'm going to show you a guy doing a couple of simple things with this that we demonstrated in Washington. Can we look at this thing? Watch the fingers grab. The thumb comes up. Wrist. This weighs 6.9 pounds. Going to scratch his nose. It's got 14 active degrees of freedom. Now he's going to pick up a pen with his opposed thumb and index finger. Now he's going to put that down, pick up a piece of paper, rotate all the degrees of freedom in his hand and wrist, and read it. (Applause)

Trees epitomize stasis. Trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations, but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs, trees become very dynamic entities, moving and growing. And I decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists. I simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig. I waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas, and that produced art. The piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a Douglas fir, and what I learned was that different species have different signatures, like a Picasso versus a Monet. But I was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it, so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree -- which produced this painting -- moved in a single year, I simply measured and summed each of those lines. I multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year. And so I was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year. You might have a guess. The answer is actually 186,540 miles, or seven times around the globe. And so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs, we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities, but rather extremely dynamic. And I began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees, to consider other entities that are also static and stuck, but which cry for change and dynamicism, and one of those entities is our prisons. Prisons, of course, are where people who break our laws are stuck, confined behind bars. And our prison system itself is stuck. The United States has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women. That number is rising. Of the 100 incarcerated people that are released, 60 will return to prison. Funds for education, for training and for rehabilitation are declining, so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues. I decided to ask whether the lesson I had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons, and I think the answer is yes. In the year 2007, I started a partnership with the Washington State Department of Corrections. Working with four prisons, we began bringing science and scientists, sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons. We give science lectures, and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting. That, I think, is movement. We partnered with the Nature Conservancy for inmates at Stafford Creek Correctional Center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in Washington state. That, I think, is movement. We worked with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife to grow endangered frogs -- the Oregon spotted frog -- for later release into protected wetlands. That, I think, is movement. And just recently, we've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call Supermax facilities. They've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners. They're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day. When they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals, they're placed in immobile booths like this. For one hour a day they're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards. Although we can't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments, we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards, putting them on the walls, so at least they get contact with visual images of nature. This is Mr. Lopez, who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months, and he's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene, more calm, less apt to violence. And so what we see, I think, is that small, collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope. We know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks. But if trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change. Thank you very much. (Applause)

♫ Picture yourself in a world where there's no one else, ♫ ♫ nobody anywhere. ♫ ♫ A moment ago, there were voices and faces to look upon, ♫ ♫ you can't see them anywhere. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and no one left to say it to, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen to what I say. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ Now picture a world where the people all feel their worth. ♫ ♫ Children are everywhere. ♫ ♫ Now there is a reason for everyone's time on Earth. ♫ ♫ Wondering why you should care, yeah. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and only love can see us through, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen what I say, yeah. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ You don't have to be a big celebrity ♫ ♫ to feel the power, the power in your soul, no. ♫ ♫ You don't have to be a big star on MTV ♫ ♫ to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ I can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ She can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ He can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can, I can, she can, he can, ♫ ♫ we can make a little bit of difference in this world. ♫ ♫ Everybody gonna make a little ♫ ♫ little difference, yeah. ♫ ♫ Talking 'bout everybody gonna make a little difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody gonna make a little difference in this world, ♫ ♫ oh yeah. ♫ (Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) This is a song that came about because I think it's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what's going on, and the wars and so forth. This song kind of came out of all of that. And I wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record, which I still stand by, but this has got something else in it. It's called "Peace on Earth." ♫ There is no hope. ♫ ♫ There is no future. ♫ ♫ No faith in God to save the day. ♫ ♫ There is no reason, no understanding ♫ ♫ no sacred place to hide away. ♫ ♫ There is no earnest conversation. ♫ ♫ No words of wisdom from the wise. ♫ ♫ There is no reconciliation ♫ ♫ and no collective compromise. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ There is no darkness, no sunshine. ♫ ♫ There is no great society. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom without conviction. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom to be free. ♫ ♫ There is no heaven, no fire and brimstone. ♫ ♫ There is no brotherhood of man. ♫ ♫ There is no country, no one religion. ♫ ♫ There is no universal plan. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ The answer is ♫ ♫ mutual-assured destruction, ♫ ♫ a balance of power, ♫ ♫ a weapon for everyone. ♫ ♫ Mutual-assured destruction ♫ ♫ bringing peace to everyone. ♫ (Trumpet sounds) (Trumpet sounds) ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ There in the hallway, ♫ ♫ peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ (Applause)

So I am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation. Now, inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor last year, I didn't bring a human brain, but I did bring a liter of bone marrow. And bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients, most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases. So, a few years ago, I'm doing my transplant fellowship at Stanford. I'm in the operating room. We have Bob here, who is a volunteer donor. We're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia. So actually how do we harvest this bone marrow? Well we have a whole O.R. team, general anesthesia, nurses, and another doctor across from me. Bob's on the table, and we take this sort of small needle, you know, not too big. And the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue, and kind of punch it into the hard bone, into the tuchus -- that's a technical term -- and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out, each time, with a syringe. And hand it off to the nurse. She squirts it into a tin. Hands it back to me. And we do that again and again. About 200 times usually. And by the end of this my arm is sore, I've got a callus on my hand, let alone Bob, whose rear end looks something more like this, like Swiss cheese. So I'm thinking, you know, this procedure hasn't changed in about 40 years. And there is probably a better way to do this. So I thought of a minimally invasive approach, and a new device that we call the Marrow Miner. This is it. And the Marrow Miner, the way it works is shown here. Our standard see-through patient. Instead of entering the bone dozens of times, we enter just once, into the front of the hip or the back of the hip. And we have a flexible, powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip, as it moves around. So it enables you to very rapidly aspirate, or suck out, rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole. We can do multiple passes through that same entry. No robots required. And, so, very quickly, Bob can just get one puncture, local anesthesia, and do this harvest as an outpatient. So I did a few prototypes. I got a small little grant at Stanford. And played around with this a little bit. And our team members developed this technology. And eventually we got two large animals, and pig studies. And we found, to our surprise, that we not only got bone marrow out, but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner, compared to the normal device. This device was just FDA approved in the last year. Here is a live patient. You can see it following the flexible curves around. There will be two passes here, in the same patient, from the same hole. This was done under local anesthesia, as an outpatient. And we got, again, about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient. So why should you care? Bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells. You all know about embryonic stem cells. They've got great potential but haven't yet entered clinical trials. Adult stem cells are throughout our body, including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow, which we've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years. In the last decade there's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient's other diseases such as heart disease, vascular disease, orthopedics, tissue engineering, even in neurology to treat Parkinson's and diabetes. We've just come out, we're commercializing, this year, generation 2.0 of the Marrow Miner. The hope is that this gets more stem cells out, which translates to better outcomes. It may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live-saving bone marrow donors. It may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells, when you're younger and healthier, to use in the future should you need it. And ultimately -- and here's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors, who come together for a reunion each year at Stanford. Hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future. Thanks. (Applause)

Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years ago I read a newspaper article which said that one day syringes would be one of the major causes of the spread of AIDS, the transmission of AIDS. I thought this was unacceptable. So I decided to do something about it. Sadly, it's come true. Malaria, as we all know, kills approximately one million people a year. The reuse of syringes now exceeds that and kills 1.3 million people a year. This young girl and her friend that I met in an orphanage in Delhi were HIV positive from a syringe. And what was so sad about this particular story was that once their parents had found out -- and don't forget, their parents took them to the doctor -- the parents threw them out on the street. And hence they ended up in an orphanage. And it comes from situations like this where you have either skilled or unskilled practitioners, blindly giving an injection to someone. And the injection is so valuable, that the people basically trust the doctor, being second to God, which I've heard many times, to do the right thing. But in fact they're not. And you can understand, obviously, the transmission problem between people in high-virus areas. This video we took undercover, which shows you, over a half an hour period, a tray of medicines of 42 vials, which are being delivered with only 2 syringes in a public hospital in India. And over the course of half an hour, not one syringe was filmed being unwrapped. They started with two and they ended with two. And you'll see, just now, a nurse coming back to the tray, which is their sort of modular station, and dropping the syringe she's just used back in the tray for it to be picked up and used again. So you can imagine the scale of this problem. And in fact in India alone, 62 percent of all injections given are unsafe. These kids in Pakistan don't go to school. They are lucky. They already have a job. And that job is that they go around and pick up syringes from the back of hospitals, wash them, and in the course of this, obviously picking them up they injure themselves. And then they repackage them and sell them out on markets for literally more money than a sterile syringe in the first place, which is quite bizarre. In an interesting photo, their father, while we were talking to him, picked up a syringe and pricked his finger -- I don't know whether you can see the drop of blood on the end -- and immediately whipped out a box of matches, lit one, and burned the blood off the end of his finger, giving me full assurance that that was the way that you stopped the transmission of HIV. In China, recycling is a major issue. And they are collected en mass -- you can see the scale of it here -- and sorted out, by hand, back into the right sizes, and then put back out on the street. So recycling and reuse are the major issues here. But there was one interesting anecdote that I found in Indonesia. In all schools in Indonesia, there is usually a toy seller in the playground. The toy seller, in this case, had syringes, which they usually do, next door to the diggers, which is obviously what you would expect. And they use them, in the breaks, for water pistols. They squirt them at each other, which is lovely and innocent. And they are having great fun. But they also drink from them while they're in their breaks, because it's hot. And they squirt the water into their mouths. And these are used with traces of blood visible. So we need a better product. And we need better information. And I think, if I can just borrow this camera, I was going to show you my invention, which I came up with. So, it's a normal-looking syringe. You load it up in the normal way. This is made on existing equipment in 14 factories that we license. You give the injection and then put it down. If someone then tries to reuse it, it locks and breaks afterwards. It's very, very simple. Thank you. (Applause) And it costs the same as a normal syringe. And in comparison, a Coca-Cola is 10 times the price. And that will stop reusing a syringe 20 or 30 times. And I have an information charity which has done huge scale amount of work in India. And we're very proud of giving information to people, so that little kids like this don't do stupid things. Thank you very much. (Applause)

This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block. The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together. Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world. They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time. Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time. Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this. It was called the Automatic Binding Brick. And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household. It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced -- or 75 bricks for every person on the planet. You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings. LEGO made it accessible. LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination. Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block. The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time. But there's a main difference: The transistor was only for experts. I personally don't accept this, that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, so I decided to change that. Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers. A few years ago I started developing littleBits. Let me show you how they work. LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function. They're pre-engineered to be light, sound, motors and sensors. And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets. So you can't put them the wrong way. The bricks are color-coded. Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire. So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits. You put a blue to a green, you can make light. You can put a knob in between and now you've made a little dimmer. Switch out the knob for a pulse module, which is here, and now you've made a little blinker. Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine. I'm going to stop that. So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful. Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures. So to make this blink faster or slower, you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower. The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library. We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick. Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors -- everything should be accessible. We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them. And it's been an incredible experience. The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don't learn at schools. For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch. We've also been taking littleBits to design schools. So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material. Here you see, with felt and paper water bottles, we have Geordie making ... (Clanging) (Buzzing) A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever -- just cardboard, wood and paper -- and told them "Make something." Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball. (Laughter) But wait, this is actually my favorite project. It's a lobster made of playdough that's afraid of the dark. (Laughter) To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material. And we want to make this material accessible to everyone. So littleBits is open-source. You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself. We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours. So go ahead and start inventing. Thank you. (Applause)

(Non English) (French) Mais Des fois on peut voir parce Que Les gens ici faire Des choses on peut manger. (French) Mais quand tu es fâché avec quelqu'un c'est pas passé the first time. (British English) And that's one of the things that I enjoy most about this convention. It's not so much, as so little has to do with what everything is. (Laughter) But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves. (Laughter) The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. (Laughter) Common knowledge, but important nonetheless. (Laughter) As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear. It's hard to imagine or measure. The background radiation is simply too static to be able to be seen under the normal spectral analysis. (American accent) But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us -- you know what I'm saying? But -- you know what I'm saying? Because, as a hip hop thing, you know what I'm saying, TED be rocking -- you know what I'm saying. Like so I wrote a song, and I hope you guys dig it. It's a song about people and sasquatches -- (Laughter) And other French science stuff. That's French science. Okay, here we go. (Singing) I've been trying inside I know that I'm in trouble (Applause) that I'm in trouble by myself But every time it gets me (Vocalization) (Beatbox) (Singing) And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in And you're the one that I want to be so saucy And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby And you can do anything as long as you don't get hurt along the way back (Beatbox) If I survive, I'm going to tell you what is wrong Because if you were [unclear] And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] I give you what I want to be (Music) (Music ends abruptly) (British accent) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want. (Applause) And the computer models, no matter how many that you have and how many people that you use, are never going to be able to arrive at the same conclusions. Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion. (Laughter) Tomorrow is another day. (Laughter) Not just any day, but it is a day. It will get here, there's no question. And the important thing to remember is that this simulation is a good one. It's believable, it's tactile. You can reach out -- things are solid. You can move objects from one area to another. You can feel your body. You can say, "I'd like to go over to this location," and you can move this mass of molecules through the air over to another location, at will. (Laughter) That's something you live inside of every day. Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from. (Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin. (Laughter) Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see. (Laughter) (Audience) (Laughter) This is my final piece. And just remember, everything you are -- it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be. So please, without further ado. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) This is a fun one. It goes like this. (Beatbox) (Gibberish) (Music ends) Okay, for the last piece I'd like to do, this one goes very similar to this. I hope you guys recognize it. Here we go. Okay, that still works. Okay, good. All right, here we go. (Laughter) (Beatbox) Here we go. (Beatbox) Yeah, yo, yo, yo (Gibberish) (Music fades out) Thank you. Enjoy the rest. (Applause)

Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields. So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics. So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts. I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology. Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology. With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech. (Laughter) So we're based in New York City. And if you're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the Bot-Agent. The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @robotinthewild. I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data. He's named after the Star Trek character. I think he's going to be super popular. We've got the robot -- in his head is a database of a lot of jokes. Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes. So it knows something about the subject; it knows about the length. It knows how much it's moving. And so it's going to try to watch your response. I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today. (Laughter) It can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things, sort of like Netflix-style, over longer-term to different communities or audiences, children versus adults, different cultures. You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in. And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions. Some of you in this middle section -- you have red/green paddles. If you like what's going on, show the green. If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red. Now don't be shy. It's just a robot. It doesn't have feelings ... yet. (Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter. There's also a microphone that's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing -- I hope not -- to help make some of its next decisions. Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin. Data: Hello TEDWomen. It's an honor to be here. (Laughter) (Applause) You guys are looking good out there. Ready for some jokes? Audience: Yeah. Data: Here's the first one. Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live." "That's terrible," said the patient. "How can the news possibly be worse?" "I've been trying to contact you since yesterday." (Laughter) (Applause) The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss. Data: Pretty lucky for them. Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? "Come on buddy, I have the toe clippers right here. You get past me, the guy behind me has a spoon." (Laughter) HK: He's a French robot. Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods. One of them falls to the ground. He does not seem to be breathing. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911. He gasps to the operator, "My friend is dead. What can I do?" The operator says, "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, and the operator hears a shot. The guy's voice comes back on the line, "Okay, now what?" (Laughter) (Applause) Question: Why is television called a medium? Anyone? Because it's neither rare nor well done. But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television. Any of you like television? Audience: Yes. Data: I find it incredibly educational. Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read. (Laughter) That's all for now. Was that okay for my first time? (Applause) You've been a great audience. Thank you. HK: Yay. (Applause) So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance. So thank you all for being a part of it. There's a lot more to come. And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, "Mysteries of the Unseen World." (Music) There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. We can do the same thing with ships at sea. We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora Borealis. It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life. At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. We're giants, and we're unaware of things that are too small for us to see. The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. This is the egg of a butterfly. And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. Can you guess what this is? Shark skin. A caterpillar's mouth. The eye of a fruit fly. An eggshell. A flea. A snail's tongue. We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered. A spider also has great secrets, because spiders' silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA. And nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms. With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets and supernova explosions. People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. Knowing that there's so much around us we can't see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives. We'll just have to see. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, "Mysteries of the Unseen World." (Music) There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. We can do the same thing with ships at sea. We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora borealis. It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life. At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. We're giants, and we're unaware of things that are too small for us to see. The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. This is the egg of a butterfly. And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. Can you guess what this is? Shark skin. A caterpillar's mouth. The eye of a fruit fly. An eggshell. A flea. A snail's tongue. We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered. A spider also has great secrets, because spider's silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA, and nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms. With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets, and supernova explosions. People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. Knowing that there's so much around us we can see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives. We'll just have to see. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. And these projects came from questions I had, like: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? (Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? How can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. (Laughter) The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me. And her death was sudden and unexpected. And I thought about death a lot. And ... this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had. And ... brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ..." So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their life, and share their personal aspirations in public space. I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. "Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." (Laughter) "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Dateline." "Before I die, I want to sing for millions." "Before I die, I want to plant a tree." "Before I die, I want to live off the grid." "Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." "Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." "Before I die, I want to be completely myself." So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community. So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another. Two of the most valuable things we have are time, and our relationships with other people. In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective, and remember that life is brief and tender. Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about, or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life. Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

What's in the box? Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment. (Laughter) (Applause) Sound familiar? Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? Three times. So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. Nope. There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. So where does this lead? Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years. Well I'm here to suggest there's a better way, that less might actually equal more. I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college -- in your dorm, traveling -- in a hotel room, camping -- rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat. Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time. So I'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint. It's actually a great way to save you some money. And it's going to give you a little more ease in your life. So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area. First up: crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com. I wanted it all -- home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear. With over 300 entries from around the world, I got it, my own little jewel box. By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft. instead of 600, immediately I'm saving 200 grand. Smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities -- save some more money there, but also a smaller footprint. And because it's really designed around an edited set of possessions -- my favorite stuff -- and really designed for me, I'm really excited to be there. So how can you live little? Three main approaches. First of all, you have to edit ruthlessly. We've got to clear the arteries of our lives. And that shirt that I hadn't worn in years? It's time for me to let it go. We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. We need to think before we buy. Ask ourselves, "Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?" By all means, we should buy and own some great stuff. But we want stuff that we're going to love for years, not just stuff. Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy. We want space efficiency. We want things that are designed for how they're used the vast majority of the time, not that rare event. Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three? So we want things that nest, we want things that stack, and we want it digitized. You can take paperwork, books, movies, and you can make it disappear -- it's magic. Finally, we want multifunctional spaces and housewares -- a sink combined with a toilet, a dining table becomes a bed -- same space, a little side table stretches out to seat 10. In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here, we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space. Look at the coffee table -- it grows in height and width to seat 10. My office folds away, easily hidden. My bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers. Guests? Move the moving wall, have some fold-down guest beds. And of course, my own movie theater. So I'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft. But consider the benefits of an edited life. Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000. Most of us, maybe all of us, are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags, maybe a small space, a hotel room. So when you go home and you walk through your front door, take a second and ask yourselves, "Could I do with a little life editing? Would that give me a little more freedom? Maybe a little more time?" What's in the box? It doesn't really matter. I know I don't need it. What's in yours? Maybe, just maybe, less might equal more. So let's make room for the good stuff. Thank you. (Applause)

Usually I like working in my shop, but when it's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river, then I just love it. And I'll cut some wood and drill some holes and watch the water, and maybe I'll have to walk around and look for washers. You have no idea how much time I spend. This is the "Double Raindrop." Of all my sculptures, it's the most talkative. It adds together the interference pattern from two raindrops that land near each other. Instead of expanding circles, they're expanding hexagons. All the sculptures move by mechanical means. Do you see how there's three peaks to the yellow sine wave? Right here I'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on. Eight hundred two-liter soda bottles -- oh yea. (Laughter) Four hundred aluminum cans. Tule is a reed that's native to California, and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious. A single drop of rain increasing amplitude. The spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip. This adds together four different waves. And here I'm going to pull out the double wavelengths and increase the single. The mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys. Four hundred and forty-five strings in a three-dimensional weave. Transferred to a larger scale -- actually a lot larger, with a lot of help -- 14,064 bicycle reflectors -- a 20-day install. "Connected" is a collaboration with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek. Strings attached to dancers. This is very early rehearsal footage, but the finished work's on tour and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks. A pair of helices and 40 wooden slats. Take your finger and draw this line. Summer, fall, winter, spring, noon, dusk, dark, dawn. Have you ever seen those stratus clouds that go in parallel stripes across the sky? Did you know that's a continuous sheet of cloud that's dipping in and out of the condensation layer? What if every seemingly isolated object was actually just where the continuous wave of that object poked through into our world? The Earth is neither flat nor round. It's wavy. It sounds good, but I'll bet you know in your gut that it's not the whole truth, and I'll tell you why. I have a two-year-old daughter who's the best thing ever. And I'm just going to come out and say it: My daughter is not a wave. And you might say, "Surely, Rueben, if you took even just the slightest step back, the cycles of hunger and eating, waking and sleeping, laughing and crying would emerge as pattern." But I would say, "If I did that, too much would be lost." This tension between the need to look deeper and the beauty and immediacy of the world, where if you even try to look deeper you've already missed what you're looking for, this tension is what makes the sculptures move. And for me, the path between these two extremes takes the shape of a wave. Let me show you one more. Thank you very much. Thanks. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) June Cohen: Looking at each of your sculptures, they evoke so many different images. Some of them are like the wind and some are like waves, and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math. Is there an actual inspiration behind each one? Are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it? RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation -- like literally two raindrops falling, and just watching that pattern is so stunning. And then just trying to figure out how to make that using stuff. I like working with my hands. There's nothing better than cutting a piece of wood and trying to make it move. JC: And does it ever change? Do you think you're designing one thing, and then when it's produced it looks like something else? RM: The "Double Raindrop" I worked on for nine months, and when I finally turned it on, I actually hated it. The very moment I turned it on, I hated it. It was like a really deep-down gut reaction, and I wanted to throw it out. And I happened to have a friend who was over, and he said, "Why don't you just wait." And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better, the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it. And so I guess, one, the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes, and two, it does not look like as expected. JC: The relationship evolves over time. Well thank you so much. That was a gorgeous treat for us. RM: Thanks. (JC: Thank you, Reuben.) (Applause)

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. And these projects came from questions I had, like, how much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? (Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? How can we share more of our memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? And how can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. (Laughter) I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. (Laughter) The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me, and her death was sudden and unexpected. And I thought about death a lot, and this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had, and brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ... " So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space. I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. "Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." (Laughter) "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Date Line." "Before I die, I want to sing for millions." "Before I die, I want to plant a tree." "Before I die, I want to live off the grid." "Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." "Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." "Before I die, I want to be completely myself." So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. It's about knowing you're not alone. It's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways. It's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community, so my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and beyond. Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice and share more with one another. Two of the most valuable things we have are time and our relationships with other people. In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective and remember that life is brief and tender. Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. Thinking about death clarifies your life. Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. I think it might be a lifeline. I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin. Texting: I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting, a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see -- hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else -- or trying to translate the abbreviations LOL, LMAO, HMU. I can help you with those later. But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids. It might be the only way to communicate with your kids. (Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then it's closer to 4,000. And the secret is she opens every single one. Texting has a 100 percent open rate. Now the parents are really alarmed. It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. I promise she read that text. And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon. Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth. I know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that. We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email. We've also found an unintended consequence. We've been getting text messages back like these. "I don't want to go to school today. The boys call me faggot." "I was cutting, my parents found out, and so I stopped. But I just started again an hour ago." Or, "He won't stop raping me. He told me not to tell anyone. It's my dad. Are you there?" That last one's an actual text message that we received. And yeah, we're there. I will not forget the day we got that text message. And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline. Because this isn't what we do. We do social change. Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us. So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty powerful. It's fast, it's pretty private. No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly. It's real time. We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. That's great. But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data. Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. I want to prevent this shit from happening. So think about a cop. There's something in New York City. The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. And then they started crime mapping. And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things -- charting the future essentially. And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent. So think about the data from a crisis text line. There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape -- no census. Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence. Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. You could inform legislation. You could inform school policy. You could say to a principal, "You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock. What's going on in your school?" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data. Because while people are talking about data, making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade, or Target to know when it's time for me to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father's raping her. Thank you. (Applause)

Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it? Chris Anderson: No, you can't start the three minutes. Reset the three minutes, that's just not fair. AH: Oh my God, it's harsh up here. I mean I'm nervous enough as it is. But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago. Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery. Do you know that surgery? Electric saw, power drill, totally disgusting unless you're David Bolinsky, in which case it's all truth and beauty. Sure David, if it's not your hip, it's truth and beauty. Anyway, I did have a really big epiphany around the situation, so Chris invited me to tell you about it. But first you need to know two things about me. Just two things. I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids. Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system. That means we get our new hips for free. And being the youngest of seven, I have never been at the front of the line for anything. OK? So my hip had been hurting me for years. I finally went to the doctor, which was free. And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free. Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting -- almost a year. That is what free gets you. I met the surgeon, and he took some free X-rays, and I got a good look at them. And you know, even I could tell my hip was bad, and I actually work in marketing. So he said, "Allison, we've got to get you on the table. I'm going to replace your hip -- it's about an 18-month wait." 18 more months. I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months. You know, it's such a long wait that I actually started to even think about it in terms of TEDs. I wouldn't have my new hip for this TED. I wouldn't have my new hip for TEDGlobal in Africa. I would not have my new hip for TED2008. I would still be on my bad hip. That was so disappointing. So, I left his office and I was walking through the hospital, and that's when I had my epiphany. This youngest of seven had to get herself to the front of the line. Oh yeah. Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is? We do not think that way. We don't talk about it. It's not even a consideration. In fact, when we're traveling abroad, it's how we identify fellow Canadians. "After you." "Oh, no, no. After you." Hey, are you from Canada? "Oh, me too! Hi!" "Great! Excellent!" So no, suddenly I wasn't averse to butting any geezer off the list. Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing, or gardening. No, no. Front of the line. So by now I was walking the lobby, and of course, that hurt, because of my hip, and I kind of needed a sign. And I saw a sign. In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, "Volunteers Needed." Hmm. Well, they signed me up immediately. No reference checks. None of the usual background stuff, no. They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75. Yeah. They needed some young blood. So, next thing you know, I had my bright blue volunteer vest, I had my photo ID, and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss. I worked alone. Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop. While ringing in hospital staff's Tic Tacs, I'd casually ask, "What do you do?" Then I'd tell them, "Well, I'm getting my hip replaced -- in 18 months. It's gonna be so great when the pain stops. Ow!" All the staff got to know the plucky, young volunteer. My next surgeon's appointment was, coincidentally, right after a shift at the gift shop. So, naturally, I had my vest and my identification. I draped them casually over the chair in the doctor's office. And you know, when he walked in, I could just tell that he saw them. Moments later, I had a surgery date just weeks away, and a big fat prescription for Percocet. Now, word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line. And, you know, I'm not even ashamed of that. Two reasons. First of all, I am going to take such good care of this new hip. But also I intend to stick with the volunteering, which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all. Even when a Canadian cheats the system, they do it in a way that benefits society.

(Music) (Applause) I'm Jon M. Chu. And I'm not a dancer, I'm not a choreographer -- I'm actually a filmmaker, a storyteller. I directed a movie two years ago called "Step Up 2: The Streets." Anybody? Anybody? Yeah! During that movie I got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers -- amazing, the best in the world -- and they brought me into a society, the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind. I mean, this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities. They could fly in the air. They could bend their elbow all the way back. They could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row. I'd never seen anything like that. When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson. I grew up in a musical family. (Laughter) And those guys, those were like, ultimate heroes. Being a shy, little, skinny Asian kid growing up in the Silicon Valley with low self-esteem, those guys made me believe in something bigger. Those guys made me want to, like, "I'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl." (Applause) And it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared, sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos. But after seeing what I've seen, the truth is, they have not disappeared at all. They're here, getting better and better every day. And dance has progressed. It is insane what dance is right now. Dance has never had a better friend than technology. Online videos and social networking ... dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance, where kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself. And this is happening every day. And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages, with cheap webcams, lies the world's great dancers of tomorrow. Our Fred Astaires, our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips, and may not have that opportunity, except for us. So, we created the LXD, sort of a -- the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world. A living, breathing comic book series, but unlike Spiderman and Iron Man, these guys can actually do it. And we're going to show you some today. So, let me introduce to you, some of our heroes right now. We got Madd Chadd, Lil' C, Kid David and J Smooth. Please be excited, have fun, yell, scream. Ladies and gentlemen: The LXD. (Applause) (Video): Madd Chadd: When people first see me, I get a lot of different reactions actually. Sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it, but sometimes they get a little freaked out. And, I don't know, I kind of get a kick out of that a little bit. (Music) (Applause) J Smooth: When I'm in the zone -- I'm dancing and free styling it -- I actually visually kind of picture lines, and moving them. I think of like, Transformers, like how panels open and then they fold, they fold in, and then you close that panel. And then another thing opens, you close that. (Music) (Applause) Kid David: It's kind of like, honestly a lot of times I don't really know what's going on when I'm dancing. Because at that point it's just really like, it's my body and the music. It's not really a conscious decision, "I'm going to do this next, I'm going to do this." It's kind of like this other level where you can't make choices anymore, and it's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music. I got my name just because I was so young. I was young when I started. I was younger than a lot of the people I was dancing with. So, it was always like, they called me Kid David, because I was the kid. (Music) (Applause) L'il C: I tell them to create a ball, and then you just use that ball of energy. And instead of throwing it out, people would think that's a krump move, that's a krump move. That's not a krump move. You're going to throw it out, you throw it out, and you hold it. And you let it go, and then right when you see the tail, you grab it by the tail, then you bring it back in. And you just got this piece of energy and you just, you're manipulating it. You know, you create power, then you tame it. (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause)

When I arrived in Kiev, on February 1 this year, Independence Square was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. The protesters who occupied Maidan, as the square is known, prepared for battle, stockpiling homemade weapons and mass-producing improvised body armor. The Euromaidan protests began peacefully at the end of 2013, after the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a far-reaching accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia. In response, tens of thousands of dissatisfied citizens poured into central Kiev to demonstrate against this allegiance. As the months passed, confrontations between police and civilians intensified. I set up a makeshift portrait studio by the barricades on Hrushevsky Street. There, I photographed the fighters against a black curtain, a curtain that obscured the highly seductive and visual backdrop of fire, ice and smoke. In order to tell the individual human stories here, I felt that I needed to remove the dramatic visuals that had become so familiar and repetitive within the mainstream media. What I was witnessing was not only news, but also history. With this realization, I was free from the photojournalistic conventions of the newspaper and the magazine. Oleg, Vasiliy and Maxim were all ordinary men, with ordinary lives from ordinary towns. But the elaborate costumes that they had bedecked themselves in were quite extraordinary. I say the word "costume" because these were not clothes that had been issued or coordinated by anyone. They were improvised uniforms made up of decommissioned military equipment, irregular combat fatigues and trophies taken from the police. I became interested in the way they were choosing to represent themselves, this outward expression of masculinity, the ideal of the warrior. I worked slowly, using an analog film camera with a manual focusing loop and a handheld light meter. The process is old-fashioned. It gives me time to speak with each person and to look at them, in silence, while they look back at me. Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on February 20, which became known as Bloody Thursday. Snipers, loyal to the government, started firing on the civilians and protesters on Institutskaya Street. Many were killed in a very short space of time. The reception of the Hotel Ukraine became a makeshift morgue. There were lines of bodies laid in the street. And there was blood all over the pavements. The following day, President Yanukovych fled Ukraine. In all, three months of protests resulted in more than 120 confirmed dead and many more missing. History unfolded quickly, but celebration remained elusive in Maidan. As the days passed in Kiev's central square, streams of armed fighters were joined by tens of thousands of ordinary people, filling the streets in an act of collective mourning. Many were women who often carried flowers that they had brought to lay as marks of respect for the dead. They came day after day and they covered the square with millions of flowers. Sadness enveloped Maidan. It was quiet and I could hear the birds singing. I hadn't heard that before. I stopped women as they approached the barricades to lay their tributes and asked to make their picture. Most women cried when I photographed them. On the first day, my fixer, Emine, and I cried with almost every woman who visited our studio. There had been such a noticeable absence of women up until that point. And the color of their pastel coats, their shiny handbags, and the bunches of red carnations, white tulips and yellow roses that they carried jarred with the blackened square and the blackened men who were encamped there. It is clear to me that these two sets of pictures don't make much sense without the other. They are about men and women and the way we are -- not the way we look, but the way we are. They speak about different gender roles in conflict, not only in Maidan, and not only in Ukraine. Men fight most wars and women mourn them. If the men showed the ideal of the warrior, then the women showed the implications of such violence. When I made these pictures, I believed that I was documenting the end of violent events in Ukraine. But now I understand that it is a record of the beginning. Today, the death toll stands around 3,000, while hundreds of thousands have been displaced. I was in Ukraine again six weeks ago. In Maidan, the barricades have been dismantled, and the paving stones which were used as weapons during the protests replaced, so that traffic flows freely through the center of the square. The fighters, the women and the flowers are gone. A huge billboard depicting geese flying over a wheat field covers the burned-out shell of the trade union's building and proclaims, "Glory to Ukraine. Glory to heroes." Thank you. (Applause).

(Music) (Applause) Thank you. Ooh, I'm like, "Phew, phew, calm down. Get back into my body now." (Laughter) Usually when I play out, the first thing that happens is people scream out, "What's she doing?!" I'll play at these rock shows, be on stage standing completely still, and they're like, "What's she doing?! What's she doing?!" And then I'll kind of be like -- (Vvvwow!) -- and then they're like, "Whoa!" (Laughter) I'm sure you're trying to figure out, "Well, how does this thing work?" Well, what I'm doing is controlling the pitch with my left hand. See, the closer I get to this antenna, the higher the note gets -- (Portamento) -- and you can get it really low. And with this hand I'm controlling the volume, so the further away my right hand gets, the louder it gets. (Tones) So basically, with both of your hands you're controlling pitch and volume and kind of trying to create the illusion that you're doing separate notes, when really it's continuously going ... (Flourish ... Beep) (Laughter) Sometimes I startle myself: I'll forget that I have it on, and I'll lean over to pick up something, and then it goes like -- (Blip) -- "Oh!" And it's like a funny sound effect that follows you around if you don't turn the thing off. (Laughter) Maybe we'll go into the next tune, because I totally lost where this is going. We're going to do a song by David Mash called "Listen: the Words Are Gone," and maybe I'll have words come back into me afterwards if I can relax. (Music) (Applause) So, I'm trying to think of some of the questions that are commonly asked; there are so many. And ... Well, I guess I could tell you a little of the history of the theremin. It was invented around the 1920s, and the inventor, Léon Theremin -- he also was a musician besides an inventor -- he came up with the idea for making the theremin, I think, when he was working on some shortwave radios. And there'd be that sound in the signal -- it's like (Screeching) -- and he thought, "Oh, what if I could control that sound and turn it into an instrument, because there are pitches in it." And so somehow through developing that, he eventually came to make the theremin the way it is now. And a lot of times, even kids nowadays, they'll make reference to a theremin by going, "Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo," because in the '50s it was used in the sci-fi horror movies, that sound that's like ... (Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo) (Laughter) It's kind of a funny, goofy sound to do. And sometimes if I have too much coffee, then my vibrato gets out of hand. You're really sensitive to your body and its functions when you're behind this thing. You have to stay so still if you want to have the most control. It reminds me of the balancing act earlier on -- what Michael was doing -- because you're fighting so hard to keep the balance with what you're playing with and stay in tune, and at the same time you don't want to focus so much on being in tune all the time; you want to be feeling the music. And then also, you're trying to stay very, very, very still because little movements with other parts of your body will affect the pitch, or sometimes if you're holding a low note -- (Tone rising out of key) -- and breathing will make it ... (Laughter) If I pass out on the next song ... (Laughter) I think of it almost like like a yoga instrument because it makes you so aware of every little crazy thing your body is doing, or just aware of what you don't want it to be doing while you're playing; you don't want to have any sudden movements. And if I go to a club and play a gig, people are like, "Here, have some drinks on us!" And it's like, "Well, I'm about to go on soon; I don't want to be like -- (Teetering tones) -- you know?" It really does reflect the mood that you're in also, if you're ... it's similar to being a vocalist, except instead of it coming out of your throat, you're controlling it just in the air and you don't really have a point of reference; you're always relying on your ears and adjusting constantly. You just have to always adjust to what's happening and realize you'll have bummer notes come here and there and listen to it, adjust it, and just move on, or else you'll get too tied up and go crazy. Like me. I think we will play another tune now. I'm going to do "Lush Life." It's one of my favorite tunes to play. (Music) (Applause)

If you had caught me straight out of college in the halls of the Vermont State House where I was a lobbyist in training and asked me what I was going to do with my life, I would have told you that I'd just passed the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, the Chinese equivalency exam, and I was going to go study law in Beijing, and I was going to improve U.S.-China relations through top-down policy changes and judicial system reforms. (Laughter) (Applause) I had a plan, and I never ever thought it would have anything to do with the banjo. Little did I know what a huge impact it would have on me one night when I was at a party and I heard a sound coming out of a record player in the corner of a room. And it was Doc Watson singing and playing "Shady Grove." ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my darlin' ♫ ♫ Shady Grove, my little love ♫ ♫ Going back to Harlan ♫ That sound was just so beautiful, the sound of Doc's voice and the rippling groove of the banjo. And after being totally and completely obsessed with the mammoth richness and history of Chinese culture, it was like this total relief to hear something so truly American and so truly awesome. I knew I had to take a banjo with me to China. So before going to law school in China I bought a banjo, I threw it in my little red truck and I traveled down through Appalachia and I learned a bunch of old American songs, and I ended up in Kentucky at the International Bluegrass Music Association Convention. And I was sitting in a hallway one night and a couple girls came up to me. And they said, "Hey, do you want to jam?" And I was like, "Sure." So I picked up my banjo and I nervously played four songs that I actually knew with them. And a record executive walked up to me and invited me to Nashville, Tennessee to make a record. (Laughter) It's been eight years, and I can tell you that I didn't go to China to become a lawyer. In fact, I went to Nashville. And after a few months I was writing songs. And the first song I wrote was in English, and the second one was in Chinese. (Music) [Chinese] Outside your door the world is waiting. Inside your heart a voice is calling. The four corners of the world are watching, so travel daughter, travel. Go get it, girl. (Applause) It's really been eight years since that fated night in Kentucky. And I've played thousands of shows. And I've collaborated with so many incredible, inspirational musicians around the world. And I see the power of music. I see the power of music to connect cultures. I see it when I stand on a stage in a bluegrass festival in east Virginia and I look out at the sea of lawn chairs and I bust out into a song in Chinese. [Chinese] And everybody's eyes just pop wide open like it's going to fall out of their heads. And they're like, "What's that girl doing?" And then they come up to me after the show and they all have a story. They all come up and they're like, "You know, my aunt's sister's babysitter's dog's chicken went to China and adopted a girl." And I tell you what, it like everybody's got a story. It's just incredible. And then I go to China and I stand on a stage at a university and I bust out into a song in Chinese and everybody sings along and they roar with delight at this girl with the hair and the instrument, and she's singing their music. And I see, even more importantly, the power of music to connect hearts. Like the time I was in Sichuan Province and I was singing for kids in relocation schools in the earthquake disaster zone. And this little girl comes up to me. [Chinese] "Big sister Wong," Washburn, Wong, same difference. "Big sister Wong, can I sing you a song that my mom sang for me before she was swallowed in the earthquake?" And I sat down, she sat on my lap. She started singing her song. And the warmth of her body and the tears rolling down her rosy cheeks, and I started to cry. And the light that shone off of her eyes was a place I could have stayed forever. And in that moment, we weren't our American selves, we weren't our Chinese selves, we were just mortals sitting together in that light that keeps us here. I want to dwell in that light with you and with everyone. And I know U.S.-China relations doesn't need another lawyer. Thank you. (Applause)

Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment. Today's its debut. It's a demonstration of augmented reality. And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded. They are live and reacting to me in real time. I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic. So fingers crossed. And keep your eyes on the big screen. Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery. It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder. Magic is deception, but it is a deception we enjoy. To enjoy being deceived, an audience must first suspend its disbelief. It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that, for a moment, constitutes poetic faith. MT: This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience. Without it, a script is just words. Augmented reality is just the latest technology. And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity. We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had. Without this ability there is no magic. It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller. He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio. Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler. He is an actor playing the part of a magician. MT: Which means magic is theater and every trick is a story. The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction. There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. Now many of them are intensely dramatic. Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape. But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live. Because the best stories always have a happy ending. The tricks of magic have one special element. They are stories with a twist. Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines. He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think. Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error. The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable, but do not, in fact, match what is being done in front of them. MT: In that respect, magic tricks are like jokes. Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination. But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected, we laugh. The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks. The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter. It's fun to be fooled. One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared. We feel compelled to tell them. When I do a trick at a party -- (Laughter) that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again. They want to share the experience. That makes my job more difficult, because, if I want to surprise them, I need to tell a story that starts the same, but ends differently -- a trick with a twist on a twist. It keeps me busy. Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained. We think in narrative structures. We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood. It's a uniquely human achievement. We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation. Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com. The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story. We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies. We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole. Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be. They give us our identity and a sense of community. And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I only have three minutes so I'm going to have to talk fast, and it will use up your spare mental cycles, so multitasking may be hard. So, 27 years ago I got a traffic ticket that got me thinking. I've had some time to think it over. And energy efficiency is more than just about the vehicle -- it's also about the road. Road design makes a difference, particularly intersections, of which there are two types: signalized and unsignalized, which means stop signs. Fifty percent of crashes happen at intersections. Roundabouts are much better. A study of 24 intersections has found crashes drop 40 percent from when you convert a traffic light into a roundabout. Injury crashes have dropped 76 percent, fatal crashes down 90 percent. But that's just safety. What about time and gas? So, traffic keeps flowing, so that means less braking, which means less accelerating, less gas and less pollution, less time wasted, and that partly accounts for Europe's better efficiency than we have in the United States. So, unsignalized intersections, meaning stop signs, they save many lives, but there's an excessive proliferation of them. Small roundabouts are starting to appear. This is one in my neighborhood. And they are much better -- better than traffic lights, better than four-way stop signs. They're expensive to install, but they are more expensive not to. So, we should look at that. But they are not applicable in all situations. So, take, for example, the three-way intersection. So, it's logical that you'd have one there, on the minor road entering the major. But the other two are somewhat questionable. So, here's one. There's another one which I studied. Cars rarely appear on that third road. And so, the question is, what does that cost us? That intersection I looked at had about 3,000 cars per day in each direction, and so that's two ounces of gas to accelerate out of. That's five cents each, and times 3,000 cars per day, that's $51,000 per year. That's just the gasoline cost. There is also pollution, wear on the car, and time. What's that time worth? Well, at 10 seconds per 3,000 cars, that's 8.3 hours per day. The average wage in the U.S. is $20 an hour. That is 60,000 per year. Add that together with the gas, and it's $112,000 per year, just for that sign in each direction. Discount that back to the present, at five percent: over two million dollars for a stop sign, in each direction. Now, if you look at what that adjacent property is worth, you could actually buy the property, cut down the shrubbery to improve the sight line, and then sell it off again. And you'd still come out ahead. So, it makes one wonder, "Why is it there?" I mean, why is there that stop sign in each direction? Because it is saving lives. So, is there a better way to accomplish that goal? The answer is to enable cars to come in from that side road safely. Because there are a lot of people who might live up there and if they're waiting forever a long queue could form because the cars aren't slowing down on the main road. Can that be accomplished with existing signs? So, there is a long history of stop signs and yield signs. Stop signs were invented in 1915, yield signs in 1950. But that's all we got. So, why not use a yield sign? Well the meaning of yield is: You must yield the right-of-way. That means that if there are five cars waiting, you have to wait till they all go, then you go. It lacks the notion of alternating, or taking turns, and it's always on the minor road, allowing the major one to have primacy. So, it's hard to create a new meaning for the existing sign. You couldn't suddenly tell everyone, "OK, remember what you used to do at yield signs? Now do something different." That would not work. So, what the world needs now is a new type of sign. (Applause) So, you'd have a little instruction below it, you know, for those who didn't see the public service announcements. And it merges the stop sign and yield signs. It's kind of shaped like a T, as in taking turns. And uncertainty results in caution. When people come to an unfamiliar situation they don't know how to deal with they slow down. So, now that you are all "Road Scholars" ... (Laughter) don't wait for that sign to be adopted, these things don't change quickly. But you all are members of communities, and you can exercise your community influence to create more sensible traffic flows. And you can have more impact on the environment just getting your neighborhood to change these things than by changing your vehicle. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So, I am indeed going to talk about the spaces men create for themselves, but first I want to tell you why I'm here. I'm here for two reasons. These two guys are my two sons Ford and Wren. When Ford was about three years old, we shared a very small room together, in a very small space. My office was on one half of the bedroom, and his bedroom was on the other half. And you can imagine, if you're a writer, that things would get really crowded around deadlines. So when Wren was on the way, I realized I needed to find a space of my own. There was no more space in the house. So I went out to the backyard, and without any previous building experience, and about 3,000 dollars and some recycled materials, I built this space. It had everything I needed. It was quiet. There was enough space. And I had control, which was very important. As I was building this space, I thought to myself, "Surely I'm not the only guy to have to have carved out a space for his own." So I did some research. And I found that there was an historic precedence. Hemingway had his writing space. Elvis had two or three manspaces, which is pretty unique because he lived with both his wife and his mother in Graceland. In the popular culture, Superman had the Fortress of Solitude, and there was, of course, the Batcave. So I realized then that I wanted to go out on a journey and see what guys were creating for themselves now. Here is one of the first spaces I found. It is in Austin, Texas, which is where I'm from. On the outside it looks like a very typical garage, a nice garage. But on the inside, it's anything but. And this, to me, is a pretty classic manspace. It has neon concert posters, a bar and, of course, the leg lamp, which is very important. I soon realized that manspaces didn't have to be only inside. This guy built a bowling alley in his backyard, out of landscaping timbers, astroturf. And he found the scoreboard in the trash. Here's another outdoor space, a little bit more sophisticated. This a 1923 wooden tugboat, made completely out of Douglas fir. The guy did it all himself. And there is about 1,000 square feet of hanging-out space inside. So, pretty early on in my investigations I realized what I was finding was not what I expected to find, which was, quite frankly, a lot of beer can pyramids and overstuffed couches and flat-screen TVs. There were definitely hang-out spots. But some were for working, some were for playing, some were for guys to collect their things. Most of all, I was just surprised with what I was finding. Take this place for example. On the outside it looks like a typical northeastern garage. This is in Long Island, New York. The only thing that might tip you off is the round window. On the inside it's a recreation of a 16th century Japanese tea house. The man imported all the materials from Japan, and he hired a Japanese carpenter to build it in the traditional style. It has no nails or screws. All the joints are hand-carved and hand-scribed. Here is another pretty typical scene. This is a suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. But you open one of the garage doors and there is a professional-size boxing ring inside. (Laughter) And so there is a good reason for this. It was built by this man who is Wayne McCullough. He won the silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Olympics, and he trains in this space. He trains other people. And right off the garage he has his own trophy room where he can sort of bask in his accomplishments, which is another sort of important part about a manspace. So, while this space represents someone's profession, this one certainly represents a passion. It's made to look like the inside of an English sailing ship. It's a collection of nautical antiques from the 1700s and 1800s. Museum quality. So, as I came to the end of my journey, I found over 50 spaces. And they were unexpected and they were surprising. But they were also -- I was really impressed by how personalized they were, and how much work went into them. And I realized that's because the guys that I met were all very passionate about what they did. And they really loved their professions. And they were very passionate about their collections and their hobbies. And so they created these spaces to reflect what they love to do, and who they were. So if you don't have a space of your own, I highly recommend finding one, and getting into it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias. I document what these groups do when they're not shooting. My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation. I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library. Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed. It used to be a contest between states. No longer. It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors. For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor. So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful. So how do we do that? We need to know what makes these organizations tick. We know a lot about how they fight, why they fight, but no one looks at what they're doing when they're not fighting. Yet, armed struggle and unarmed politics are related. It is all part of the same organization. We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture. And armed groups today are complex organizations. Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel. But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus. Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007. So these groups do way more than just shoot. They multi-task. They set up complex communication machines -- radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies. And up here, you have the ISIS magazine, printed in English and published to recruit. Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising -- not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies. Now, these activities are keys. They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand. Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services. They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs. Hezbollah offers all of these services and more. Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security. The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security. Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population. But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength and their power. For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work. Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side. But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision. These groups are hybrid. They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance. And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state. Now, what do you call a group like Hezbollah? They run part of a territory, they administer all their functions, they pick up the garbage, they run the sewage system. Is this a state? Is it a rebel group? Or maybe something else, something different and new? And what about ISIS? The lines are blurred. We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap. This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools. Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach. This also matters very much for peacemaking and peacebuilding. If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence. So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability. To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand. They're difficult to see. However, overtime, I got used to looking for them. I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. And eventually when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden in Egypt my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long next to the Nile, and my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently. So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Bendix. And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians. What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt and site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plane. This area is huge -- it's four miles by three miles in size. The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded wearing baseball mitts. So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. But you can see in more detail -- and even more interesting -- this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here, which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy. So we collaborated with the Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change you're looking for layers of human occupation. And five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have of layer of occupation for several hundred years dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jewelers workshop here. These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used. So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. We also have evidence of an elite jewelers workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well. So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom -- it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. "Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. There's nothing like it in the land." So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD. (Laughter) Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. However, over time, I got used to looking for them. I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. And eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile. And my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently. So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Mendes. And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians. What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom, about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important, because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plain. This area is huge -- it's four miles by three miles in size. The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts. (Laughter) So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. But you can see in more detail, and even more interesting, this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy. So we collaborated with Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change, you're looking for layers of human occupation. And, five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have a layer of occupation for several hundred years, dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jeweler's workshop here. These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used. So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. We also have evidence of an elite jeweler's workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well. So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom -- it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. "Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. There's nothing like it in the land." So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD. (Laughter) Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. But at least in my case, are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no. So I've been thinking about that problem, and a thinker who has helped me think about it is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi who wrote a book called "The Lonely Man Of Faith" in 1965. Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures, which he called Adam I and Adam II. Adam I is the worldly, ambitious, external side of our nature. He wants to build, create, create companies, create innovation. Adam II is the humble side of our nature. Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good, to live in a way internally that honors God, creation and our possibilities. Adam I wants to conquer the world. Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world. Adam I savors accomplishment. Adam II savors inner consistency and strength. Adam I asks how things work. Adam II asks why we're here. Adam I's motto is "success." Adam II's motto is "love, redemption and return." And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other. We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value. And the tricky thing, I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics. The external logic is an economic logic: input leads to output, risk leads to reward. The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer the desire to get what you want. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself. We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I, and often neglects Adam II. And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game, and you become a cold, calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there's a difference between your desired self and your actual self. You're not earning the sort of eulogy you want, you hope someone will give to you. You don't have the depth of conviction. You don't have an emotional sonorousness. You don't have commitment to tasks that would take more than a lifetime to commit. I was reminded of a common response through history of how you build a solid Adam II, how you build a depth of character. Through history, people have gone back into their own pasts, sometimes to a precious time in their life, to their childhood, and often, the mind gravitates in the past to a moment of shame, some sin committed, some act of selfishness, an act of omission, of shallowness, the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity, trying to be a people-pleaser, a lack of courage. Adam I is built by building on your strengths. Adam II is built by fighting your weaknesses. You go into yourself, you find the sin which you've committed over and again through your life, your signature sin out of which the others emerge, and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin, and out of that wrestling, that suffering, then a depth of character is constructed. And we're often not taught to recognize the sin in ourselves, in that we're not taught in this culture how to wrestle with it, how to confront it, and how to combat it. We live in a culture with an Adam I mentality where we're inarticulate about Adam II. Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the confrontation, the fully lived Adam I and Adam II life, this way: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love, which is forgiveness.” Thanks. (Applause)

Take a look at this drawing. Can you tell what it is? I'm a molecular biologist by training, and I've seen a lot of these kinds of drawings. They're usually referred to as a model figure, a drawing that shows how we think a cellular or molecular process occurs. This particular drawing is of a process called clathrin-mediated endocytosis. It's a process by which a molecule can get from the outside of the cell to the inside by getting captured in a bubble or a vesicle that then gets internalized by the cell. There's a problem with this drawing, though, and it's mainly in what it doesn't show. From lots of experiments, from lots of different scientists, we know a lot about what these molecules look like, how they move around in the cell, and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment. So in collaboration with a clathrin expert Tomas Kirchhausen, we decided to create a new kind of model figure that showed all of that. So we start outside of the cell. Now we're looking inside. Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes. Through connections with a membrane, clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble, or a vesicle, that's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell. Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle, making it separate from the rest of the membrane, and now clathrin is basically done with its job, and so proteins are coming in now — we've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage. And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again. These processes are too small to be seen directly, even with the best microscopes, so animations like this provide a really powerful way of visualizing a hypothesis. Here's another illustration, and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells. And again, this is a vast oversimplification and doesn't begin to show what we actually know about these processes. You might be surprised to know that these simple drawings are the only way that most biologists visualize their molecular hypotheses. Why? Because creating movies of processes as we think they actually occur is really hard. I spent months in Hollywood learning 3D animation software, and I spend months on each animation, and that's just time that most researchers can't afford. The payoffs can be huge, though. Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy. And I'm working on a new project now called "The Science of HIV" where I'll be animating the entire life cycle of the HIV virus as accurately as possible and all in molecular detail. The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades, data on what this virus looks like, how it's able to infect cells in our body, and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection. Over the years, I found that animations aren't just useful for communicating an idea, but they're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis. Biologists for the most part are still using a paper and pencil to visualize the processes they study, and with the data we have now, that's just not good enough anymore. The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas. One researcher I worked with who works on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases came up with experiments that were related directly to the animation that she and I worked on together, and in this way, animation can feed back into the research process. I believe that animation can change biology. It can change the way that we communicate with one another, how we explore our data and how we teach our students. But for that change to happen, we need more researchers creating animations, and toward that end, I brought together a team of biologists, animators and programmers to create a new, free, open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations. From our testing, we've found that it only takes 15 minutes for a biologist who has never touched animation software before to create her first molecular animation of her own hypothesis. We're also building an online database where anyone can view, download and contribute their own animations. We're really excited to announce that the beta version of the molecular animation software toolkit will be available for download today. We are really excited to see what biologists will create with it and what new insights they're able to gain from finally being able to animate their own model figures. Thank you. (Applause)

So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s. When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid. But my tiger mother said, "No." My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them. After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. It is not important if I like the job or not. But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. That is me playing my imaginary piano. An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school. I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show. But no adults liked the idea. No adults believed I was serious. Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was. So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained. My dream would never come true. I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for. But that's so unfair. So I was determined to find another calling. Nobody around to teach me? Fine. I turned to books. I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.["Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei"] I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.["Jane Eyre"] And I learned to be efficient from this book.["Cheaper by the Dozen"] And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these. ["Complete Works of Sanmao" (aka Echo Chan)] ["Lessons From History" by Nan Huaijin] I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first? Books banned in China, of course. "The Good Earth" is about Chinese peasant life. That's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it. The Bible is interesting, but strange. (Laughter) That's a topic for a different day. But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother." "Honor," I said. "That's so different, and better, than obey." So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents. Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading. It offers many insights. For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with. It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world. A map actually carries somebody's view. Comparative reading actually is nothing new. It's a standard practice in the academic world. There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature. Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? So I started reading books in pairs. So they can be about people -- ["Benjamin Franklin" by Walter Isaacson]["John Adams" by David McCullough] -- who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences. ["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres -- (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] -- or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations. For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual. For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty -- interesting. So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages. ["The Way of Chuang Tzu" Thomas Merton]["Tao: The Watercourse Way" Alan Watts] Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain. For example, it's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh! "Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh. (Laughter) Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you. So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time. So may books be always with you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival. It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day -- where fun is serious business. And no, this isn't Burning Man or San Francisco. (Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, meet your cousins. This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo. Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative. That means we all share a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother, who lived around six million years ago. Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression. (Laughter) But unfortunately, we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution. But bonobos show us the other side of the coin. While chimpanzees are dominated by big, scary guys, bonobo society is run by empowered females. These guys have really worked something out, since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet. But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes. They live in the depths of the Congolese jungle, and it has been very difficult to study them. The Congo is a paradox -- a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself -- the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War. Not surprisingly, this destruction also endangers bonobo survival. Bushmeat trades and forest loss means we couldn't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world -- and we're not even sure of that to be honest. Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees. Who are these cousins? We know them as the "make love, not war" apes since they have frequent, promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems -- since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra. Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives. Play is not just child's games. For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. It's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game. Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity -- diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections. And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual. Play is the glue that binds us together. Now, I don't know how you play, but I want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild. First, it's a ball game bonobo-style -- and I do not mean football. So here, we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game. Have a look what she's doing. It might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase, "she's got him by the balls." (Laughter) Only I think that he's rather loving it here, right? Yeah. (Laughter) So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans. And this video is really interesting because it shows -- this video's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play -- such as testicles -- and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust -- while at the same time being tremendous fun. But play's a shapeshifter. (Laughter) Play's a shapeshifter, and it can take many forms, some of which are more quiet, imaginative, curious -- maybe where wonder is discovered anew. And I want you to see, this is Fuku, a young female, and she is quietly playing with water. I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds. And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity. So these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present. But they also hold a secret for our future, a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation. The secret is that play is the key to these capacities. In other words, play is our adaptive wildcard. In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play. But will we make the most of our playfulness? Play is not frivolous. Play's essential. For bonobos and humans alike, life is not just red in tooth and claw. In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent. And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to tell you a story about death and architecture. A hundred years ago, we tended to die of infectious diseases like pneumonia, that, if they took hold, would take us away quite quickly. We tended to die at home, in our own beds, looked after by family, although that was the default option because a lot of people lacked access to medical care. And then in the 20th century a lot of things changed. We developed new medicines like penicillin so we could treat those infectious diseases. New medical technologies like x-ray machines were invented. And because they were so big and expensive, we needed large, centralized buildings to keep them in, and they became our modern hospitals. After the Second World War, a lot of countries set up universal healthcare systems so that everyone who needed treatment could get it. The result was that lifespans extended from about 45 at the start of the century to almost double that today. The 20th century was this time of huge optimism about what science could offer, but with all of the focus on life, death was forgotten, even as our approach to death changed dramatically. Now, I'm an architect, and for the past year and a half I've been looking at these changes and at what they mean for architecture related to death and dying. We now tend to die of cancer and heart disease, and what that means is that many of us will have a long period of chronic illness at the end of our lives. During that period, we'll likely spend a lot of time in hospitals and hospices and care homes. Now, we've all been in a modern hospital. You know those fluorescent lights and the endless corridors and those rows of uncomfortable chairs. Hospital architecture has earned its bad reputation. But the surprising thing is, it wasn't always like this. This is L'Ospedale degli Innocenti, built in 1419 by Brunelleschi, who was one of the most famous and influential architects of his time. And when I look at this building and then think about hospitals today, what amazes me is this building's ambition. It's just a really great building. It has these courtyards in the middle so that all of the rooms have daylight and fresh air, and the rooms are big and they have high ceilings, so they just feel more comfortable to be in. And it's also beautiful. Somehow, we've forgotten that that's even possible for a hospital. Now, if we want better buildings for dying, then we have to talk about it, but because we find the subject of death uncomfortable, we don't talk about it, and we don't question how we as a society approach death. One of the things that surprised me most in my research, though, is how changeable attitudes actually are. This is the first crematorium in the U.K., which was built in Woking in the 1870s. And when this was first built, there were protests in the local village. Cremation wasn't socially acceptable, and 99.8 percent of people got buried. And yet, only a hundred years later, three quarters of us get cremated. People are actually really open to changing things if they're given the chance to talk about them. So this conversation about death and architecture was what I wanted to start when I did my first exhibition on it in Venice in June, which was called "Death in Venice." It was designed to be quite playful so that people would literally engage with it. This is one of our exhibits, which is an interactive map of London that shows just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death and dying, and as you wave your hand across the map, the name of that piece of real estate, the building or cemetery, is revealed. Another of our exhibits was a series of postcards that people could take away with them. And they showed people's homes and hospitals and cemeteries and mortuaries, and they tell the story of the different spaces that we pass through on either side of death. We wanted to show that where we die is a key part of how we die. Now, the strangest thing was the way that visitors reacted to the exhibition, especially the audio-visual works. We had people dancing and running and jumping as they tried to activate the exhibits in different ways, and at a certain point they would kind of stop and remember that they were in an exhibition about death, and that maybe that's not how you're supposed to act. But actually, I would question whether there is one way that you're supposed to act around death, and if there's not, I'd ask you to think about what you think a good death is, and what you think that architecture that supports a good death might be like, and mightn't it be a little less like this and a little more like this? Thank you. (Applause)

Companies are losing control. What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street. What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube. (Laughter) Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle. Management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff. (Laughter) A recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. However, in the same survey, only four percent of employees agreed. Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees. But are they really? I'm a marketer, and as a marketer, I know that I've never really been in control. Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room, the saying goes. Hyperconnectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now, 24/7. They can listen and join the conversation. In fact, they have more control over the loss of control than ever before. They can design for it. But how? First of all, they can give employees and customers more control. They can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas, knowledge, content, designs and product. They can give them more control over pricing, which is what the band Radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album "In Rainbows." Buyers could determine the price, but the offer was exclusive, and only stood for a limited period of time. The album sold more copies than previous releases of the band. The Danish chocolate company Anthon Berg opened a so-called "generous store" in Copenhagen. It asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones. It turned transactions into interactions, and generosity into a currency. Companies can even give control to hackers. When Microsoft Kinect came out, the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console, it immediately drew the attention of hackers. Microsoft first fought off the hacks, but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits. The sense of co-ownership, the free publicity, the added value, all helped drive sales. The ultimate empowerment of customers is to ask them not to buy. Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out eBay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones. In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a "Don't Buy This Jacket" advertisement during the peak of shopping season. It may have jeopardized short-term sales, but it builds lasting, long-term loyalty based on shared values. Research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive. The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries. Hulu and Netflix, among other companies, have open vacation policies. Companies can give people more control, but they can also give them less control. Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior, but when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences? Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier. Take the travel service Nextpedition. Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way. It does not tell the traveler where she's going until the very last minute, and information is provided just in time. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination. U.K.-based Interflora monitored Twitter for users who were having a bad day, and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers. Is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time? Yes. Force them to help others. A recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity. At Frog, the company I work for, we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees, helping them get to know each other fast. By applying a strict process, we give them less control, less choice, but we enable more and richer social interactions. Companies are the makers of their fortunes, and like all of us, they are utterly exposed to serendipity. That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human. At the end of the day, as hyperconnectivity and transparency expose companies' behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition. Or as the ballet dancer Alonzo King said, "What's interesting about you is you." For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount, but radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open. "A smile is a door that is half open and half closed," the author Jennifer Egan wrote. Companies can give their employees and customers more control or less. They can worry about how much openness is good for them, and what needs to stay closed. Or they can simply smile, and remain open to all possibilities. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

So I grew up in Limpopo, on the border of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, a little town called Motetema. Water and electricity supply are as unpredictable as the weather, and growing up in these tough situations, at the age of 17, I was relaxing with a couple of friends of mine in winter, and we were sunbathing. The Limpopo sun gets really hot in winter. So as we were sunbathing, my best friend next to me says, "Man, why doesn't somebody invent something that you can just put on your skin and then you don't have to bathe?" And I sat, and I was like, "Man, I would buy that, eh?" So I went home, and I did a little research, and I found some very shocking statistics. Over 2.5 billion people in the world today do not have proper access to water and sanitation. Four hundred and fifty million of them are in Africa, and five million of them are in South Africa. Various diseases thrive in this environment, the most drastic of which is called trachoma. Trachoma is an infection of the eye due to dirt getting into your eye. Multiple infections of trachoma can leave you permanently blind. The disease leaves eight million people permanently blind each and every year. The shocking part about it is that to avoid being infected with trachoma, all you have to do is wash your face: no medicine, no pills, no injections. So after seeing these shocking statistics, I thought to myself, "Okay, even if I'm not just doing it for myself and the fact that I don't want to bathe, I at least need to do it to try to save the world." (Laughter) So with my trusty little steed, my Nokia 6234 cell phone -- I didn't have a laptop, I didn't have Internet much, except for the 20-rand-an-hour Internet cafe — I did research on Wikipedia, on Google, about lotions, creams, the compositions, the melting points, the toxicities -- I did high school science -- and I wrote down a little formula on a piece of paper, and it looked like the KFC special spice, you know? So I was like, okay, so we've got the formula ready. Now we need to get this thing into practice. Fast forward four years later, after having written a 40-page business plan on the cell phone, having written my patent on the cell phone, I'm the youngest patent-holder in the country, and — ("No more bathing!") — I can't say any more than that. (Laughter) I had invented DryBath, the world's first bath-substituting lotion. You literally put it on your skin, and you don't have to bathe. (Laughter) So after having tried to make it work in high school with the limited resources I had, I went to university, met a few people, got it into practice, and we have a fully functioning product that's ready to go to the market. It's actually available on the market. So we learned a few lessons in commercializing and making DryBath available. One of the things we learned was that poor communities don't buy products in bulk. They buy products on demand. A person in Alex doesn't buy a box of cigarettes. They buy one cigarette each day, even though it's more expensive. So we packaged DryBath in these innovative little sachets. You just snap them in half, and you squeeze it out. And the cool part is, one sachet substitutes one bath for five rand. After creating that model, we also learned a lot in terms of implementing the product. We realized that even rich kids from the suburbs really want DryBath. (Laughter) At least once a week. Anyway, we realized that we could save 80 million liters of water on average each time they skipped a bath, and also we would save two hours a day for kids who are in rural areas, two hours more for school, two hours more for homework, two hours more to just be a kid. After seeing that global impact, we narrowed it down to our key value proposition, which was cleanliness and convenience. DryBath is a rich man's convenience and a poor man's lifesaver. Having put the product into practice, we are actually now on the verge of selling the product onto a multinational to take it to the retail market, and one question I have for the audience today is, on the gravel roads of Limpopo, with an allowance of 50 rand a week, I came up with a way for the world not to bathe. What's stopping you? (Applause) I'm not done yet. I'm not done yet. And another key thing that I learned a lot throughout this whole process, last year Google named me as one of the brightest young minds in the world. I'm also currently the best student entrepreneur in the world, the first African to get that accolade, and one thing that really puzzles me is, I did all of this just because I didn't want to bathe. Thank you. (Applause.)

This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain. It's a diagram of the visual system. And some things look very familiar today. Two eyes at the bottom, optic nerve flowing out from the back. There's a very large nose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything in particular. And if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system, you'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years. And that's because today we can see what's inside of the brain, rather than just looking at its overall shape. Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard, a mouse, a screen. You really would be kind of out of luck. You want to be able to open it up, crack it open, look at the wiring inside. And up until a little more than a century ago, nobody was able to do that with the brain. Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain's wiring. And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it, put it under even a very powerful microscope, there's nothing there. It's gray, formless. There's no structure. It won't tell you anything. And this all changed in the late 19th century. Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring. The computer was cracked open. So what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the Golgi stain. And it works in a very particular way. Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue, it somehow only stains about one percent of them. It clears the forest, reveals the trees inside. If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible. So somehow it shows what's there. Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this, and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron. And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer, this is the transistor. And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don't operate alone, but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer. Today, a century later, when researchers want to visualize neurons, they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them. And there's several ways of doing this. But one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein. Now green fluorescent protein, which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish, is very useful. Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell, that cell will glow green -- or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein, you get a cell to glow many different colors. And so coming back to the brain, this is from a genetically engineered mouse called "Brainbow." And it's so called, of course, because all of these neurons are glowing different colors. Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons, molecules, rather than the entire cell. And there's several ways of doing this, but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies. And you're familiar, of course, with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system. But it turns out that they're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules, like, for example, the coat protein of a virus that's invading the body. And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain, recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually. And a lot of the images I've been showing you here are very beautiful, but they're also very powerful. They have great explanatory power. This, for example, is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain. And you've heard of serotonin, of course, in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety. You've heard of SSRIs, which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases. And in order to understand how serotonin works, it's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is. And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question. I'd like to leave you with the following thought: Green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go. They were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason, or in order to detect the coat protein of an invading virus, for example. And only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say, "Hey, these are tools, these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette." And instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch, there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all. Thank you. (Applause)

This is a thousand-year-old drawing of the brain. It's a diagram of the visual system. And some things look very familiar today. Two eyes at the bottom, optic nerve flowing out from the back. There's a very large nose that doesn't seem to be connected to anything in particular. And if we compare this to more recent representations of the visual system, you'll see that things have gotten substantially more complicated over the intervening thousand years. And that's because today we can see what's inside of the brain, rather than just looking at its overall shape. Imagine you wanted to understand how a computer works and all you could see was a keyboard, a mouse, a screen. You really would be kind of out of luck. You want to be able to open it up, crack it open, look at the wiring inside. And up until a little more than a century ago, nobody was able to do that with the brain. Nobody had had a glimpse of the brain's wiring. And that's because if you take a brain out of the skull and you cut a thin slice of it, put it under even a very powerful microscope, there's nothing there. It's gray, formless. There's no structure. It won't tell you anything. And this all changed in the late 19th century. Suddenly, new chemical stains for brain tissue were developed and they gave us our first glimpses at brain wiring. The computer was cracked open. So what really launched modern neuroscience was a stain called the Golgi stain. And it works in a very particular way. Instead of staining all of the cells inside of a tissue, it somehow only stains about one percent of them. It clears the forest, reveals the trees inside. If everything had been labeled, nothing would have been visible. So somehow it shows what's there. Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who's widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, applied this Golgi stain, which yields data which looks like this, and really gave us the modern notion of the nerve cell, the neuron. And if you're thinking of the brain as a computer, this is the transistor. And very quickly Cajal realized that neurons don't operate alone, but rather make connections with others that form circuits just like in a computer. Today, a century later, when researchers want to visualize neurons, they light them up from the inside rather than darkening them. And there's several ways of doing this. But one of the most popular ones involves green fluorescent protein. Now green fluorescent protein, which oddly enough comes from a bioluminescent jellyfish, is very useful. Because if you can get the gene for green fluorescent protein and deliver it to a cell, that cell will glow green -- or any of the many variants now of green fluorescent protein, you get a cell to glow many different colors. And so coming back to the brain, this is from a genetically engineered mouse called "Brainbow." And it's so called, of course, because all of these neurons are glowing different colors. Now sometimes neuroscientists need to identify individual molecular components of neurons, molecules, rather than the entire cell. And there's several ways of doing this, but one of the most popular ones involves using antibodies. And you're familiar, of course, with antibodies as the henchmen of the immune system. But it turns out that they're so useful to the immune system because they can recognize specific molecules, like, for example, the code protein of a virus that's invading the body. And researchers have used this fact in order to recognize specific molecules inside of the brain, recognize specific substructures of the cell and identify them individually. And a lot of the images I've been showing you here are very beautiful, but they're also very powerful. They have great explanatory power. This, for example, is an antibody staining against serotonin transporters in a slice of mouse brain. And you've heard of serotonin, of course, in the context of diseases like depression and anxiety. You've heard of SSRIs, which are drugs that are used to treat these diseases. And in order to understand how serotonin works, it's critical to understand where the serontonin machinery is. And antibody stainings like this one can be used to understand that sort of question. I'd like to leave you with the following thought: Green fluorescent protein and antibodies are both totally natural products at the get-go. They were evolved by nature in order to get a jellyfish to glow green for whatever reason, or in order to detect the code protein of an invading virus, for example. And only much later did scientists come onto the scene and say, "Hey, these are tools, these are functions that we could use in our own research tool palette." And instead of applying feeble human minds to designing these tools from scratch, there were these ready-made solutions right out there in nature developed and refined steadily for millions of years by the greatest engineer of all. Thank you. (Applause)

Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque? Probably not, but people like me do. I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans. And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future. There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones. And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases. But this is only one half of the story. The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response. All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved. And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past. But there are a lot of challenges for this. And first of all, what do we even study? Skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found all over the place. But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information. Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well. Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting. You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they are very rare. (Laughter) So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K. to study a very poorly studied, little known material that's found on people everywhere. It's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus. Many of you may know it by the term tartar. It's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit. And in a typical dentistry visit, you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed. But in ancient times before tooth brushing, up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime. And what's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton, it's abundant in quantity before the present day and it's ubiquitous worldwide. We find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years. And we even find it in neanderthals and animals. And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy. They'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope, and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches, and they'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria. And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on? And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth. We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet. But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems. So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside. And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut. And so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that, from the skeleton alone, has long decomposed. And so by applying ancient DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus, we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet, infection and immunity thousands of years ago. So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens. And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick. And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus. And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

There's this quote by activist and punk rock musician Jello Biafra that I love. He says, "Don't hate the media. Be the media." I'm an artist. I like working with media and technology because A, I'm familiar with them and I like the power they hold. And B, I hate them and I'm terrified of the power they hold. (Laughter) I remember watching, in 2003, an interview between Fox News host Tony Snow and then-US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. They were talking about the recent invasion of Iraq, and Rumsfeld is asked the question, "Well, we're hear about our body counts, but we never hear about theirs, why?" And Rumsfeld's answer is, "Well, we don't do body counts on other people." Right? It's estimated that between 150,000 to one million Iraqis, civilians, have died as a result of the US-led invasion in 2003. That number is in stark contrast with the 4,486 US service members who died during that same window of time. I wanted to do more than just bring awareness to this terrifying number. I wanted to create a monument for the individual civilians who died as a result of the invasion. Monuments to war, such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, are often enormous in scale. Very powerful and very one-sided. I wanted my monument to live in the world, and to circulate. I remember when I was a boy in school, my teacher assigned us this classic civics assignment where you take a sheet of paper and you write a member of your government. And we were told, if we wrote a really good letter, if we really thought about it, we would get back more than just a simple formed letter as a reply. This is my "Notepad." What looks like an everyday, yellow legal tablet of paper is actually a monument to the individual Iraqi civilians that died as a result of the US invasion. "Notepad" is an act of protest and an act of commemoration disguised as an everyday tablet of paper. The lines of the paper, when magnified, are revealed to be micro-printed text that contains the details, the names, the dates and locations of individual Iraqi civilians that died. So, for the last 5 years, I've been taking pads of this paper, tons of this stuff, and smuggling it into the stationery supplies of the United States and the Coalition governments. (Laughter) (Applause) I don't have to tell you guys this is not the place to discuss how I did that. (Laughter) But also, I've been meeting one-on-one with members and former members of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, who assisted in the invasion. And so, whenever I can, I meet with one of them, and I share the project with them. And last summer, I had the chance to meet with former United States Attorney General and Torture Memo author, Alberto Gonzales. (Video) Matt Kenyon: May I give this to you? This is a special legal tablet. It's actually part of an ongoing art project. Alberto Gonzalez: This is a special legal pad? MK: Yes. You won't believe me, but it's in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; I'm an artist. MK: And all of the lines of the paper are actually -- AG: Are they going to disappear? MK: No, they're micro-printed text that contains the names of individual Iraqi civilians who have died since the invasion of Iraq. AG: Yeah. OK. AG: Thank you. MK: Thank you. (Laughter) The way he says "thank you" really creeps me out. (Laughter) OK, so I'd like each of you to look under your chairs. There's an envelope. And please open it. The paper you're holding in your hand contains the details of Iraqi civilians that died as result of the invasion. I'd like you to use this paper and write a member of government. You can help to smuggle this civilian body count into government archives. Because every letter that's sent in to the government, and this is all across the world, of course -- every letter that is sent in is archived, filed and recorded. Together, we can put this in the mailboxes and under the noses of people in power. Everything that's sent in eventually becomes part of the permanent archive of our government, our shared historical record. Thank you. (Applause) Tom Rielly: So, tell me Matt, how did this idea come into your head, of "Notepad"? Matt Kenyon: I'd just finished a project that dealt with the US Coalition side of the war and it was a black armband that was called the "Improvised Empathetic Device" which accumulated, in real time, the names, ranks, cause of death and location of US service members who had died overseas, and each time the Department of Defense or CENTCOM released their data, it would stab me in the arm. And so, I became aware that there was a spectacle associated with our own people who were dying overseas, but a disproportionate amount of casualties were the civilian casualties. TR: Thank you so much. MK: Thank you. (Applause)

If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. And that's a huge amount of data. And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? (Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with? To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. (Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft -- actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. Oh, well. If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about. How should you deliver your talk? TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage. (Laughter) Now, while ... (Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. I'll give you three examples. First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. (Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker -- that's the good news -- to fake intellectual capacity. If I don't understand something, I can just say, "etc., etc." You'll all stay with me. It's perfectly fine. (Applause) Now, let's go to the visuals. The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. Color plays a very important role. Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. (Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment. So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. And I call this tool the TEDPad. (Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? So, download it and have fun with it. Now I hope you enjoy the session. I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thanks.

I love to collect things. Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars. Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things, that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas. These, to me, are like living sculptures, right, that you can go and look at, and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal's life. So I was thinking about my own life, and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know, for the ages, and also — (Laughter) — the lives of my friends, but the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter) So instead, I turned to video, and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time. So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends and then, using video mapping and video projection, I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends projected into jars. (Laughter) So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go, and this is called Animalia Chordata, from the Latin nomenclature for human being, classification system. So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars, and they actually move around. (Laughter) So, this is interesting to me, but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter) It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add an interaction system. So what I did was, I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways. You know, just like people on the street when you get too close to them. Some people reacted in terror. (Laughter) Others reacted in asking you for help, and some people hide from you. So this was really interesting to me, this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life, and also adding interactivity to sculpture. So over the next year, I documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as Garden, which is literally a garden of humanity. But something about the first piece, the Animali Chordata piece, kept coming back to me, this idea of interaction with art, and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact, and also being challenged by interacting with art. So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something, and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter) This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art. You may never experience the entire thing yourself. You can walk away, you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you, or you can actually choose to interact with it. So if you do choose to interact with the piece, and you press the blender button, it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment. By doing that, you are now part of my piece. You, like the people that are trapped in my work — (Blender noises, laughter) — have become part of my work as well. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) But, but this seems a bit unfair, right? I put my friends in jars, I put this character, this sort of endangered species character in a blender. But I'd never done anything about myself. I'd never really memorialized myself. So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece. This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed, in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock, and it's up to you. If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock, you actually age me. So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock, you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler, and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager. From a teenager, I'm transformed into my current self. From my current self, I'm turned into a middle-aged man, and then, from there, into an elderly man. And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day, the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day. So, in doing so, you're erasing time. You're actually implicit in this work and you're erasing my life. So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture: the Fez River Rehabilitation Project. My hometown of Fez, Morocco, boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world, called the medina, nestled in a river valley. The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since the 1950s, as the population of the medina grew, basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed. One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River, which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city's very soul. In fact, one can witness the presence of the river's extensive water network all throughout the city, in places such as private and public fountains. Unfortunately, because of the pollution of the river, it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952. This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina. Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards. Actually, the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy. Then pollution takes its toll, mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning. At some point, I couldn't bear the desecration of the river, such an important part of my city, and I decided to take action, especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it. With clean water, suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible, and with luck and actually a lot of pushing, my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river. However, we were sneaky, and we proposed more: to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways, and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric, and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez. I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces. The first one is the Rcif Plaza, which sits actually right on top of the river, which you can see here in dotted lines. This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina, that has the largest pedestrian network in the world. And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here, right next to the plaza, you can see that the river looked like a river of trash. Instead, what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian, to cover it with recycled leather canopies, and to connect it to the banks of the river. The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks, and it used to be an illegal parking, and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina. The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur. As the project progressed and received several design awards, new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design. The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don't do. It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project: that is, to uncover the river, treat its water, and provide public spaces for all. We were actually very lucky, and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening. Like, you can see here in the Rcif Plaza. This is how it looked like about six years ago. This is how it looks like today. It's still under construction, but actually it is heavily used by the local population. And finally, this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed. This is the river, covered, used as a trash yard. Then after many years of work, the river with clean water, uncovered. And finally, you can see here the river when the project will be completed. So for sure, the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city, but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect, we have set up the core idea of the project into motion; that is, to transform the river from sewage to public space for all, thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So when I do my job, people hate me. In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me. And no, I'm not a meter maid, and I'm not an undertaker. I am a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox News. (Applause) So y'all heard that, right? Just to make sure, right? I am a gay talking head on Fox News. I am going to tell you how I do it and the most important thing I've learned. So I go on television. I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in, in some cases, who don't want me and people like me to even exist. It's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids, with a live television audience of millions. It's totally almost just like that. And that's just on air. The hate mail I get is unbelievable. Last week alone, I got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count. I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge, a cunt, and an ugly man, and that was just in one email. (Laughter) So what have I realized, being on the receiving end of all this ugliness? Well, my biggest takeaway is that for decades, we've been focused on political correctness, but what matters more is emotional correctness. Let me give you a small example. I don't care if you call me a dyke. I really don't. I care about two things. One, I care that you spell it right. (Laughter) (Applause) Just quick refresher, it's D-Y-K-E. You'd totally be surprised. And second, I don't care about the word, I care about how you use it. Are you being friendly? Are you just being naive? Or do you really want to hurt me personally? Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. And what I've realized is that political persuasion doesn't begin with ideas or facts or data. Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct. So when I first went to go work at Fox News, true confession, I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging. That, by the way, in case you're paying attention, is not emotionally correct. But liberals on my side, we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending, we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree with us. In other words, we can be politically right but emotionally wrong. And incidentally, that means that people don't like us. Right? Now here's the kicker. Conservatives are really nice. I mean, not all of them, and not the ones who send me hate mail, but you would be surprised. Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates, and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help. Now, I think Sean Hannity is 99 percent politically wrong, but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive, and that's why people listen to him. Because you can't get anyone to agree with you if they don't even listen to you first. We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements, and if we can start to find compassion for one another, then we have a shot at building common ground. It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here, but when you try to put it in practice, it's really powerful. So someone who says they hate immigrants, I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they've always known. Or someone who says they don't like teachers' unions, I bet they're really devastated to see their kid's school going into the gutter, and they're just looking for someone to blame. Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. That is emotional correctness. I'm not saying it's easy. An average of, like, 5.6 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities. This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama. I'm not perfect, but what I am is optimistic, because I don't just get hate mail. I get a lot of really nice letters, lots of them. And one of my all-time favorites begins, "I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic, but I'm a big fan of you as a person." Now this guy doesn't agree with me, yet. (Laughter) But he's listening, not because of what I said, but because of how I said it, and somehow, even though we've never met, we've managed to form a connection. That's emotional correctness, and that's how we start the conversations that really lead to change. Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago. It's about making new forms of life. And these are made of this kind of tube -- electricity tube, we call it in Holland. And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time. (Video) Narrator: Eventually, these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches. Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution. Theo Jansen: I want to put these forms of life on the beaches. And they should survive over there, on their own, in the future. Learning to live on their own -- and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own. Narrator: The mechanical beasts will not get their energy from food, but from the wind. The wind will move feathers on their back, which will drive their feet. The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beach, with its nose pointed into the wind. As soon as it walks into either the rolling surf or the dry sand, it stops, and walks in the opposite direction. Evolution has generated many species. (Music) This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa. (Music) (Laughter) (Applause) TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetic codes. And it is a sort of race, and each and every animal is different, and the winning codes will multiply. This is the wave, going from left to right. You can see this one. Yes, and now it goes from left to right. This is a new generation, a new family, which is able to store the wind. So, the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles, which are on top of that. And they can use that energy in case the wind falls away, and the tide is coming up, and there is still a little bit of energy to reach the dunes and save their lives, because they are drowned very easily. (Laughter) I could show you this animal. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So, the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. There are 11 numbers, which I call The 11 Holy Numbers. These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk that way. In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel. It works the same as a wheel. The axis of a wheel stays on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well. In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do. And the feet just step over the sand, and the wheel has to touch every piece of the ground in-between. So 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel, we have a new wheel. I will show you, in the next video -- can you start it, please? -- that very heavy loads can be moved. There's a guy pushing there, behind, but it can also walk on the wind very well. It's 3.2 tons. This is working on the stored wind in the bottles. It has a feeler, where it can feel obstacles and turn around. You see, it's going the other way. Can I have the feeler here? OK. Good. So, they have to survive all the dangers of the beach, and one of the big dangers is the sea. This is the sea. And it must feel the water of the sea. And this is the water feeler, and what's very important is this tube. It sucks in air normally, but when it swallows water, it feels the resistance of it. So, imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea. As soon as it touches the water -- you should hear a sound of running air. (Sound of running air) Yes! So if it doesn't feel, it will be drowned, OK? Here we have the brain of the animal. In fact, it is a step counter, and it counts the steps. It's a binary step counter. So as soon it has been to the sea, it changes the pattern of zeroes and ones here. And it always knows where it is on the beach. So it's very simple brain. It says, well, there's the sea, there are dunes, and I'm here. So it's a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal. Thank you. One of the biggest enemies are the storms. This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere. When the nose of the animal is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. So when the storm is coming up, it drives a pin into the ground. (Laughter) Audience member: Wow! The nose is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. The wind may turn, but the animal will always turn its nose into the wind. Now, another couple of years, and these animals will survive on their own. I still have to help them a lot. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause)

My journey to coming here today started in 1974. That's me with the funny gloves. I was 17 and going on a peace walk. What I didn't know though, was most of those people, standing there with me, were Moonies. (Laughter) And within a week I had come to believe that the second coming of Christ had occurred, that it was Sun Myung Moon, and that I had been specially chosen and prepared by God to be his disciple. Now as cool as that sounds, my family was not that thrilled with this. (Laughter) And they tried everything they could to get me out of there. There was an underground railroad of sorts that was going on during those years. Maybe some of you remember it. They were called deprogrammers. And after about five long years my family had me deprogrammed. And I then became a deprogrammer. I started going out on cases. And after about five years of doing this, I was arrested for kidnapping. Most of the cases I went out on were called involuntary. What happened was that the family had to get their loved ones some safe place somehow. And so they took them to some safe place. And we would come in and talk to them, usually for about a week. And so after this happened, I decided it was a good time to turn my back on this work. And about 20 years went by. There was a burning question though that would not leave me. And that was, "How did this happen to me?" And in fact, what did happen to my brain? Because something did. And so I decided to write a book, a memoir, about this decade of my life. And toward the end of writing that book there was a documentary that came out. It was on Jonestown. And it had a chilling effect on me. These are the dead in Jonestown. About 900 people died that day, most of them taking their own lives. Women gave poison to their babies, and watched foam come from their mouths as they died. The top picture is a group of Moonies that have been blessed by their messiah. Their mates were chosen for them. The bottom picture is Hitler youth. This is the leg of a suicide bomber. The thing I had to admit to myself, with great repulsion, was that I get it. I understand how this could happen. I understand how someone's brain, how someone's mind can come to the place where it makes sense -- in fact it would be wrong, when your brain is working like that -- not to try to save the world through genocide. And so what is this? How does this work? And how I've come to view what happened to me is a viral, memetic infection. For those of you who aren't familiar with memetics, a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus, much like a virus. The way a virus works is -- it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system. In 1974, I was young, I was naive, and I was pretty lost in my world. I was really idealistic. These easy ideas to complex questions are very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable. What happens is that circular logic takes over. "Moon is one with God. God is going to fix all the problems in the world. All I have to do is humbly follow. Because God is going to stop war and hunger -- all these things I wanted to do -- all I have to do is humbly follow. Because after all, God is [working through] the messiah. He's going to fix all this." It becomes impenetrable. And the most dangerous part of this is that is creates "us" and "them," "right" and "wrong," "good" and "evil." And it makes anything possible, makes anything rationalizable. And the thing is, though, if you looked at my brain during those years in the Moonies -- neuroscience is expanding exponentially, as Ray Kurzweil said yesterday. Science is expanding. We're beginning to look inside the brain. And so if you looked at my brain, or any brain that's infected with a viral memetic infection like this, and compared it to anyone in this room, or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis, I am convinced it would look very, very different. And that, strange as it may sound, gives me hope. And the reason that gives me hope is that the first thing is to admit that we have a problem. But it's a human problem. It's a scientific problem, if you will. It happens in the human brain. There is no evil force out there to get us. And so this is something that, through research and education, I believe that we can solve. And so the first step is to realize that we can do this together, and that there is no "us" and "them." Thank you very much. (Applause)

How many times have you used the word "awesome" today? Once? Twice? Seventeen times? Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word? No, I didn't think so, because it's come down to this, people: You're using the word incorrectly, and tonight I hope to show you how to put the "awe" back in "awesome." Recently, I was dining at an outdoor cafe, and the server came up to our table, and asked us if we had dined there before, and I said, "Yes, yes, we have." And she said, "Awesome." And I thought, "Really? Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again?" The other day, one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF, and I said, "Well, of course," and he said, "Awesome." Seriously, can saving anything as a PDF be awesome? Sadly, the frequent overuse of the word "awesome" has now replaced words like "great" and "thank you." So Webster's dictionary defines the word "awesome" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic. Now, with that in mind, was your Quiznos sandwich awesome? How about that parking space? Was that awesome? Or that game the other day? Was that awesome? The answer is no, no and no. A sandwich can be delicious, that parking space can be nearby, and that game can be a blowout, but not everything can be awesome. (Laughter) So when you use the word "awesome" to describe the most mundane of things, you're taking away the very power of the word. This author says, "Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome." (Laughter) Um, no, it is not, and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck. (Laughter) So in other words, if you have everything, you value nothing. It's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here. There's no dynamic, there's no highs or lows, if everything is awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, here are 10 things that are truly awesome. Imagine, if you will, having to schlep everything on your back. Wouldn't this be easier for me if I could roll this home? Yes, so I think I'll invent the wheel. The wheel, ladies and gentlemen. Is the wheel awesome? Say it with me. Yes, the wheel is awesome! The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years. Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone. Were the Great Pyramids awesome? Yes, the pyramids were awesome. The Grand Canyon. Come on. It's almost 80 million years old. Is the Grand Canyon awesome? Yes, the Grand Canyon is. Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829, and earlier today, when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich, and you know who you are — (Laughter) — wasn't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver? I mean, come on. Is photography awesome? Yes, photography is awesome. D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. Was D-Day awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Did you eat food today? Did you eat? Then you can thank the honeybee, that's the one, because if crops aren't pollinated, we can't grow food, and then we're all going to die. It's just like that. But it's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower, although that would be awesome. (Laughter) Bees are awesome. Are you kidding me? Landing on the moon! Come on! Apollo 11. Are you kidding me? Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away. That's like from here to the moon. (Laughter) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for awesome! You're damn right, it was. Woodstock, 1969: Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll. Tickets were only 24 dollars back then. You can't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now. Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the most iconic. Was Woodstock awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Sharks! They're at the top of the food chain. Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt. Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime. Does awesome inspire fear? Oh, hell yeah, sharks are awesome! The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication, and later tonight, when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap, the Internet is awesome. And finally, finally some of you can't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was. I will save you the time. It was not awesome, but it was true, and I hope it was entertaining, and out of all the audiences I've ever had, y'all are the most recent. Thank you and good night. (Applause)

I would like to talk to you about why many e-health projects fail. And I really think that the most important thing of it is that we stopped listening to patients. And one of the things we did at Radboud University is we appointed a chief listening officer. Not in a very scientific way -- she puts up a little cup of coffee or cup of tea and asks patients, family, relatives, "What's up? How could we help you?" And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all -- maybe not all -- but most of the e-health projects fail, since we stopped listening. This is my WiFi scale. It's a very simple thing. It's got one knob, on/off. And every morning I hop on it. And yes, I've got a challenge, as you might see. And I put my challenge on 95 kg. But the thing is that it's made this simple that whenever I hop on, it sends my data through Google Health as well. And it's collected by my general practitioner as well, so he can see what's my problem in weight, not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it, but also looking backward. But there's another thing. As some of you might know, I've got more than 4,000 followers on Twitter. So every morning I hop on my WiFi scale and before I'm in my car, people start talking to me, "I think you need a light lunch today, Lucien." (Laughter) But that's the nicest thing that could happen, since this is peer pressure, peer pressure used to help patients -- since this could be used for obesity, it could be used to stop smoking in patients. But on the other hand, it also could be used to get people from out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health. As of next week, it will soon be available. There will be this little blood pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other. And people will be able, from their homes, to take their blood pressure, send it into their doctor and eventually share it with others, for instance, for over a hundred dollars. And this is the point where patients get into position and can collect, not only their own control again, be captain of their own ship, but also can help us in health care due to the challenges that we face, like health care cost explosion, doubled demand and things like that. Make techniques that are easy to use and start with this to embrace patients in the team. And you can do this with techniques like this, but also by crowd-sourcing. And one of the things we did I would like to share with you introduced by a little video. (Music) We've all got navigation controls in our car. We maybe even [have] it in our cellphone. We know perfectly where all the ATMs are about the city of Maastricht. The other thing is we know where all the gas stations are. And sure, we could find fast food chains. But where would be the nearest AED to help this patient? We asked around and nobody knew. Nobody knew where the nearest life-saving AED was to be obtained right now. So what we did, we crowdsourced The Netherlands. We set up a website and asked the crowd, "If you see an AED, please submit it, tell us where it is, tell us when it's open," since sometimes in office hours sometimes it's closed, of course. And over 10,000 AEDs already in The Netherlands already have been submitted. The next step we took was to find the applications for it. And we built an iPad application. We made an application for Layar, augmented reality, to find these AEDs. And whenever you are in a city like Maastricht and somebody collapses, you can use your iPhone, and within the next weeks also run your Microsoft cellphone, to find the nearest AED which can save lives. And as of today, we would like to introduce this, not only as AED4EU, which is what the product is called, but also AED4US. And we would like to start this on a worldwide level. And [we're] asking all of our colleagues in the rest of the world, colleague universities, to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowd-source all these AEDs all around the world. That whenever you're on holiday and somebody collapses, might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you, you can find this. The other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these AEDs. These might be courier services or cable guys for instance, just to see whether the AED that's submitted still is in place. So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm here to share my photography. Or is it photography? Because, of course, this is a photograph that you can't take with your camera. Yet, my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15. It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing, but it was a bit different, because using the camera, the process was in the planning instead. And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger. So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time. I felt like anyone could do that. So I wanted to create something different, something where the process starts when you press the trigger. Photos like this: construction going on along a busy road. But it has an unexpected twist. And despite that, it retains a level of realism. Or photos like these -- both dark and colorful, but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism. When I say realism, I mean photo-realism. Because, of course, it's not something you can capture really, but I always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph. Photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick. So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really. But what's the trick that makes it look realistic? Is it something about the details or the colors? Is it something about the light? What creates the illusion? Sometimes the perspective is the illusion. But in the end, it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface. It's not really what is realistic, it's what we think looks realistic really. So I think the basics are quite simple. I just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality. And let me show you a simple example. Here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects, something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world. But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional, like it could exist. But at the same time, we know it can't. So we trick our brains, because our brain simply doesn't accept the fact that it doesn't really make sense. And I see the same process with combining photographs. It's just really about combining different realities. So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives. But when combining photographs, this is really important to consider, because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow. So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result. As you can see, these images aren't really special. But combined, they can create something like this. So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective. Secondly, photos combined should have the same type of light. And these two images both fulfill these two requirements -- shot at the same height and in the same type of light. The third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless. Make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed. So by matching color, contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images, adding photographic defects like depth of field, desaturated colors and noise, we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image, despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically. So here's another example. (Laughter) One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what's manipulated. But this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations. I personally think that it's easier to actually create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head. But it does require a lot of planning. And getting this idea during winter, I knew that I had several months to plan it, to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically. So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip. The shores are from a different location. The underwater part was captured in a stone pit. And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish. So to achieve a realistic result, I think it comes down to planning. It always starts with a sketch, an idea. Then it's about combining the different photographs. And here every piece is very well planned. And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic. So all the tools are out there, and the only thing that limits us is our imagination. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't I.Q. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to tell you about a project which I started about 16 years ago, and it's about making new forms of life. And these are made of this kind of tube -- electricity tube, we call it in Holland. And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time. (Video) Narrator: Eventually, these beasts are going to live in herds on the beaches. Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution. Theo Jansen: I want to put these forms of life on the beaches. And they should survive over there, on their own, in the future. Learning to live on their own -- and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own. Narrator: The mechanical beasts will not get their energy from food, but from the wind. The wind will move feathers on their back, which will drive their feet. The beast walks sideways on the wet sand of the beach, with its nose pointed into the wind. As soon as it walks into either the rolling surf or the dry sand, it stops, and walks in the opposite direction. Evolution has generated many species. This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa. (Applause) TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetical codes. And it is a sort of race, and each and every animal is different, and the winning codes will multiply. This is the wave, going from left to right. You can see this one. And now it goes from -- yes, now it goes from left to right. This is a new generation, a new family, which is able to store the winds. So, the wings pump up air in lemonade bottles, which are on top of that. And they can use that energy in case the wind falls away, and the tide is coming up, and there is still a little bit of energy to reach the dunes and save their lives, because they are drowned very easily. (Laughter) I could show you this animal. (Applause) Thank you. So, the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. There are 11 numbers, which I call the 11 holy numbers. These are the distances of the tubes which make it walk that way. In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel. It works the same as a wheel. The axis of a wheel is staying on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well. In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive with your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do. And the feet just step over the sand, and the wheel has to touch every piece of the ground in between. So, 5,000 years after the invention of the wheel, we have a new wheel. And I will show you, in the next video -- can you start it, please? -- that very heavy loads can be moved. There's a guy pushing there, behind, but can also walk on the wind very well. It's 3.2 tons. And this is working on the stored winds in the bottles. It has a feeler, where it can feel obstacles and turn around. And that stuff, you see, is going to it the other way. Can I have the feeler here? OK. Good. So, they have to survive all the dangers of the beach, and one of the big dangers is the sea. This is the sea. And it must feel the water of the sea. And this is the water feeler. And what's very important is this tube. It sucks in air normally, but when it swallows water, it feels the resistance of it. So imagine that the animal is walking towards the sea. As soon as it touches the water, you should hear a sort of sound of running air. Yes! So if it doesn't feel, it will be drowned, OK? Here, we have the brain of the animal. In fact, it is a step counter, and it counts the steps. It's a binary step counter. So as soon it has been to the sea, it changes the pattern of zeroes and ones here, and it knows always where it is on the beach. So it's very simple brain. It says, well, there's the sea, there are dunes, and I'm here. So it's a sort of imagination of the simple world of the beach animal. Thank you. One of the biggest enemies are the storms. This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere, and when the nose is fixed -- of the animal -- the whole animal is fixed. So when the storm is coming up, it drives a pin into the ground. (Laughter) And the nose is fixed, the whole animal is fixed. The wind may turn, but the animal will turn always its nose into the wind. Now, another couple of years, and these animals will survive on their own. I still have to help them a lot. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause).

Okay, it's great to be back at TED. Why don't I just start by firing away with the video? (Music) (Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video. Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes. Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club. Man 3: Google "photos of tiger heads." Hmm. Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking) Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture. (Child shouting) Man 5: Go! Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome. Child: Whoa! Look at that snake! Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video! Man 7: After this bridge, first exit. Man 8: Okay, A12, right there! (Applause) (Children singing) Man 9: Google, say "delicious" in Thai. Google Glass: อร่อยMan 9: Mmm, อร่อย. Woman 4: Google "jellyfish." (Music) Man 10: It's beautiful. (Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince. He needs help getting 10 million dollars. I like to pay attention to these because that's how we originally funded the company, and it's gone pretty well. Though in all seriousness, this position that you just saw me in, looking down at my phone, that's one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. Should it be by just walking around looking down? But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor. Okay. And I don't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot, but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it. In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body? You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass. You're just kind of moving around. So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands? You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there. They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage. And also you want something that frees your eyes. That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people. And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it. And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works. My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. You'd just have information come to you as you needed it. And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth. This project has lasted now, been just over two years. We've learned an amazing amount. It's been really important to make it comfortable. So our first prototypes we built were huge. It was like cell phones strapped to your head. It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable. We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming. But we've come a long way. And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera. Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids. I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment. And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic. The cell phone is -- yeah, you have to look down on it and all that, but it's also kind of a nervous habit. Like if I smoked, I'd probably just smoke instead. I would just light up a cigarette. It would look cooler. You know, I'd be like -- But in this case, you know, I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to. But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away, be it email or social posts or whatnot, even though it wasn't really -- there's nothing really that important or that pressing. And with this, I know I will get certain messages if I really need them, but I don't have to be checking them all the time. Yeah, I've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more, doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video. Thank you all very much. (Applause)

I'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper. Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change, and headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog. They are both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science. Recently the headlines looked like this when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system. That report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries. They wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic. And all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers, from 113 countries. It's a big community. It's such a big community, in fact, that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world. Over 15,000 scientists go to San Francisco every year for that. And every one of those scientists is in a research group, and every research group studies a wide variety of topics. For us at Cambridge, it's as varied as the El Niño oscillation, which affects weather and climate, to the assimilation of satellite data, to emissions from crops that produce biofuels, which is what I happen to study. And in each one of these research areas, of which there are even more, there are PhD students, like me, and we study incredibly narrow topics, things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules. And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene, which is here. It's a small organic molecule. You've probably never heard of it. The weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion -- 10 to the 21st -- molecules of isoprene. But despite its very small weight, enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet. It's a huge amount of stuff. It's equal to the weight of methane. And because it's so much stuff, it's really important for the atmospheric system. Because it's important to the atmospheric system, we go to all lengths to study this thing. We blow it up and look at the pieces. This is the EUPHORE Smog Chamber in Spain. Atmospheric explosions, or full combustion, takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car. But still, we look at the pieces. We run enormous models on supercomputers; this is what I happen to do. Our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each, on minute timescales. And it takes weeks to perform our integrations. And we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what's happening. We also fly all over the world looking for this thing. I recently joined a field campaign in Malaysia. There are others. We found a global atmospheric watchtower there, in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene, and of course, other things while we were there. This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest, from above. And this is the tower from below. And on part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us. And this plane, the model, BA146, which was run by FAAM, normally flies 120 to 130 people. So maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today. But we didn't just fly it. We were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule -- incredibly dangerous stuff. We have to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements. We hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering. We have to get special flight clearance. And as you come around the banks in these valleys, the forces can get up to two Gs. And the scientists have to be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while they're on board. So, as you can imagine, the inside of this aircraft doesn't look like any plane you would take on vacation. It's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule. We do all of this to understand the chemistry of one molecule. And when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule, they write one scientific paper on the subject. And out of that field campaign we'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules. And as a body of knowledge builds up, it will form one subsection, or one sub-subsection of an assessment like the IPCC, although we have others. And each one of the 11 chapters of the IPCC has six to ten subsections. So you can imagine the scale of the effort. In each one of those assessments that we write, we always tag on a summary, and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience. And we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers, in order to make headlines like these. Thank you very much. (Applause)

All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. Right? Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really do shout. [Beautiful] [Intriguing] So you don't have to say a lot. [Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories. If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos? A few, but not most. What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would? What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself. And electronic tattoos also shout. And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good. So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos. And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online. Here's what happened to this company. [Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, "Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you." So what if Andy was wrong? Here's Andy's theory. [In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this? What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will. And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American. Why the Greeks? Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time. So lesson number one: Sisyphus. Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down. It's a little like your reputation. Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful what you post. Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out. So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever. With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love. Lesson number three: Atalanta. Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody. If you won, she would marry you. If you lost, you died. How did Hippomenes beat her? Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race. Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message. And then, of course, there's Narcissus. Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus. (Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection. Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges. When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?" The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality. And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos. Thank you. (Applause)

I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother. And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere. I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked. Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak -- a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox. Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing. But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper. They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters. They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. But what if it's not about efficiency this time? I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you. If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the Internet?" And I thought, "Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller." And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, "Come back to me. Find me when you can." Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family. Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when. These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of "get faster," no matter how many social networks we might join. We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

So, these are the Dark Ages. And the Dark Ages are the time between when you put away the Lego for the last time as a kid, and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid's toy. Started out with my then four-year-old: "Oh, should buy the kid some Lego. That stuff's cool." Walked into the Lego store. Bought him this. It's totally appropriate for a four-year-old. (Laughter) I think the box says -- let's see here -- "8 to 12" on it. I turn to my wife and said, "Who are we buying this for?" She's like, "Oh, us." I'm like, "Okay. All right. That's cool." Pretty soon it got a little bit out of control. The dining room looked like this. You walk there, and it hurts. So we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an Abu Ghraib annex. (Laughter) Torture, very funny. Wow, you guys are great. And we put down those little floor tiles, and then I went onto eBay and bought 150 pounds of Lego -- (Laughter) which is insane. My daughter -- the day we got it, I was tucking her in -- and I said, "Honey, you're my treasure." And she said, "No, the Lego is the treasure." (Laughter) And then she said, "Dad, we're Lego rich." I was like, "Yeah. I suppose we are." So then once you do that you're like, "Oh, crap. Where am I going to put all this?" So you go to The Container Store and spend an enormous amount of money, and then you start this crazy sorting process that never -- it's just nuts. Whatever. So then you realize there are these conventions. And you go to one of these conventions, and some dude built the Titanic. And you're like, "Holy shit! He had to come in like a truck, a semi, with this thing." And then someone built this -- this is the Smith Tower in Seattle. Just beautiful. And there's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for Lego, because Lego -- the Danish -- no, they're not into guns. But the Americans? Oh, we'll make some guns for Lego, no problem. And at a certain point, you look around, you're like, "Whoa, this is a really nerdy crowd." And I mean like this is a nerdy crowd, but that's like a couple of levels above furries. (Laughter) The nerds here, they get laid -- except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket -- and you say to yourself at some point, "Am I part of this group? Like, am I into this?" And I was just like, "Yeah, I guess I am. I'm coming out. I'm kind of into this stuff, and I'm going to stop being embarrassed." So then you really get into it, and you're like, "Well, the Lego people in Denmark, they've got all this software to let you build your own virtually." And so this is like this CAD program where you build it. And then whatever you design virtually, you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later. And then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store. The Lego guys don't give you any royalties, strangely, but some user made this and then it sold. And it's pretty amazing actually. Then you notice that if that Lego-provided CAD program isn't enough, there's an entire open-source, third-party, independent Lego CAD program that lets you do 3D modeling and 3D rendering and make, in fact, movies out of Lego, 3D films of which there are thousands on YouTube, and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content -- just beautiful -- and people recreating all sorts of things. I have to take a moment. I love the guy who's like running away with his clasps, his hooks. Okay. Anyway. (Laughter) There's a whole programming language and robotics tool, so if you want to teach someone how to program, kid, adult, whatever it is. And the guy that made this, he made a slot machine out of Lego. And I don't mean he made Lego that looked like a slot machine; I mean he made a slot machine out of Lego. The insides were Lego. There's people getting drunk building Lego, and you've got to finish the thing before you puke. There's a whole gray market for Lego, thousands of home-based businesses. And some people will fund their entire Lego habit by selling the little guy, but then you have no guys in your ships. And then, just some examples. This stuff really is sculpture. This is amazing what you can do. And don't kid yourself: some architectural details, incredible organic shapes and just, even, nature out of, again, little blocks. This is my house. And this is my house. I was afraid a car was going to come smash it as I was taking a picture for you guys. Anyway, I'm out of time. But just very quickly -- we'll just see if I can do this quick. Because there aren't enough TED logos around here. (Laughter) Let's see here. Okay. Ta-da. (Applause)

So, I kind of believe that we're in like the "cave-painting" era of computer interfaces. Like, they're very kind of -- they don't go as deep or as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be and I'd like to change all that. Hit me. OK. So I mean, this is the kind of status quo interface, right? It's very flat, kind of rigid. And OK, so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable Mac, you know, but really it's the kind of same old crap we've had for the last, you know, 30 years. (Laughter) (Applause) Like I think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers. I mean it's point and click, it's like the menus, icons, it's all the kind of same thing. And so one kind of information space that I take inspiration from is my real desk. It's so much more subtle, so much more visceral -- you know, what's visible, what's not. And I'd like to bring that experience to the desktop. So I kind of have a -- this is BumpTop. It's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing. So you can bump things -- they're all physically, you know, manipulable and stuff. And instead of that point and click, it's like a push and pull, things collide as you'd expect them. Just like on my real desk, I can -- let me just grab these guys -- I can turn things into piles instead of just the folders that we have. And once things are in a pile I can browse them by throwing them into a grid, or you know, flip through them like a book or I can lay them out like a deck of cards. When they're laid out, I can pull things to new locations or delete things or just quickly sort a whole pile, you know, just immediately, right? And then, it's all smoothly animated, instead of these jarring changes you see in today's interfaces. Also, if I want to add something to a pile, well, how do I do that? I just toss it to the pile, and it's added right to the top. It's a kind of nice way. Also some of the stuff we can do is, for these individual icons we thought -- I mean, how can we play with the idea of an icon, and push that further? And one of the things I can do is make it bigger if I want to emphasize it and make it more important. But what's really cool is that since there's a physics simulation running under this, it's actually heavier. So the lighter stuff doesn't really move but if I throw it at the lighter guys, right? (Laughter) So it's cute, but it's also like a subtle channel of conveying information, right? This is heavy so it feels more important. So it's kind of cool. Despite computers everywhere paper really hasn't disappeared, because it has a lot of, I think, valuable properties. And some of those we wanted to transfer to the icons in our system. So one of the things you can do to our icons, just like paper, is crease them and fold them, just like paper. Remember, you know, something for later. Or if you want to be destructive, you can just crumple it up and, you know, toss it to the corner. Also just like paper, around our workspace we'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later, and I can do the same thing here, and you know, you'll see post-it notes and things like that around people's offices. And I can pull them off when I want to work with them. So, one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that, you know, "Okay, well my real desk is really messy. I don't want that mess on my computer." So one thing we have for that is like a grid align, kind of -- so you get that more traditional desktop. Things are kind of grid aligned. More boring, but you still have that kind of colliding and bumping. And you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop. Let's just break this shelf. Okay, that shelf broke. I think beyond the icons, I think another really cool domain for this software -- I think it applies to more than just icons and your desktop -- but browsing photographs. I think you can really enrich the way we browse our photographs and bring it to that kind of shoebox of, you know, photos with your family on the kitchen table kind of thing. I can toss these things around. They're so much more tangible and touchable -- and you know I can double-click on something to take a look at it. And I can do all that kind of same stuff I showed you before. So I can pile things up, I can flip through it, I can, you know -- okay, let's move this photo to the back, let's delete this guy here, and I think it's just a much more rich kind of way of interacting with your information. And that's BumpTop. Thanks!

I'm five years old, and I am very proud. My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. Thanks to Chernobyl, we get asylum in the U.S. I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. Only, we don't know that it's a homeless shelter. We think that it's a hotel, a hotel with lots of rats. So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don't just lose money. And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. I decide that I'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. And in that moment, I feel like a millionaire. About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. So we take the pizza, our very first pizza, and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway. And he tells us to pay, but we don't speak English. My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. Everyone's upset. But the pizza is delicious. It doesn't hit me until years later just how little we had. On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. The man at the front desk laughs, and he says, "You can't reserve a room here. This is a homeless shelter." And we were shocked. My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid. His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. But he did have one thing. He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. This is Scarlett. Once upon a time, Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights. She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. Thank you. (Applause)

I teach chemistry. (Explosion) All right, all right. So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? Some people nodding yes. Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. (Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario. You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction. So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information. In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. Now, when I got this, I was -- press Caps Lock -- absolutely freaked out, okay? But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it? So when I asked him, he told me three things. He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life. Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. Rule number two: Embrace the mess. We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. And rule number three: Practice reflection. What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? As if what we are doing one day will save lives. Our students our worth it. And each case is different. (Explosion) All right. Sorry. The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on. So these are my daughters. On the right we have little Emmalou -- Southern family. And, on the left, Riley. Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "Why?" Yeah. Why. I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. We all were at that age. But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. How will they grow this curiosity? You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms -- to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Hello. I'm a toy developer. With a dream of creating new toys that have never been seen before, I began working at a toy company nine years ago. When I first started working there, I proposed many new ideas to my boss every day. However, my boss always asked if I had the data to prove it would sell, and asked me to think of product development after analyzing market data. Data, data, data. So I analyzed the market data before thinking of a product. However, I was unable to think of anything new at that moment. (Laughter) My ideas were unoriginal. I wasn't getting any new ideas and I grew tired of thinking. It was so hard that I became this skinny. (Laughter) It's true. (Applause) You've all probably had similar experiences and felt this way too. Your boss was being difficult. The data was difficult. You become sick of thinking. Now, I throw out the data. It's my dream to create new toys. And now, instead of data, I'm using a game called Shiritori to come up with new ideas. I would like to introduce this method today. What is Shiritori? Take apple, elephant and trumpet, for example. It's a game where you take turns saying words that start with the last letter of the previous word. It's the same in Japanese and English. You can play Shiritori as you like: "neko, kora, raibu, burashi," etc, etc. [Cat, cola, concert, brush] Many random words will come out. You force those words to connect to what you want to think of and form ideas. In my case, for example, since I want to think of toys, what could a toy cat be? A cat that lands after doing a somersault from a high place? How about a toy with cola? A toy gun where you shoot cola and get someone soaking wet? (Laughter) Ridiculous ideas are okay. The key is to keep them flowing. The more ideas you produce, you're sure to come up with some good ones, too. A brush, for example. Can we make a toothbrush into a toy? We could combine a toothbrush with a guitar and -- (Music noises) -- you've got a toy you can play with while brushing your teeth. (Laughter) (Applause) Kids who don't like to brush their teeth might begin to like it. Can we make a hat into a toy? How about something like a roulette game, where you try the hat on one by one, and then, when someone puts it on, a scary alien breaks through the top screaming, "Ahh!" I wonder if there would be a demand for this at parties? Ideas that didn't come out while you stare at the data will start to come out. Actually, this bubble wrap, which is used to pack fragile objects, combined with a toy, made Mugen Pop Pop, a toy where you can pop the bubbles as much as you like. It was a big hit when it reached stores. Data had nothing to do with its success. Although it's only popping bubbles, it's a great way to kill time, so please pass this around amongst yourselves today and play with it. (Applause) Anyway, you continue to come up with useless ideas. Think up many trivial ideas, everyone. If you base your ideas on data analysis and know what you're aiming for, you'll end up trying too hard, and you can't produce new ideas. Even if you know what your aim is, think of ideas as freely as if you were throwing darts with your eyes closed. If you do this, you surely will hit somewhere near the center. At least one will. That's the one you should choose. If you do so, that idea will be in demand and, moreover, it will be brand new. That is how I think of new ideas. It doesn't have to be Shiritori; there are many different methods. You just have to choose words at random. You can flip through a dictionary and choose words at random. For example, you could look up two random letters and gather the results or go to the store and connect product names with what you want to think of. The point is to gather random words, not information from the category you're thinking for. If you do this, the ingredients for the association of ideas are collected and form connections that will produce many ideas. The greatest advantage to this method is the continuous flow of images. Because you're thinking of one word after another, the image of the previous word is still with you. That image will automatically be related with future words. Unconsciously, a concert will be connected to a brush and a roulette game will be connected to a hat. You wouldn't even realize it. You can come up with ideas that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. This method is, of course, not just for toys. You can collect ideas for books, apps, events, and many other projects. I hope you all try this method. There are futures that are born from data. However, using this silly game called Shiritori, I look forward to the exciting future you will create, a future you couldn't even imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I have a daughter, Mulan. And when she was eight, last year, she was doing a report for school or she had some homework about frogs. And we were at this restaurant, and she said, "So, basically, frogs lay eggs and the eggs turn into tadpoles, and tadpoles turn into frogs." And I said, "Yeah. You know, I'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much. It's the females, I think, that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them. And then they become tadpoles and frogs." And she says, "What? Only the females have eggs?" And I said, "Yeah." And she goes, "And what's this fertilizing?" So I kind of said, "Oh, it's this extra ingredient, you know, that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog." (Laughter) And she said, "Oh, so is that true for humans too?" And I thought, "Okay, here we go." I didn't know it would happen so quick, at eight. I was trying to remember all the guidebooks, and all I could remember was, "Only answer the question they're asking. Don't give any more information." (Laughter) So I said, "Yes." And she said, "And where do, um, where do human women, like, where do women lay their eggs?" And I said, "Well, funny you should ask. (Laughter) We have evolved to have our own pond. We have our very own pond inside our bodies. And we lay our eggs there, we don't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that. It's our own pond. And that's how it happens." And she goes, "Then how do they get fertilized?" And I said, "Well, Men, through their penis, they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out. And you go through the woman's vagina." And so we're just eating, and her jaw just drops, and she goes, "Mom! Like, where you go to the bathroom?" And I said, "I know. I know." (Laughter) That's how we evolved. It does seem odd. It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park ... Bad zoning, but ..." (Laughter) She's like, "What?" And she goes, "But Mom, but men and women can't ever see each other naked, Mom. So how could that ever happen?" And then I go, "Well," and then I put my Margaret Mead hat on. "Human males and females develop a special bond, and when they're much older, much, much older than you, and they have a very special feeling, then they can be naked together." And she said, "Mom, have you done this before?" And I said, "Yes." And she said, "But Mom, you can't have kids." Because she knows that I adopted her and that I can't have kids. And I said, "Yes." And she said, "Well, you don't have to do that again." And I said, "..." And then she said, "But how does it happen when a man and woman are together? Like, how do they know that's the time? Mom, does the man just say, 'Is now the time to take off my pants?'" (Laughter) And I said, "Yes." (Laughter) "That is exactly right. That's exactly how it happens." So we're driving home and she's looking out the window, and she goes, "Mom. What if two just people saw each other on the street, like a man and a woman, they just started doing it. Would that ever happen?" And I said, "Oh, no. Humans are so private. Oh ..." And then she goes, "What if there was like a party, and there was just like a whole bunch of girls and a whole bunch of boys, and there was a bunch of men and women and they just started doing it, Mom? Would that ever happen?" And I said, "Oh, no, no. That's not how we do it." Then we got home and we see the cat. And she goes, "Mom, how do cats do it?" And I go, "Oh, it's the same. It's basically the same." And then she got all caught up in the legs. "But how would the legs go, Mom? I don't understand the legs." She goes, "Mom, everyone can't do the splits." And I go, "I know, but the legs ..." and I'm probably like, "The legs get worked out." And she goes, "But I just can't understand it." So I go, "You know, why don't we go on the Internet, and maybe we can see ... like on Wikipedia." (Laughter) So we go online, and we put in "cats mating." And, unfortunately, on YouTube, there's many cats mating videos. And we watched them and I'm so thankful, because she's just like, "Wow! This is so amazing." She goes, "What about dogs?" So we put in dogs mating, and, you know, we're watching it, and she's totally absorbed. And then she goes, "Mom, do you think they would have, on the Internet, any humans mating?" (Laughter) And then I realized that I had taken my little eight year old's hand, and taken her right into Internet porn. (Laughter) And I looked into this trusting, loving face, and I said, "Oh, no. That would never happen." Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

Hannah is excited to be going to college. She couldn't wait to get out of her parents' house, to prove to them that she's an adult, and to prove to her new friends that she belongs. She heads to a campus party where she sees a guy that she has a crush on. Let's call him Mike. The next day, Hannah wakes up with a pounding headache. She can only remember the night in flashes. But what she does remember is throwing up in the hall outside Mike's room and staring at the wall silently while he was inside her, wanting it to stop, then shakily stumbling home. She doesn't feel good about what happened, but she thinks, "Maybe this is just what sex in college is?" One in five women and one in 13 men will be sexually assaulted at some point during their college career in the United States. Less than 10 percent will ever report their assault to their school or to the police. And those who do, on average, wait 11 months to make the report. Hannah initially just feels like dealing with what happened on her own. But when she sees Mike taking girls home from parties, she's worried about them. After graduation, Hannah learns that she was one of five women who Mike did the exact same thing to. And this is not an unlikely scenario because 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders. But with such low reporting rates, it's fairly unlikely that even repeat perpetrators will be reported, much less anything happen if they are. In fact, only six percent of assaults reported to the police end with the assailant spending a single day in prison. Meaning, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll get away with it. This means there's practically no deterrent to assault in the United States. Now, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist by training. I'm interested in systems and networks and where we can concentrate our resources to do the most good. So this, to me, is a tragic but a solvable problem. So when the issue of campus assault started hitting the news a few years ago, it felt like a unique opportunity to make a change. And so we did. We started by talking to college survivors. And what they wish they'd had in college is pretty simple; they wanted a website, one they could use at the time and place that felt safest to them with clearly written information about their reporting options, with the ability to electronically report their assault, rather than having the first step to go in and talk to someone who may or may not believe them. With the option to create a secure, timestamped document of what happened to them, preserving evidence even if they don't want to report yet. And lastly, and perhaps most critically, with the ability to report their assault only if someone else reported the same assailant. You see, knowing that you weren't the only one changes everything. It changes the way you frame your own experience, it changes the way you think about your perpetrator, it means that if you do come forward, you'll have someone else's back and they'll have yours. We created a website that actually does this and we launched it [...] in August, on two college campuses. And we included a unique matching system where if Mike's first victim had come forward, saved her record, entered into the matching system and named Mike, and Mike's second victim had done the same thing a few months later, they would have matched and the verified contact information of both survivors would have been sent to the authorities at the same time for investigation and follow up. If a system like this had existed for Hannah and her peers, it's more likely that they would have reported, that they would have been believed, and that Mike would have been kicked off campus, gone to jail, or at least gotten the help that he needed. And if we were able to stop repeat offenders like Mike after just their second assault following a match, survivors like Hannah would never even be assaulted in the first place. We could prevent 59 percent of sexual assaults just by stopping repeat perpetrators earlier on. And because we're creating a real deterrent to assault, for perhaps the first time, maybe the Mikes of the world would never even try to assault anyone. The type of system I'm describing, the type of system that survivors want is a type of information escrow, meaning an entity that holds on to information for you and only releases it to a third party when certain pre-agreed upon conditions are met, such as a match. The application that we built is for college campuses. But the same type of system could be used in the military or even the workplace. We don't have to live in a world where 99 percent of rapists get away with it. We can create one where those who do wrong are held accountable, where survivors get the support and justice they deserve, where the authorities get the information they need, and where there's a real deterrent to violating the rights of another human being. Thank you. (Applause)

Two years ago, after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself in Port-au-Prince, leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city, three days after the earthquake. We were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go, the places nobody else could go, and after three weeks, we realized something. Military veterans are very, very good at disaster response. And coming home, my cofounder and I, we looked at it, and we said, there are two problems. The first problem is there's inadequate disaster response. It's slow. It's antiquated. It's not using the best technology, and it's not using the best people. The second problem that we became aware of was a very inadequate veteran reintegration, and this is a topic that is front page news right now as veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're struggling to reintegrate into civilian life. And we sat here and we looked at these two problems, and finally we came to a realization. These aren't problems. These are actually solutions. And what do I mean by that? Well, we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home. Recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform. And we can use veterans to improve disaster response. Now on the surface, this makes a lot of sense, and in 2010, we responded to the tsunami in Chile, the floods in Pakistan, we sent training teams to the Thai-Burma border. But it was earlier this year, when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization. This is Clay Hunt. Clay was a Marine with me. We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay was with us in Port-au-Prince. He was also with us in Chile. Earlier this year, in March, Clay took his own life. This was a tragedy, but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing. You know, Clay didn't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home. He lost purpose. He lost his community. And perhaps most tragically, he lost his self-worth. And so, as we evaluated, and as the dust settled from this tragedy, we realized that, of those two problems -- in the initial iteration of our organization, we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service. We had a lot of success, and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm. But after Clay, we shifted that focus, and suddenly, now moving forward, we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that's using disaster response. Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran. And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and then later Hurricane Irene, gave us an opportunity to look at that. Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. Every day he leaves the wire with a mission. That mission is to defend the freedom of the family that he left at home. It's to keep the men around him alive. It's to pacify the village that he works in. He's got a purpose. But he comes home [to] Kansas City, Missouri, maybe he goes to college, maybe he's got a job, but he doesn't have that same sense of purpose. You give him a chainsaw. You send him to Joplin, Missouri after a tornado, he regains that. Going back, that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri, joins the Army, the Army gives him a rifle, they send him to Iraq. Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him. He leaves the wire. He knows that those people have his back. He's slept in the same sand. They've lived together. They've eaten together. They've bled together. He goes home to Kansas City, Missouri. He gets out of the military. He takes his uniform off. He doesn't have that community anymore. But you drop 25 of those veterans in Joplin, Missouri, they get that sense of community back. Again, you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City. He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. They send him to Iraq. They pin a medal on his chest. He goes home to a ticker tape parade. He takes the uniform off. He's no longer Sergeant Jones in his community. He's now Dave from Kansas City. He doesn't have that same self-worth. But you send him to Joplin after a tornado, and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service, now they have self-worth again. I think it's very important, because right now somebody needs to step up, and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment. NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible. Location information can be very sensitive. If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church or if you don't go to church. And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact. This information used to be private. Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information. One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for -- they're everywhere. Mounted on roads or on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing. But more than that, increasingly, local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. Did you know this was happening? When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date, time and location, the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with. The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. And if you drive a car in the United States, I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life. Mike hasn't done anything wrong. Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it. At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal the existence of this database. Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending. The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees. License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods. Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. The question is, what should we do about this? I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism. Fortunately, there are steps we can take. Local police departments can be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. Thank you. (Applause).

Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system. First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet. Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. I must admit, I used to be one of them. I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day. What I discovered was this is not true. I began to look into this stuff on the Internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature -- like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. (Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown. The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s. And most folks don't even know they exist. Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way. And let me tell you, corn is in everything. And don't even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS. (Laughter) Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow. They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too. Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets. So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? This is what I found out. I discovered that there's a movement for a better way. Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. (Applause) Thank you. And that way I can have a greater impact on the world. This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system. Since I'm home-schooled, I went to go hear him speak one day. This man, this "lunatic farmer," doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds. And so for that, he's called crazy by the system. I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life. Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really? With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital. (Applause) Now I know definitely which one I would choose. I want you to know that there are farms out there -- like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee -- whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from. I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community popping up. I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. I try to share this everywhere I go. Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal. He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes -- you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front. My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time. So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food. Thank you. (Applause)

One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings. And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental -- if you'll pardon the pun -- in helping Nathaniel get off the streets. I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me. Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him. And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall -- he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep. And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. (Laughter) So, I just started playing. And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete -- Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen. And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician. Music is medicine. Music changes us. And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. And that is an escape from his tormented state. And I understood that this was the very essence of art. This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us. And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. Robert Gupta. (Applause) Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. So, please forgive me. (Laughter) (Music) (Applause)

(Music) For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City, these shots might start to look familiar. This is Central Park, one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America. But to anyone who hasn't visited, these images can't really fully convey. To really understand Central Park, you have to physically be there. Well, the same is true of the music, which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park. (Music) I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing -- That's us there. That's both of us actually — specifically about a concept that we've been developing over the last few years, this idea of location-aware music. Now, my brother and I, we're musicians and music producers. We've been working together since, well, since we were kids, really. But recently, we've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect, from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts. But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space. But before I go too much further into that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea. My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation, The Gates, in Central Park. Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks, and unlike work that's exhibited in a more neutral space, like on the walls of a gallery or a museum, this was work that was really in dialogue with this place, and in a lot of ways, The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted's incredible design. This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time, and years later, my brother and I moved back to Washington, D.C., and we started to ask the question, would it be possible, in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park, to compose music for a landscape? Which brought us to this. (Music) On Memorial Day, we released "The National Mall," a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington, D.C. Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape, a musical score is actually unfolding around them. So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park, but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener's chosen trajectory. So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album. Let's take a closer look. Let's look at one example here. So using the app, as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, you hear the sounds of instruments warming up, which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody. This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins. Keep walking, and a full choir joins in, until you finally reach the top of the hill and you're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness, as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park. But were you to walk in the opposite direction, this entire sequence happens in reverse. And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park, the music would fade to silence, and the play button would disappear. We're sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can't travel to the United States, but would like to hear this record. Well, unlike a normal album, we haven't been able to accommodate this request. When they ask for a C.D. or an MP3 version, we just can't make that happen, and the reason is because this isn't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record. In this case, the app is the work itself, and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience. Six months later, we did a location-aware album for Central Park, a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall, with music spanning from the Sheep's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir. Currently, my brother and I are working on projects all over the country, but last spring we started a project, here actually at Stanford's Experimental Media Art Department, where we're creating our largest location-aware album to date, one that will span the entirety of Highway 1 here on the Pacific Coast. But what we're doing, integrating GPS with music, is really just one idea. But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age, that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model, but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music. Thank you. (Applause)

I normally teach courses on how to rebuild states after war. But today I've got a personal story to share with you. This is a picture of my family, my four siblings -- my mom and I -- taken in 1977. And we're actually Cambodians. And this picture is taken in Vietnam. So how did a Cambodian family end up in Vietnam in 1977? Well to explain that, I've got a short video clip to explain the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975 and 1979. Video: April 17th, 1975. The communist Khmer Rouge enters Phnom Penh to liberate their people from the encroaching conflict in Vietnam, and American bombing campaigns. Led by peasant-born Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge evacuates people to the countryside in order to create a rural communist utopia, much like Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution in China. The Khmer Rouge closes the doors to the outside world. But after four years the grim truth seeps out. In a country of only seven million people, one and a half million were murdered by their own leaders, their bodies piled in the mass graves of the killing fields. Sophal Ear: So, notwithstanding the 1970s narration, on April 17th 1975 we lived in Phnom Penh. And my parents were told by the Khmer Rouge to evacuate the city because of impending American bombing for three days. And here is a picture of the Khmer Rouge. They were young soldiers, typically child soldiers. And this is very normal now, of modern day conflict, because they're easy to bring into wars. The reason that they gave about American bombing wasn't all that far off. I mean, from 1965 to 1973 there were more munitions that fell on Cambodia than in all of World War II Japan, including the two nuclear bombs of August 1945. The Khmer Rouge didn't believe in money. So the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cambodia was bombed. But not just that, they actually banned money. I think it's the only precedent in which money has ever been stopped from being used. And we know money is the root of all evil, but it didn't actually stop evil from happening in Cambodia, in fact. My family was moved from Phnom Penh to Pursat province. This is a picture of what Pursat looks like. It's actually a very pretty area of Cambodia, where rice growing takes place. And in fact they were forced to work the fields. So my father and mother ended up in a sort of concentration camp, labor camp. And it was at that time that my mother got word from the commune chief that the Vietnamese were actually asking for their citizens to go back to Vietnam. And she spoke some Vietnamese, as a child having grown up with Vietnamese friends. And she decided, despite the advice of her neighbors, that she would take the chance and claim to be Vietnamese so that we could have a chance to survive, because at this point they're forcing everybody to work. And they're giving about -- in a modern-day, caloric-restriction diet, I guess -- they're giving porridge, with a few grains of rice. And at about this time actually my father got very sick. And he didn't speak Vietnamese. So he died actually, in January 1976. And it made it possible, in fact, for us to take on this plan. So the Khmer Rouge took us from a place called Pursat to Kaoh Tiev, which is across from the border from Vietnam. And there they had a detention camp where alleged Vietnamese would be tested, language tested. And my mother's Vietnamese was so bad that to make our story more credible, she'd given all the boys and girls new Vietnamese names. But she'd given the boys girls' names, and the girls boys' names. And it wasn't until she met a Vietnamese lady who told her this, and then tutored her for two days intensively, that she was able to go into her exam and -- you know, this was a moment of truth. If she fails, we're all headed to the gallows; if she passes, we can leave to Vietnam. And she actually, of course -- I'm here, she passes. And we end up in Hong Ngu on the Vietnamese side. And then onwards to Chau Doc. And this is a picture of Hong Ngu, Vietnam today. A pretty idyllic place on the Mekong Delta. But for us it meant freedom. And freedom from persecution from the Khmer Rouge. Last year, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which the U.N. is helping Cambodia take on, started, and I decided that as a matter of record I should file a Civil Complaint with the Tribunal about my father's passing away. And I got word last month that the complaint was officially accepted by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. And it's for me a matter of justice for history, and accountability for the future, because Cambodia remains a pretty lawless place, at times. Five years ago my mother and I went back to Chau Doc. And she was able to return to a place that for her meant freedom, but also fear, because we had just come out of Cambodia. I'm happy, actually, today, to present her. She's here today with us in the audience. Thank you mother. (Applause)

Francesca Fedeli: Ciao. So he's Mario. He's our son. He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for, like, eight months. But in the end everything seemed to be under control. So he got the right weight at birth. He got the right Apgar index. So we were pretty reassured by this. But at the end, 10 days later after he was born, we discovered that he had a stroke. As you might know, a stroke is a brain injury. A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right part of his brain has gone. So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be the fact that he couldn't be able to control the left side of his body. Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, to input to print out a document, but the printer doesn't have the right drives, so the same is for Mario. It's just like, he would like to move his left side of his body, but he's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg. So life had to change. We needed to change our schedule. We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life. Roberto D'Angelo: As you may imagine, unfortunately, we were not ready. Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities, and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds. And that has been really a tough time. Questions, some basics, like, you know, why did this happen to us? And what went wrong? Some more tough, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? I mean, at the end, will he be able to work? Will he be able to be normal? And, you know, as a parent, especially for the first time, why is he not going to be better than us? And this, indeed, really is tough to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. I mean, the only real product of our life, at the end, was a failure. And you know, it was not a failure for ourselves in itself, but it was a failure that will impact his full life. Honestly, we went down. I mean we went really down, but at the end, we started to look at him, and we said, we have to react. So immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our life. We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot. Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. You have an object, and we showed him how to grab the object. Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions. It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation. But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand. He was looking at us. We were his mirror. And the problem, as you might feel, is that we were down, we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. And that day really changed our perspective. We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario. We restarted from our strengths, and at the same time we restarted from his strengths. We stopped looking at him as a problem, and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve. And really, this was the change, and from our side, we said, "What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario?" And we started from our passions. I mean, at the end, my wife and myself are quite different, but we have many things in common. We love to travel, we love music, we love to be in places like this, and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him. This short video is from last week. I am not saying -- (Applause) — I am not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we are just at the beginning of the path. But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity. And this is the message that we want to share with you. This is why we are here. Mario! And this is why -- (Applause) — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. And we thank you so much, all of you. FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye. (Applause) FF: Thank you. (Applause)

I want you guys to imagine that you're a soldier running through the battlefield. Now, you're shot in the leg with a bullet, which severs your femoral artery. Now, this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less than three minutes. Unfortunately, by the time that a medic actually gets to you, what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more, with the application of pressure, to stop that type of bleed. Now, this problem is not only a huge problem for the military, but it's also a huge problem that's epidemic throughout the entire medical field, which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body? So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally. So now, before we do this, we have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work. So now, everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells. So the cell is the most basic unit of life. But not many people know what else. But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix. So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. It allows them to feel what they're doing, where they are, and tells them how to act and how to behave. And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body. So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different parts of the same organ actually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So now, for example, think of the rainforest. You have the canopy, you have the understory, and you have the forest floor. Now, all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants, and different animals call them home. So just like that, the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix. So now, behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix. So as you see, your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself. So when I was a freshman at NYU, what I discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. So if you have a bleeding wound like the one behind me, you can actually put our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. So that means if you put it onto liver, it turns into something that looks like liver, and if you put it onto skin, it turns into something that looks just like skin. So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles into this local tissue. So now, this has a whole bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble into it immediately. Now, this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure. So now, this type of bleed is incredibly traumatic, and like I said before, would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop. Now, in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself, our material is able to stop that bleed, and it's because it actually goes on and works with the body to heal, so it reassembles into this piece of meat, and then the blood actually recognizes that that's happening, and produces fibrin, producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds. So now this technology — Thank you. (Applause) So now this technology, by January, will be in the hands of veterinarians, and we're working very diligently to try to get it into the hands of doctors, hopefully within the next year. But really, once again, I want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running through a battlefield. Now, you get hit in the leg with a bullet, and instead of bleeding out in three minutes, you pull a small pack of gel out of your belt, and with the press of a button, you're able to stop your own bleed and you're on your way to recovery. Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Hammer) (Laughter) (Microwave beeps) (Laughter) You probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road. It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot. Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt. And especially if you then ride with your bicycle, and pass these cars, then that's not very nice. Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise. It's a noisy material, and if we produce roads like in the Netherlands, very close to cities, then we would like a silent road. The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt. Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore. Also the noise will disappear in these pores. Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear, so it's a very silent road. It also has disadvantages, of course, and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur. What is raveling? You see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off. First you get one stone, then several more, and more and more and more and more, and then they -- well, I will not do that. (Laughter) But they can damage your windshield, so you're not happy with that. And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage. Sometimes you can create potholes with that. Ha. He's ready. Potholes, of course, that can become a problem, but we have a solution. Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material. It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones. Due to weathering, due to U.V. light, due to oxidation, this binder, this bitumen, the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink, and if it shrinks, it gets micro-cracks, and it delaminates from the aggregates. Then if you drive over the road, you take out the aggregates -- what we just saw here. To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials. If we can make this material self-healing, then probably we have a solution. So what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans, and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces, and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen. So then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it. Then you need a machine, like you see here, that you can use for cooking -- an induction machine. Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that. Then what you do is you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen, and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks, and the stones are again fixed to the surface. Today I use a microwave because I cannot take the big induction machine here onstage. So a microwave is a similar system. So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out to see what happened. So this is the specimen coming out now. So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens. We tested a lot of specimens there, and then the government, they actually saw our results, and they thought, "Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that." So they donated to us a piece of highway, 400 meters of the A58, where we had to make a test track to test this material. So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road, and then of course this road will last several years without any damage. That's what we know from practice. So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab. So we did aging on the samples, did a lot of loading on it, healed them with our induction machine, and healed them and tested them again. Several times we can repeat that. So actually, the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine -- this is the big version we have made to go on the real road -- if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money. Well, to conclude, I can say that we made a material using steel fibers, the addition of steel fibers, using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road, double the surface life you can even do, so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks. And now you're of course curious if it also worked. So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm. Actually, it still has to cool down first before I can show you that the healing works. But I will do a trial. Let's see. Yeah, it worked. Thank you. (Applause)

So, as researchers, something that we often do is use immense resources to achieve certain capabilities, or achieve certain goals. And this is essential to the progress of science, or exploration of what is possible. But it creates this unfortunate situation where a tiny, tiny fraction of the world can actually participate in this exploration or can benefit from that technology. Something that motivates me, and gets me really excited about my research, is when I see simple opportunities to drastically change that distribution and make the technology accessible to a much wider percentage of the population. I'm going to show you two videos that have gotten a lot of attention that I think embody this philosophy. And they actually use the Nintendo Wii Remote. For those of you who aren't familiar with this device, it's a $40 video game controller. And it's mostly advertised for its motion-sensing capabilities: so you can swing a tennis racket, or hit a baseball bat. But what actually interests me a lot more is the fact that in the tip of each controller is a relatively high-performing infrared camera. And I'm going to show you two demos of why this is useful. So here, I have my computer set up with the projector, and I have a Wii Remote sitting on top of it. And, for example, if you're in a school that doesn't have a lot money, probably a lot of schools, or if you're in an office environment, and you want an interactive whiteboard, normally these cost about two to three thousand dollars. So I'm going to show you how to create one with a Wii Remote. Now, this requires another piece of hardware, which is this infrared pen. You can probably make this yourself for about five dollars with a quick trip to the Radio Shack. It's got a battery, a button and an infrared LED -- you guys can't see it -- but it turns on whenever I push the button. Now, what this means is that if I run this piece of software, the camera sees the infrared dot, and I can register the location of the camera pixels to the projector pixels. And now this is like an interactive whiteboard surface. (Applause) So for about $50 of hardware, you can have your own whiteboard. This is Adobe Photoshop. (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) The software for this I've actually put on my website and have let people download it for free. In the three months this project has been public, it's been downloaded over half a million times. So teachers and students all around the world are already using this. (Applause) Although it does do it for 50 dollars, there are some limitations of this approach. You get about 80 percent of the way there, for one percent of the cost. Another nice thing is that a camera can see multiple dots, so this is actually a multi-touch, interactive whiteboard system as well. (Applause) For the second demo, I have this Wii Remote that's actually next to the TV. So it's pointing away from the display, rather than pointing at the display. And why this is interesting is that if you put on, say, a pair of safety glasses, that have two infrared dots in them, they are going to give the computer an approximation of your head location. And why this is interesting is I have this sort of application running on the computer monitor, which has a 3D room, with some targets floating in it. And you can see that it looks like a 3D room. kind of like a video game, it sort of looks 3D, but for the most part, the image looks pretty flat, and bound to the surface of the screen. But if we turn on head tracking -- the computer can change the image that's on the screen and make it respond to the head movements. So let's switch back to that. (Laughter) (Applause) So this has actually been a little bit startling to the game-development community. (Laughter) Because this is about 10 dollars of additional hardware if you already have a Nintendo Wii. So I'm looking forward to seeing some games, and actually Louis Castle, that's him down there, last week announced that Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers, is releasing a game in May that has a little Easter egg feature for supporting this type of head tracking. And that's from less than five months from a prototype in my lab to a major commercial product. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) But actually, to me, what's almost more interesting than either of these two projects is how people actually found out about them. YouTube has really changed the way, or changed the speed, in which a single individual can actually spread an idea around the world. I'm doing some research in my lab with a video camera, and within the first week, a million people had seen this work, and literally within days, engineers, teachers and students from around the world were already posting their own YouTube videos of them using my system or derivatives of this work. So I hope to see more of that in the future, and hope online video distribution to be embraced by the research community. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Today I'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design, and it makes perfect sense that I should be the one to do it because I have a Bachelor's degree in Literature. (Laughter) But I'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs, so I pretty much know everything there is. Now, I'm sure you recognize this object; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at Los Angeles International Airport over the past couple of days. This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky. And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture. It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX, although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era, when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants. It is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located, of course, at Stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design, the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously, the much better access to parking. When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer. After all, the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often, preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls. (Applause) (Music) Ah yes, a table. We use these every day. And on top of it, the juicy salif. This is a design by Philippe Starck, who I believe is in the audience at this very moment. And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision, its playfulness, its innovation and its promise of imminent violence. (Laughter) It is a design that challenges your intuition -- it is not what you think it is when you first see it. It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d'oeuvres at a time, which would be useful out in the lobby, I would say. And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism, it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts. It is in fact a citrus juicer and when I say that, you never see it as anything else again. It is also not a monument to design, it is a monument to design's utility. You can take it home with you, unlike the Theme Building, which will stay where it is forever. This is affordable and can come home with you and, as such, it can sit on your kitchen counter -- it can't go in your drawers; trust me, I found that out the hard way -- and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design. One other thing about it, if you do have one at home, let me tell you one of the features you may not know: when you fall asleep, it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep. (Applause) Okay, what is this object? I have no idea. I don't know what that thing is. It looks terrible. Is it a little hot plate? I don't get it. Does anyone know? Chi? It's an ... iPhone. iPhone. Oh yes, that's right, I remember those; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days. No, I have an iPhone. Of course I do. Here is my well-loved iPhone. I do so many things on this little device. I like to read books on it. More than that, I like to buy books on it that I never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and I never look at them again and it's perfect. I use it every day to measure the weight of an ox, for example. Every now and then, I admit that I complete a phone call on it occasionally. And yet I forget about it all the time. This is a design that once you saw it, you forgot about it. It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life. Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology. Or I should say, what it did was it took technology which, unlike people in this room, to many other people in the world, still feels very alien, and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate. And unlike the juicy salif, it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain, rather, it simply attaches itself to your brain. (Laughter) And you didn't even notice it happened. So there you go. My name is John Hodgman. I just explained design. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me, and closer than you might realize to you. I came to the U.K. 21 years ago as an asylum-seeker. I was 21. I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, where I was a student activist. I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo. But I want to tell you what the Congo has got to do with you. But first of all, I want you to do me a favor. Can you all please reach into your pockets and take out your mobile phone? Feel that familiar weight, how naturally your finger slides towards the buttons. (Laughter) Can you imagine your world without it? It connects us to our loved ones, our family, friends and colleagues, at home and overseas. It is a symbol of an interconnected world. But what you hold in your hand leaves a bloody trail, and it all boils down to a mineral: tantalum, mined in the Congo as coltan. It is an anticorrosive heat conductor. It stores energy in our mobile phones, Playstations and laptops. It is used in aerospace and medical equipment as alloys. It is so powerful that we only need tiny amounts. It would be great if the story ended there. Unfortunately, what you hold in your hand has not only enabled incredible technological development and industrial expansion, but it has also contributed to unimaginable human suffering. Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved. Rape is used as a weapon of war, instilling fear and depopulating whole areas. The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided, but it has fueled, the ongoing war in the Congo. But don't throw away your phones yet. Thirty thousand children are enlisted and are made to fight in armed groups. The Congo consistently scores dreadfully in global health and poverty rankings. But remarkably, the U.N. Environmental Programme has estimated the wealth of the country to be over 24 trillion dollars. The state-regulated mining industry has collapsed, and control over mines has splintered. Coltan is easily controlled by armed groups. One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda, where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan. But don't throw away your phones yet, because the incredible irony is that the technology that has placed such unsustainable, devastating demands on the Congo is the same technology that has brought this situation to our attention. We only know so much about the situation in the Congo and in the mines because of the kind of communication the mobile phone allows. As with the Arab Spring, during the recent elections in the Congo, voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa, and in the wake of the result, the diaspora has joined with the Carter Center, the Catholic Church and other observers to draw attention to the undemocratic result. The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom. It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet. It has allowed momentous political change to take place. So we are faced with a paradox. The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression. TED has always celebrated what technology can do for us, technology in its finished form. It is time to be asking questions about technology. Where does it come from? Who makes it? And for what? Here I am speaking directly to you, the TED community, and to all those who might be watching on a screen, on your phone, across the world, in the Congo. All the technology is in place for us to communicate, and all the technology is in place to communicate this. At the moment, there is no clear fair trade solution, but there has been a huge amount of progress. The U.S. has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo. Recent U.K. legislation could be used in the same way. In February, Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo, and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone. There are campaigns spreading across university campuses to make their colleges conflict-free. But we're not there yet. We need to continue mounting pressure on phone companies to change their sourcing processes. When I first came to the U.K. 21 years ago, I was homesick. I missed my family and the friends I left behind. Communication was extremely difficult. Sending and receiving letters took months, if you were lucky. Often they never arrived. Even if I could have afforded the phone bills home, like most people in the Congo, my parents did not own a phone line. Today, my two sons David and Daniel can talk to my parents and get to know them. Why should we allow such a wonderful, brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings? We demand fair trade food and fair trade clothes. It is time to demand fair trade phones. This is an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause)

I want to talk to you today about a difficult topic that is close to me, and closer than you might realize to you. I came to the UK 21 years ago, as an asylum-seeker. I was 21. I was forced to leave the Democratic Republic of the Congo, my home, where I was a student activist. I would love my children to be able to meet my family in the Congo. But I want to tell you what the Congo has got to do with you. But first of all, I want you to do me a favor. Can you all please reach into your pockets and take out your mobile phone? Feel that familiar weight ... how naturally your finger slides towards the buttons. (Laughter) Can you imagine your world without it? It connects us to our loved ones, our family, friends and colleagues, at home and overseas. It is a symbol of an interconnected world. But what you hold in your hand leaves a bloody trail, and it all boils down to a mineral: tantalum, mined in the Congo as coltan. It is an anticorrosive heat conductor. It stores energy in our mobile phones, PlayStations and laptops. It is used in aerospace and medical equipment as an alloy. It is so powerful that we only need tiny amounts. It would be great if the story ended there. Unfortunately, what you hold in your hand has not only enabled incredible technological development and industrial expansion, but it has also contributed to unimaginable human suffering. Since 1996, over five million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Countless women, men and children have been raped, tortured or enslaved. Rape is used as a weapon of war, instilling fear and depopulating whole areas. The quest for extracting this mineral has not only aided, but it has fueled the ongoing war in the Congo. But don't throw away your phones yet. Thirty thousand children are enlisted and are made to fight in armed groups. The Congo consistently scores dreadfully in global health and poverty rankings. But remarkably, the UN Environmental Programme has estimated the wealth of the country to be over 24 trillion dollars. The state-regulated mining industry has collapsed, and control over mines has splintered. Coltan is easily controlled by armed groups. One well-known illicit trade route is that across the border to Rwanda, where Congolese tantalum is disguised as Rwandan. But don't throw away your phones yet, because the incredible irony is that the technology that has placed such unsustainable, devastating demands on the Congo is the same technology that has brought this situation to our attention. We only know so much about the situation in the Congo and in the mines because of the kind of communication the mobile phone allows. As with the Arab Spring, during the recent elections in the Congo, voters were able to send text messages of local polling stations to the headquarters in the capital, Kinshasa. And in the wake of the result, the diaspora has joined with the Carter Center, the Catholic Church and other observers, to draw attention to the undemocratic result. The mobile phone has given people around the world an important tool towards gaining their political freedom. It has truly revolutionized the way we communicate on the planet. It has allowed momentous political change to take place. So, we are faced with a paradox. The mobile phone is an instrument of freedom and an instrument of oppression. TED has always celebrated what technology can do for us, technology in its finished form. It is time to be asking questions about technology. Where does it come from? Who makes it? And for what? Here, I am speaking directly to you, the TED community, and to all those who might be watching on a screen, on your phone, across the world, in the Congo. All the technology is in place for us to communicate, and all the technology is in place to communicate this. At the moment, there is no clear fair-trade solution. But there has been a huge amount of progress. The US has recently passed legislation to target bribery and misconduct in the Congo. Recent UK legislation could be used in the same way. In February, Nokia unveiled its new policy on sourcing minerals in the Congo, and there is a petition to Apple to make a conflict-free iPhone. There are campaigns spreading across university campuses to make their colleges conflict-free. But we're not there yet. We need to continue mounting pressure on phone companies to change their sourcing processes. When I first came to the UK, 21 years ago, I was homesick. I missed my family and the friends I left behind. Communication was extremely difficult. Sending and receiving letters took months -- if you were lucky. Often, they never arrived. Even if I could have afforded the phone bills home, like most people in the Congo, my parents did not own a phone line. Today, my two sons -- David and Daniel, can talk to my parents and get to know them. Why should we allow such a wonderful, brilliant and necessary product to be the cause of unnecessary suffering for human beings? We demand fair-trade food and fair-trade clothes. It is time to demand fair-trade phones. This is an idea worth spreading. Thank you. (Applause)

This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. It's in a shopping mall, and it sells fish eggs. It's a caviar vending machine. This is the Art-o-mat, an art vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition. This is Oliver Medvedik. He's not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me onto this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. Because strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. And a lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. I instantly joined Genspace after this, and I asked Oliver, "Well, if we can do this strawberries, can we do this with people as well?" And about 10 minutes later, we were both spinning it in vials together and coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. And I started doing this on my own, and this is what my DNA actually looks like. And I was at a dinner party with some friends, some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. And I started having these bizarre dinner parties at my house on Friday nights where people would come over and we would do DNA extractions, and I would actually capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well. (Laughter) These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science whatsoever. You can kind of tell from their reactions. 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. It's kind of an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing, and I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA 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 of all, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. So in a way, I've created sort of a genetic network, a genetic social network, really. And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like, "Oh. 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 DNA in. But that made me think about collecting toys, and this thing that'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. You're not sure what's going to be inside of them. But then, when you open them up, you have different rarities of the toys. And so I thought that was interesting. I started thinking about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together, and some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking about doing paintings of a vending machine, and the little vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw this kind of beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. And so, of course, I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. Here it is. (Music) ["DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology."] ["For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine."] ["Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen."] ["DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA."] Gabriel Garcia-Colombo: So the DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well, actually. We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. I'd actually like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, right next to some of the other, actual vending machines in that location. But really with this project and a lot of my art projects I want to ask the audience a question, and that is, when biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you still submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? And how much will these samples be worth? And will you buy someone else's sample? And what will you be able to do with that sample? Thank you. (Applause)

These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. They're bizzarre, they're beautiful, and there's very little we know about them. These thoughts were going through my head when I looked at the pages of my first dinosaur book. I was about five years old at the time, and I decided there and then that I would become a paleontologist. Paleontology allowed me to combine my love for animals with my desire to travel to far-flung corners of the world. And now, a few years later, I've led several expeditions to the ultimate far-flung corner on this planet, the Sahara. I've worked in the Sahara because I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a bizarre, giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus. A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. Unfortunately, all his Spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. So all we're left with are just a few drawings and notes. From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big, it had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail, and it had long, slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile, with conical teeth, that may have been used to catch slippery prey, like fish. But that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next 100 years. My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. It's a difficult place to work in. You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions, and it's very difficult to find good fossils there. But our hard work paid off. We discovered many incredible specimens. There's the largest dinosaur bone that had ever been found in this part of the Sahara. We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters. These fossils were deposited in a river system. The river system was also home to a giant, car-sized coelacanth, a monster sawfish, and the skies over the river system were filled with pterosaurs, flying reptiles. It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine. So we're finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus, but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. We were just finding bits and pieces and I was hoping that we'd find a partial skeleton at some point. Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of Spinosaurus. We returned to the site, we collected more bones. And so after 100 years we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature. And we were able to reconstruct it. We now know that Spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile, very different from other predatory dinosaurs, very different from the T. rex. But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skeleton. We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. We had leg bones, we had skull bones, we had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet -- again, very unusual, no other dinosaur has feet like this -- and we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment, or maybe for paddling in the water. We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of Spinosaurus bones, and it turns out that they're very dense and compact. Again, this is something we see in animals that spend a lot of time in the water, it's useful for buoyancy control in the water. We C.T.-scanned all of our bones and built a digital Spinosaurus skeleton. And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. It's bigger than a T. rex, and yes, the head has "fish-eating" written all over it, but really the entire skeleton has "water-loving" written all over it -- dense bone, paddle-like feet, and the hind limbs are reduced in size, and again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water. So, as we fleshed out our Spinosaurus -- I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin -- we realize that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur, bigger than T. rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants, feeding on the many aquatic animals I showed you earlier on. So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. It's a dinosaur like no other. And some people told me, "Wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. There are not many things left to discover in the world." Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. I think the Sahara's still full of treasures, and when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews, and he said, "Always, there has been an adventure just around the corner -- and the world is still full of corners." That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines. And it is still true today. Thank you. (Applause)

We're at a tipping point in human history, a species poised between gaining the stars and losing the planet we call home. Even in just the past few years, we've greatly expanded our knowledge of how Earth fits within the context of our universe. NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of potential planets around other stars, indicating that Earth is but one of billions of planets in our galaxy. Kepler is a space telescope that measures the subtle dimming of stars as planets pass in front of them, blocking just a little bit of that light from reaching us. Kepler's data reveals planets' sizes as well as their distance from their parent star. Together, this helps us understand whether these planets are small and rocky, like the terrestrial planets in our own Solar System, and also how much light they receive from their parent sun. In turn, this provides clues as to whether these planets that we discover might be habitable or not. Unfortunately, at the same time as we're discovering this treasure trove of potentially habitable worlds, our own planet is sagging under the weight of humanity. 2014 was the hottest year on record. Glaciers and sea ice that have been with us for millennia are now disappearing in a matter of decades. These planetary-scale environmental changes that we have set in motion are rapidly outpacing our ability to alter their course. But I'm not a climate scientist, I'm an astronomer. I study planetary habitability as influenced by stars with the hopes of finding the places in the universe where we might discover life beyond our own planet. You could say that I look for choice alien real estate. Now, as somebody who is deeply embedded in the search for life in the universe, I can tell you that the more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet itself. Each one of these new worlds invites a comparison between the newly discovered planet and the planets we know best: those of our own Solar System. Consider our neighbor, Mars. Mars is small and rocky, and though it's a bit far from the Sun, it might be considered a potentially habitable world if found by a mission like Kepler. Indeed, it's possible that Mars was habitable in the past, and in part, this is why we study Mars so much. Our rovers, like Curiosity, crawl across its surface, scratching for clues as to the origins of life as we know it. Orbiters like the MAVEN mission sample the Martian atmosphere, trying to understand how Mars might have lost its past habitability. Private spaceflight companies now offer not just a short trip to near space but the tantalizing possibility of living our lives on Mars. But though these Martian vistas resemble the deserts of our own home world, places that are tied in our imagination to ideas about pioneering and frontiers, compared to Earth Mars is a pretty terrible place to live. Consider the extent to which we have not colonized the deserts of our own planet, places that are lush by comparison with Mars. Even in the driest, highest places on Earth, the air is sweet and thick with oxygen exhaled from thousands of miles away by our rainforests. I worry -- I worry that this excitement about colonizing Mars and other planets carries with it a long, dark shadow: the implication and belief by some that Mars will be there to save us from the self-inflicted destruction of the only truly habitable planet we know of, the Earth. As much as I love interplanetary exploration, I deeply disagree with this idea. There are many excellent reasons to go to Mars, but for anyone to tell you that Mars will be there to back up humanity is like the captain of the Titanic telling you that the real party is happening later on the lifeboats. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. But the goals of interplanetary exploration and planetary preservation are not opposed to one another. No, they're in fact two sides of the same goal: to understand, preserve and improve life into the future. The extreme environments of our own world are alien vistas. They're just closer to home. If we can understand how to create and maintain habitable spaces out of hostile, inhospitable spaces here on Earth, perhaps we can meet the needs of both preserving our own environment and moving beyond it. I leave you with a final thought experiment: Fermi's paradox. Many years ago, the physicist Enrico Fermi asked that, given the fact that our universe has been around for a very long time and we expect that there are many planets within it, we should have found evidence for alien life by now. So where are they? Well, one possible solution to Fermi's paradox is that, as civilizations become technologically advanced enough to consider living amongst the stars, they lose sight of how important it is to safeguard the home worlds that fostered that advancement to begin with. It is hubris to believe that interplanetary colonization alone will save us from ourselves, but planetary preservation and interplanetary exploration can work together. If we truly believe in our ability to bend the hostile environments of Mars for human habitation, then we should be able to surmount the far easier task of preserving the habitability of the Earth. Thank you. (Applause)

Okay, I have no idea what we're going to play. I won't be able to tell you what it is until it happens. I didn't realize there was going to be a little music before. So I think I'm going to start with what I just heard. (Music) (Applause) Okay, so first of all, let's welcome Mr. Jamire Williams on the drums, (Applause) Burniss Travis on the bass, (Applause) and Mr. Christian Sands on the piano. (Applause) So the bandstand, as we call it, this is an incredible space. It is really a sacred space. And one of the things that is really sacred about it is that you have no opportunity to think about the future, or the past. You really are alive right here in this moment. There are so many decisions being made when you walk on the bandstand. We had no idea what key we were going to play in. In the middle, we sort of made our way into a song called "Titi Boom." But that could have happened -- maybe, maybe not. Everyone's listening. We're responding. You have no time for projected ideas. So the idea of a mistake: From the perspective of a jazz musician, it's easier to talk about someone else's mistake. So the way I perceive a mistake when I'm on the bandstand -- first of all, we don't really see it as a mistake. The only mistake lies in that I'm not able to perceive what it is that someone else did. Every "mistake" is an opportunity in jazz. So it's hard to even describe what a funny note would be. So for example, if I played a color, like we were playing on a palette, that sounded like this ... (Music) So if Christian played a note -- like play an F. (Music) See, these are all right inside of the color palette. If you played an E. See, these all lie right inside of this general emotional palette that we were painting. If you played an F# though, (Dissonance) to most people's ears, they would perceive that as a mistake. So I'm going to show you, we're going to play just for a second. And we're going to play on this palette. And at some point, Christian will introduce this note. And we won't react to it. He'll introduce it for a second and then I'll stop, I'll talk for a second. We'll see what happens when we play with this palette. (Music) So someone could conceptually perceive that as a mistake. The only way that I would say it was a mistake is in that we didn't react to it. It was an opportunity that was missed. So it's unpredictable. We'll paint this palette again. He'll play it. I don't know how we'll react to it, but something will change. We'll all accept his ideas, or not. (Music) So you see, he played this note. I ended up creating a melody out of it. The texture changed in the drums this time. It got a little bit more rhythmic, a little bit more intense in response to how I responded to it. So there is no mistake. The only mistake is if I'm not aware, if each individual musician is not aware and accepting enough of his fellow band member to incorporate the idea and we don't allow for creativity. So jazz, this bandstand is absolutely amazing. It's a very purifying experience. And I know that I speak for all of us when I tell you that we don't take it for granted. We know that to be able to come on the bandstand and play music is a blessing. So how does this all relate to behavioral finance? Well we're jazz musicians, so stereotypically we don't have a great relationship to finance. (Laughter) Anyway, I just wanted to sort of point out the way that we handle it. And the other dynamic of it is that we don't micromanage in jazz. You have some people who do. But what that does is it actually limits the artistic possibilities. If I come up and I dictate to the band that I want to play like this and I want the music to go this way, and I just jump right in ... ready, just play some time. One, two, one, two, three, four. (Music) It's kind of chaotic because I'm bullying my ideas. I'm telling them, "You come with me over this way." If I really want the music to go there, the best way for me to do it is to listen. This is a science of listening. It has far more to do with what I can perceive than what it is that I can do. So if I want the music to get to a certain level of intensity, the first step for me is to be patient, to listen to what's going on and pull from something that's going on around me. When you do that, you engage and inspire the other musicians and they give you more, and gradually it builds. Watch. One, two, a one, two, three, four. (Music) Totally different experience when I'm pulling ideas. It's much more organic. It's much more nuanced. It's not about bullying my vision or anything like that. It's about being here in the moment, accepting one another and allowing creativity to flow. Thank you. (Applause)

It's a great honor today to share with you The Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe. And so I think we can roll the video that we have. [The Himalayas.] (Music) The flat horizon that we've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste. It wasn't until we really left Earth, got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself, that we could understand our planet as a limited condition. The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over the past 12 years. We maintain that, put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales. What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. NASA supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world. The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do -- our main space shows in the dome. But what you see here is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden. I've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work, and the result has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. This software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live. I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology. And so as we move out, we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, giving you a sense of how far away we are. As we move out, the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long, we're essentially backing up into the past. We back so far up we're finally seeing a containment around us -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. This is the WMAP microwave background that we see. We'll fly outside it here, just to see this sort of containment. If we were outside this, it would almost be meaningless, in the sense as before time. But this our containment of the visible universe. We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see. Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of exoplanets that we've mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with our own solar system. What you're going to see -- we're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system -- these are the paths of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system. Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of the Moon, and we see the Earth. This map can be updated, and we can add in new data. I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. for the Cassini mission. But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase. This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this. This software can also be networked between domes. We have a growing user base of this, and we network domes. And we can network between domes and classrooms. We're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia and a high school in Cambodia. And the Cambodians have actually controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school. This is an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, but through the Uniview software. So you're seeing the edge of the Earth. This is Nepal. This is, in fact, right here is the valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. But we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. This is Nepal and Tibet. And just in closing, I'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on -- here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out -- so I'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is. Because our home is the universe, and we are the universe, essentially. We carry that in us. And to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. So allow me to tell you about it. So I have a brother, Gavin. When this whole shebang happened, he was four. He loved to cook. He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. He wanted to be a chef really badly. And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? I mean, we all had those when we were little. And he wanted one so badly. But then he started to realize something. In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. And this discouraged my brother a lot. He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. So this petition started to take off -- humongously fast, you have no idea. I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition. (Applause) Thank you. So, needless to say, it was crazy. Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. It was literally one of the best moments of my life. It was like "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." That thing was amazing. What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? So, let's see. From user name Liquidsore29 -- interesting user names we have here— "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? But then I started to realize something. Haters gonna hate. Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. And you can make that change. You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before: What is possible with the human voice? What is possible with the human voice? (Beatboxing) ♪ Ooh baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing) (Dog barking) Yeah. (Applause) (Boomerang noises) It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah. As you can probably well imagine, I was a strange child. (Laughter) Because the thing is, I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be. I was constantly experimenting with these noises. And I'm still on that mission. I'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make. And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now, and I know that there's some noises I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in by my physical body, and there's things it can't do. And there's things that no one's voice can do. For example, no one can do two notes at the same time. You can do two-tone singing, which monks can do, which is like... (Two-tone singing) But that's cheating. And it hurts your throat. So there's things you can't do, and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me, because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world, but they're sketches at best, which is what's annoyed me. If only, if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it. So I've been working with these guys, and we've made a machine. We've made a system which is basically a live production machine, a real-time music production machine, and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice, create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me. And I'm going to show you what it can do. And before I start making noises with it, and using it to manipulate my voice, I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear is being made by my voice. This system has -- thank you, beautiful assistant -- this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it, so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind. So once this thing really gets going, and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it, it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice, but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple. So the polyphony problem: I've only got one voice. How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices going on at the same time. The simplest way to do it is something like this. (Beatboxing) By dancing. It's like this. (Music) Thanks. (Applause) So that's probably the easiest way. But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate, something that you can't achieve with live looping, there's other ways to layer your voice up. There's things like pitch-shifting, which are awesome, and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like. So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this. (Beatboxing) There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start, because it's just fun, so you can clap along if you want. You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out. I'm going to lay down a bass sound now. (Music) And now, a rockabilly guitar. Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a -- (Applause) -- Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ? Is that possible? Yes, it is, by recording myself like this. (Organ sound) And now I have that, I have that recorded. Assign it to a keyboard. (Music) So that's cool. (Applause) But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd? Impossible, you say. No. It is possible, and you can do it very simply using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out. (Music) So every noise you can hear there is my voice. I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that. There's no samples. There's no synthesizers. That is literally all my voice being manipulated, and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you, what's the point? Why do this? (Laughter) Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd, I suppose, is the easy answer. But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist. I've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine. So with your permission, I'm going to do some things that are in my mind, and I hope you enjoy them, because they're rather unusual, especially when you're doing things which are as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice, you see. (Voice effects) (Music) Like this. (Music) So, loosely defined, that is what's possible with the human voice. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause)

I've been a critical care EMT for the past seven years in Suffolk County, New York. I've been a first responder in a number of incidents ranging from car accidents to Hurricane Sandy. If you are like most people, death might be one of your greatest fears. Some of us will see it coming. Some of us won't. There is a little-known documented medical term called impending doom. It's almost a symptom. As a medical provider, I'm trained to respond to this symptom like any other, so when a patient having a heart attack looks at me and says, "I'm going to die today," we are trained to reevaluate the patient's condition. Throughout my career, I have responded to a number of incidents where the patient had minutes left to live and there was nothing I could do for them. With this, I was faced with a dilemma: Do I tell the dying that they are about to face death, or do I lie to them to comfort them? Early in my career, I faced this dilemma by simply lying. I was afraid. I was afraid if I told them the truth, that they would die in terror, in fear, just grasping for those last moments of life. That all changed with one incident. Five years ago, I responded to a motorcycle accident. The rider had suffered critical, critical injuries. As I assessed him, I realized that there was nothing that could be done for him, and like so many other cases, he looked me in the eye and asked that question: "Am I going to die?" In that moment, I decided to do something different. I decided to tell him the truth. I decided to tell him that he was going to die and that there was nothing I could do for him. His reaction shocked me to this day. He simply laid back and had a look of acceptance on his face. He was not met with that terror or fear that I thought he would be. He simply laid there, and as I looked into his eyes, I saw inner peace and acceptance. From that moment forward, I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies. Having responded to many cases since then where patients were in their last moments and there was nothing I could do for them, in almost every case, they have all had the same reaction to the truth, of inner peace and acceptance. In fact, there are three patterns I have observed in all these cases. The first pattern always kind of shocked me. Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there's a need for forgiveness. Whether they call it sin or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal. I had once cared for an elderly gentleman who was having a massive heart attack. As I prepared myself and my equipment for his imminent cardiac arrest, I began to tell the patient of his imminent demise. He already knew by my tone of voice and body language. As I placed the defibrillator pads on his chest, prepping for what was going to happen, he looked me in the eye and said, "I wish I had spent more time with my children and grandchildren instead of being selfish with my time." Faced with imminent death, all he wanted was forgiveness. The second pattern I observe is the need for remembrance. Whether it was to be remembered in my thoughts or their loved ones', they needed to feel that they would be living on. There's a need for immortality within the hearts and thoughts of their loved ones, myself, my crew, or anyone around. Countless times, I have had a patient look me in the eyes and say, "Will you remember me?" The final pattern I observe always touched me the deepest, to the soul. The dying need to know that their life had meaning. They need to know that they did not waste their life on meaningless tasks. This came to me very, very early in my career. I had responded to a call. There was a female in her late 50s severely pinned within a vehicle. She had been t-boned at a high rate of speed, critical, critical condition. As the fire department worked to remove her from the car, I climbed in to begin to render care. As we talked, she had said to me, "There was so much more I wanted to do with my life." She had felt she had not left her mark on this Earth. As we talked further, it would turn out that she was a mother of two adopted children who were both on their way to medical school. Because of her, two children had a chance they never would have had otherwise and would go on to save lives in the medical field as medical doctors. It would end up taking 45 minutes to free her from the vehicle. However, she perished prior to freeing her. I believed what you saw in the movies: when you're in those last moments that it's strictly terror, fear. I have come to realize, regardless of the circumstance, it's generally met with peace and acceptance, that it's the littlest things, the littlest moments, the littlest things you brought into the world that give you peace in those final moments. Thank you. (Applause)

Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, "I exist." Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, "They exist." From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine, the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio, paper and glue -- as easy as that. I asked a question last year: Can art change the world? Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed ... what else? The Occupy movement found a voice, and I still have to speak English constantly. So there has been a lot of change. So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept. You are going to take the photos. You're going to send them to me. I'm going to print them and send them back to you. Then you're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement. This is Inside Out. One hundred thousand posters have been printed this year. Those are the kind of posters, let me show you. And we keep sending more every day. This is the size. Just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it. This one was from Haiti. When I launched my wish last year, hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us. But I say it has to be under the conditions I've always worked: no credit, no logos, no sponsoring. A week later, a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world. These are the people I want to talk about to you today. Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made. And they pasted [over] every single portrait of the dictator [with] their own photos. Boom! This is what happened. Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country. They really make Inside Out their own project. Actually, that photo was pasted in a police station, and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police. Russia. Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia. He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say, "We have rights." They used Inside Out as a platform for protest. Karachi, Pakistan. Sharmeen is actually here. She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town. And I want to thank her today. North Dakota. Standing Rock Nation, in this Turtle Island, [unclear name] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here. The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights. He pasted up portraits all over his reservation. And he's here also today. Each time I get a wall in New York, I use his photos to continue spreading the project. Juarez: You've heard of the border -- one of the most dangerous borders in the world. Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border. Do you know what it takes to do this? People, energy, make the glue, organize the team. It was amazing. While in Iran at the same time Abololo -- of course a nickname -- has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government. I don't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action. There are tons of school projects. Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools. Education is so essential. Kids just make photos in a class, the teacher receives them, they paste them on the school. Here they even got the help of the firemen. There should be even more schools doing this kind of project. Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine. So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck. You go on the back of that truck, it takes your photo, 30 seconds later take it from the side, you're ready to rock. Thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street. This is march, the 450,000 march -- beginning of September. They were all holding their photo as a statement. On the other side, people were wrapping up streets, buildings. It's everywhere. Come on, don't tell me that people aren't ready for peace out there. These projects took thousands of actions in one year, making hundreds of thousands of people participating, creating millions of views. This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on. So back to the question, "Can art change the world?" Maybe not in one year. That's the beginning. But maybe we should change the question. Can art change people's lives? From what I've seen this year, yes. And you know what? It's just the beginning. Let's turn the world inside out together. Thank you. (Applause)

Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible, I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005. And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection. I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom. In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit. When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter) After finishing this series of protests, I started questioning why my fate was like this, and I realized that it's not just me -- all Chinese are as confused as I am. As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress. This work is called Xia Gang ("leaving post"). "Xia Gang" is a Chinese euphemism for "laid off". It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy. From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China. The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers. I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives. On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: "The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party." For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work. We can only see six men in this picture,but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible. This piece is called The Studio. This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 -- I picked the news photos of the day. One is about the war in the Middle East, and another one is about a public demonstration in France. I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions. This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. (Applause) LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers. But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately. Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture. But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small. LB: This one is about 9/11 memories. This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River. Kenny Scharf's graffiti. (Laughter) This is Venice, Italy. Because global temperatures rise, the sea level rises, and it is said thatVenice will disappear in the coming decades. This is the ancient city of Pompeii. Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii. LB: This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome. When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas. For instance, why would I make myself invisible? What will making myself invisible here cause people to think? This one is called Instant Noodles. Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter) LB: Since August 2012, harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets. These phosphors can even cause cancer. To create this artwork, I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket. And my task is to stand there, trying to be still, setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple, I usually have to stand for three to four hours. The background of this piece is more complex, so I need three to four days in advance for preparation. This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter) LB: These works are on China's cultural memories. And this one, this is about food safety in China. Unsafe food can harm people's health, and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter) The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages, in different countries and at different times. I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element. If an artwork is to touch someone, it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life. And the repeated struggles in life create artwork, no matter in what form. (Music) That's all I want to say. Thank you. (Applause)

When my first children's book was published in 2001, I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator, and when I was setting up my slide projector in the cafetorium, I looked across the room, and there she was: my old lunch lady. She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day. So I approached her to say hello, and I said, "Hi, Jeannie! How are you?" And she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said, "Stephen Krosoczka?" And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka, but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am, and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid. And she started telling me about her grandkids, and that blew my mind. My lunch lady had grandkids, and therefore kids, and therefore left school at the end of the day? I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons. I had never thought about any of that before. Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination, and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes, a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes, and the end of every book, they get the bad guy with their hairnet, and they proclaim, "Justice is served!" (Laughter) (Applause) And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork. And I would notice as I would visit schools, the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way. And coast to coast, all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing: "Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness." Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time. But it meant the most to Jeannie. When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books. And two years after this photo was taken, she passed away, and I attended her wake, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there, because next to her casket was this painting, and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work, I had validated what she did. And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country: School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff. And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association, and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day. That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year. And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray. There is Ms. Brenda in California, who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss. There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day, and they were going without food over the summer, so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit, and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer. And kids made the most amazing projects. I knew they would. Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper. They took photos of their lunch lady's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers. And they made their own comics, starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies. And they made thank you pizzas, where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza. For me, I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies, because one woman said to me, she said, "Before this day, I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school. I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here." Another woman said to me, "You know, what I got out of this is that what I do is important." And of course what she does is important. What they all do is important. They're feeding our children every single day, and before a child can learn, their belly needs to be full, and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society. So I hope that you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff, and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be. A thank you can change a life. It changes the life of the person who receives it, and it changes the life of the person who expresses it. Thank you. (Applause)

I have a confession to make. As a scientist and engineer, I've focused on efficiency for many years. But efficiency can be a cult, and today I'd like to tell you about a journey that moved me out of the cult and back to a far richer reality. A few years ago, after finishing my Ph.D. in London, I moved to Boston. I lived in Boston and worked in Cambridge. I bought a racing bicycle that summer, and I bicycled every day to work. To find my way, I used my phone. It sent me over Mass. Ave., Massachusetts Avenue, the shortest route from Boston to Cambridge. But after a month that I was cycling every day on the car-packed Mass. Ave., I took a different route one day. I'm not entirely sure why I took a different route that day, a detour. I just remember a feeling of surprise; surprise at finding a street with no cars, as opposed to the nearby Mass. Ave. full of cars; surprise at finding a street draped by leaves and surrounded by trees. But after the feeling of surprise, I felt shame. How could I have been so blind? For an entire month, I was so trapped in my mobile app that a journey to work became one thing only: the shortest path. In this single journey, there was no thought of enjoying the road, no pleasure in connecting with nature, no possibility of looking people in the eyes. And why? Because I was saving a minute out of my commute. Now let me ask you: Am I alone here? How many of you have never used a mapping app for finding directions? Most of you, if not all, have. And don't get me wrong -- mapping apps are the greatest game-changer for encouraging people to explore the city. You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go. However, the app also assumes there are only a handful of directions to the destination. It has the power to make those handful of directions the definitive direction to that destination. After that experience, I changed. I changed my research from traditional data-mining to understanding how people experience the city. I used computer science tools to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale. I became captivated by the beauty and genius of traditional social science experiments done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch. The result of that research has been the creation of new maps, maps where you don't only find the shortest path, the blue one, but also the most enjoyable path, the red one. How was that possible? Einstein once said, "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." So with a bit of imagination, we needed to understand which parts of the city people find beautiful. At the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, we thought about this simple experiment. If I were to show you these two urban scenes, and I were to ask you which one is more beautiful, which one would you say? Don't be shy. Who says A? Who says B? Brilliant. Based on that idea, we built a crowdsourcing platform, a web game. Players are shown pairs of urban scenes, and they're asked to choose which one is more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on thousands of user votes, then we are able to see where consensus emerges. We are able to see which are the urban scenes that make people happy. After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs, and I teamed up with Luca and Rossano, and together, we aggregated those winning locations in London to build a new map of the city, a cartography weighted for human emotions. On this cartography, you're not only able to see and connect from point A to point B the shortest segments, but you're also able to see the happy segment, the beautiful path, the quiet path. In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet path far more enjoyable than the shortest one, and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time. Participants also love to attach memories to places. Shared memories -- that's where the old BBC building was; and personal memories -- that's where I gave my first kiss. They also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded. So what if we had a mapping tool that would return the most enjoyable routes based not only on aesthetics but also based on smell, sound, and memories? That's where our research is going right now. More generally, my research, what it tries to do is avoid the danger of the single path, to avoid robbing people of fully experiencing the city in which they live. Walk the path through the park, not through the car park, and you have an entirely different path. Walk the path full of people you love and not full of cars, and you have an entirely different path. It's that simple. I would like to end with this thought: do you remember "The Truman Show?" It's a media satire in which a real person doesn't know he's living in a fabricated world. Perhaps we live in a world fabricated for efficiency. Look at some of your daily habits, and as Truman did in the movie, escape the fabricated world. Why? Well, if you think that adventure is dangerous, try routine. It's deadly. Thank you. (Applause)