The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed June 2015 at TEDGlobalLondon
Jon Ronson: When online shaming spirals out of control
Twitter gives a voice to the voiceless, a way to speak up and hit back at perceived injustice. But sometimes, says Jon Ronson, things go too far. In a jaw-dropping story of how one un-funny tweet ruined a woman's life and career, Ronson shows how online commenters can end up behaving like a baying mob — and says it's time to rethink how we interact online.
Transcript:
In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent. If a newspaper ran some racist or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. We could get them. We could hit them with a weapon that we understood but they didn't -- a social media shaming. Advertisers would withdraw their advertising. When powerful people misused their privilege, we were going to get them. This was like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies were being leveled out. We were going to do things better.
Soon after that, a disgraced pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer -- he'd been caught plagiarizing and faking quotes, and he was drenched in shame and regret, he told me. And he and the opportunity to publicly apologize at a foundation lunch. This was going to be the most important speech of his life. Maybe it would win him some salvation. He knew before he arrived that the foundation was going to be live-streaming his event, but what he didn't know until he turned up, was that they'd erected a giant screen Twitter feed right next to his head. (Laughter) Another one in a monitor screen in his eye line.
I don't think the foundation did this because they were monstrous. I think they were clueless: I think this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality.
And here were some of the Tweets that were cascading into his eye line, as he was trying to apologize:
"Jonah Lehrer, boring us into forgiving him." (Laughter)
And, "Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame."
That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern.
And, "Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath."
That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, "Bored! Sociopath!" (Laughter)
You know, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges.
Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water.
Let me tell you a story. It's about a woman called Justine Sacco. She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers, and she'd Tweet little acerbic jokes to them, like this one on a plane from New York to London: [Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant." -Inner monologue as inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.] So Justine chuckled to herself, and pressed send, and got no replies, and felt that sad feeling that we all feel when the Internet doesn't congratulate us for being funny. (Laughter) Black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. And then she got to Heathrow, and she had a little time to spare before her final leg, so she thought up another funny little acerbic joke:
[Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!]
And she chuckled to herself, pressed send, got on the plane, got no replies, turned off her phone, fell asleep, woke up 11 hours later, turned on her phone while the plane was taxiing on the runway, and straightaway there was a message from somebody that she hadn't spoken to since high school, that said, "I am so sorry to see what's happening to you." And then another message from a best friend, "You need to call me right now. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter." (Laughter)
What had happened is that one of her 170 followers had sent the Tweet to a Gawker journalist, and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers: [And now, a funny holiday joke from IAC's PR boss] And then it was like a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, I talked to the Gawker journalist. I emailed him and asked him how it felt, and he said, "It felt delicious." And then he said, "But I'm sure she's fine."
But she wasn't fine, because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it piece by piece. First there were the philanthropists: [If @JustineSacco's unfortunate words ... bother you, join me in supporting @CARE's work in Africa.] [In light of ... disgusting, racist tweet, I'm donating to @care today] Then came the beyond horrified: [... no words for that horribly disgusting racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified.]
Was anybody on Twitter that night? A few of you. Did Justine's joke overwhelm your Twitter feed the way it did mine? It did mine, and I thought what everybody thought that night, which was, "Wow, somebody's screwed! Somebody's life is about to get terrible!" And I sat up in my bed, and I put the pillow behind my head, and then I thought, I'm not entirely sure that joke was intended to be racist. Maybe instead of gleefully flaunting her privilege, she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege. There's a comedy tradition of this, like South Park or Colbert or Randy Newman. Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was not being as good at it as Randy Newman. In fact, when I met Justine a couple of weeks later in a bar, she was just crushed, and I asked her to explain the joke, and she said, "Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making of fun of that bubble."
You know, another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, "I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist," and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, "Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too." And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart.
It started to get darker: [Everyone go report this cunt @JustineSacco] Then came the calls for her to be fired. [Good luck with the job hunt in the new year. #GettingFired] Thousands of people around the world decided it was their duty to get her fired. [@JustineSacco last tweet of your career. #SorryNotSorry Corporations got involved, hoping to sell their products on the back of Justine's annihilation: [Next time you plant to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight!] (Laughter)
A lot of companies were making good money that night. You know, Justine's name was normally Googled 40 times a month. That month, between December the 20th and the end of December, her name was Googled 1,220,000 times. And one Internet economist told me that that meant that Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming -- we got nothing. (Laughter) We were like unpaid shaming interns for Google. (Laughter)
And then came the trolls: [I'm actually kind of hoping Justine Sacco gets aids? lol] Somebody else on that wrote, "Somebody HIV-positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS." And that person got a free pass. Nobody went after that person. We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. Justine was really uniting a lot of disparate groups that night, from philanthropists to "rape the bitch." [@JustineSacco I hope you get fired! You demented bitch... Just let the world know you're planning to ride bare back while in Africa.]
Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus."
And then Justine's employers got involved: [IAC on @JustineSacco tweet: This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.] And that's when the anger turned to excitement: [All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail. #fired] [Oh man, @justinesacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands.] [We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired.] What we had was a delightful narrative arc. We knew something that Justine didn't. Can you think of anything less judicial than this? Justine was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself, and her inability was a huge part of the hilarity. On Twitter that night, we were like toddlers crawling towards a gun. Somebody worked out exactly which plane she was on, so they linked to a flight tracker website. [British Airways Flight 43 On-time - arrives in 1 hour 34 minutes] A hashtag began trending worldwide: # hasJustineLandedYet? [It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasJustineLandedYet] [Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can't look away. Can't leave.] [#HasJustineLandedYet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night.] [Is no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures] And guess what? Yes there was. [@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. And if you want to know what it looks like to discover that you've just been torn to shreds because of a misconstrued liberal joke, not by trolls, but by nice people like us, this is what it looks like: [... She's decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.]
So why did we do it? I think some people were genuinely upset, but I think for other people, it's because Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston Review, "This isn't social justice. It's a cathartic alternative."
For the past three years,
I've been going around the world meeting people like Justine Sacco -- and believe me, there's a lot of people like Justine Sacco. There's more every day. And we want to think they're fine, but they're not fine. The people I met were mangled. They talked to me about depression, and anxiety and insomnia and suicidal thoughts. One woman I talked to, who also told a joke that landed badly, she stayed home for a year and a half. Before that, she worked with adults with learning difficulties, and was apparently really good at her job.
Justine was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. But it was worse than that. She was losing herself. She was waking up in the middle of the night, forgetting who she was. She was got because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. And of course, that's a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But the phrase "misuse of privilege" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.
Justine had 170 Twitter followers, and so to make it work, she had to be fictionalized. Word got around that she was the daughter the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco. [Let us not be fooled by #JustineSacco her father is a SA mining billionaire. She's not sorry. And neither is her father.] I thought that was true about Justine, until I met her at a bar, and I asked her about her billionaire father, and she said, "My father sells carpets."
And I think back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil.
Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless.
Let's not do that.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon.
Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno.
BG: Don't go away. What strikes me about Justine's story is also the fact that if you Google her name today, this story covers the first 100 pages of Google results -- there is nothing else about her. In your book, you mention another story of another victim who actually got taken on by a reputation management firm, and by creating blogs and posting nice, innocuous stories about her love for cats and holidays and stuff, managed to get the story off the first couple pages of Google results, but it didn't last long. A couple of weeks later, they started creeping back up to the top result. Is this a totally lost battle?
Jon Ronson: You know, I think the very best thing we can do, if you see a kind of unfair or an ambiguous shaming, is to speak up, because I think the worst thing that happened to Justine was that nobody supported her -- like, everyone was against her, and that is profoundly traumatizing, to be told by tens of thousands of people that you need to get out. But if a shaming happens and there's a babble of voices, like in a democracy, where people are discussing it, I think that's much less damaging. So I think that's the way forward, but it's hard, because if you do stand up for somebody, it's incredibly unpleasant.
BG: So let's talk about your experience,
because you stood up by writing this book.
By the way, it's mandatory reading for everybody, okay? You stood up because the book actually puts the spotlight on shamers. And I assume you didn't only have friendly reactions on Twitter.
JR: It didn't go down that well with some people. (Laughter) I mean, you don't want to just concentrate -- because lots of people understood, and were really nice about the book. But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, "We are the powerful people abusing our power now," I get people saying, "Well you must be a racist too."
BG: So the other night -- yesterday -- we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table -- and that was a nice, constructive discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge of insults.
JR: Yeah. This happened last night. We had like a TED dinner last night. We were chatting and it was lovely and nice, and I decided to check Twitter. Somebody said, "You are a white supremacist." And then I went back and had a nice conversation with somebody, and then I went back to Twitter, somebody said my very existence made the world a worse place. My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the Internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I'm starting to think of that as a really nice option.
BG: Jon, thank you. JR: Thank you, Bruno.
(Applause)
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
POL/GralInt-TED Talks-Ashraf Ghani: How to rebuild a broken state
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed July 2005 at TEDGlobal 2005
Ashraf Ghani: How to rebuild a broken state
Ashraf Ghani's passionate and powerful 10-minute talk, emphasizing the necessity of both economic investment and design ingenuity to rebuild broken states, is followed by a conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the future of Afghanistan.
Transcript:
A public, Dewey long ago observed, is constituted through discussion and debate. If we are to call the tyranny of assumptions into question, and avoid doxa, the realm of the unquestioned, then we must be willing to subject our own assumptions to debate and discussion. It is in this spirit that I join into a discussion of one of the critical issues of our time, namely, how to mobilize different forms of capital for the project of state building.
To put the assumptions very clearly: capitalism, after 150 years, has become acceptable, and so has democracy. If we looked in the world of 1945 and looked at the map of capitalist economies and democratic polities, they were the rare exception, not the norm. The question now, however, is both about which form of capitalism and which type of democratic participation. But we must acknowledge that this moment has brought about a rare consensus of assumptions. And that provides the ground for a type of action, because consensus of each moment allows us to act. And it is necessary, no matter how fragile or how provisional our consensus, to be able to move forward.
But the majority of the world neither benefits from capitalism nor from democratic systems. Most of the globe experiences the state as repressive, as an organization that is concerned about denial of rights, about denial of justice, rather than provision of it. And in terms of experience of capitalism, there are two aspects that the rest of the globe experiences. First, extractive industry. Blood diamonds, smuggled emeralds, timber, that is cut right from under the poorest. Second is technical assistance. And technical assistance might shock you, but it's the worst form of -- today -- of the ugly face of the developed world to the developing countries. Tens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on building capacity with people who are paid up to 1,500 dollars a day, who are incapable of thinking creatively, or organically.
Next assumption -- and of course the events of July 7, I express my deep sympathy, and before that, September 11 -- have reminded us we do not live in three different worlds. We live in one world. But that's easily said. But we are not dealing with the implications of the one world that we are living in. And that is that if we want to have one world, this one world cannot be based on huge pockets of exclusion, and then inclusion for some. We must now finally come to think about the premises of a truly global world, in relationship to the regime of rights and responsibilities and accountabilities that are truly global in scope. Otherwise we will be missing this open moment in history, where we have a consensus on both the form of politics and the form of economics.
What is one of these organizations to pick? We have three critical terms: economy, civil society and the state. I will not deal with those first two, except to say that uncritical transfer of assumptions, from one context to another, can only make for disaster. Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy. The poverty of our knowledge must become the first basis of moving forward, and not imposition of the framework that works on the basis of mathematical modeling, for which I have enormous respect. My colleagues at Johns Hopkins were among the best.
Second, instead of debating endlessly about what is the structure of the state, why don't we simplify and say, what are a series of functions that the state in the 21st century must perform? Clare Lockhart and I are writing a book on this; we hope to share that much widely with -- and third is that we could actually construct an index to measure comparatively how well these functions that we would agree on are being performed in different places.
So what are these functions? We propose 10. And it's legitimate monopoly of means of violence, administrative control, management of public finances, investment in human capital, provision of citizenship rights, provision of infrastructure, management of the tangible and intangible assets of the state through regulation, creation of the market, international agreements, including public borrowing, and then, most importantly, rule of law.
I won't elaborate. I hope the questions will give me an opportunity. This is a feasible goal, basically because, contrary to widespread assumption, I would argue that we know how to do this. Who would have imagined that Germany would be either united or democratic today, if you looked at it from the perspective of Oxford of 1943? But people at Oxford prepared for a democratic Germany and engaged in planning. And there are lots of other examples.
Now in order to do this -- and this brings this group -- we have to rethink the notion of capital. The least important form of capital, in this project, is financial capital -- money. Money is not capital in most of the developing countries. It's just cash. Because it lacks the institutional, organizational, managerial forms to turn it into capital. And what is required is a combination of physical capital, institutional capital, human capital -- and security, of course, is critical, but so is information.
Now, the issue that should concern us here -- and that's the challenge that I would like to pose to this group -- is again, it takes 16 years in your countries to produce somebody with a B.S. degree. It takes 20 years to produce somebody with a Ph.D. The first challenge is to rethink, fundamentally, the issue of the time. Do we need to repeat the modalities that we have inherited? Our educational systems are inherited from the 19th century. What is it that we need to do fundamentally to re-engage in a project, that capital formation is rapid? The absolute majority of the world's population are below 20, and they are growing larger and faster. They need different ways of being approached, different ways of being enfranchised, different ways of being skilled. And that's the first thing.
Second is, you're problem solvers, but you're not engaging your global responsibility. You've stayed away from the problems of corruption. You only want clean environments in which to function. But if you don't think through the problems of corruption, who will? You stay away from design for development. You're great designers, but your designs are selfish. It's for your own immediate use. The world in which I operate operates with designs regarding roads, or dams, or provision of electricity that have not been revisited in 60 years. This is not right. It requires thinking.
But, particularly, what we need more than anything else from this group is your imagination to be brought to bear on problems the way a meme is supposed to work. As the work on paradigms, long time ago showed -- Thomas Kuhn's work -- it's in the intersection of ideas that new developments -- true breakthroughs -- occur. And I hope that this group would be able to deal with the issue of state and development and the empowerment of the majority of the world's poor, through this means. Thank you. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: So, Ashraf, until recently, you were the finance minister of Afghanistan, a country right at the middle of much of the world's agenda. Is the country gonna make it? Will democracy flourish? What scares you most?
Ashraf Ghani: What scares me most is -- is you, lack of your engagement. (Laughter) You asked me. You know I always give the unconventional answer. No. But seriously, the issue of Afghanistan first has to be seen as, at least, a 10- to 20-year perspective. Today the world of globalization is on speed. Time has been compressed. And space does not exist for most people. But in my world -- you know, when I went back to Afghanistan after 23 years, space had expanded. Every conceivable form of infrastructure had broken down. I rode -- traveled -- travel between two cities that used to take three hours now took 12. So the first is when the scale is that, we need to recognize that just the simple things that are infrastructure -- it takes six years to deliver infrastructure. In our world. Any meaningful sort of thing. But the modality of attention, or what is happening today, what's happening tomorrow.
Second is, when a country has been subjected to one of the most immense, brutal forms of exercise of power -- we had the Red Army for 10 continuous years, 110,000 strong, literally terrorizing. The sky: every Afghan sees the sky as a source of fear. We were bombed practically out of existence. Then, tens of thousands of people were trained in terrorism -- from all sides. The United States, Great Britain, joined for instance, Egyptian intelligence service to train thousands of people in resistance and urban terrorism. How to turn a bicycle into an instrument of terror. How to turn a donkey, a carthorse, anything. And the Russians, equally. So, when violence erupts in a country like Afghanistan, it's because of that legacy. But we have to understand that we've been incredibly lucky. I mean, I really can't believe how lucky I am here, standing in front of you, speaking. When I joined as finance minister, I thought that the chances of my living more than three years would not be more than five percent. Those were the risks. They were worth it.
I think we can make it, and the reason we can make it is because of the people. You see, because, I mean -- I give you one statistic. 91 percent of the men in Afghanistan, 86 percent of the women, listen to at least three radio stations a day. In terms of their discourse, in terms of their sophistication of knowledge of the world, I think that I would dare say, they're much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans -- because the world matters to them. And what is their predominant concern? Abandonment. Afghans have become deeply internationalist.
You know, when I went back in December of 2001, I had absolutely no desire to work with the Afghan government because I'd lived as a nationalist. And I told them -- my people, with the Americans here -- separate. Yes, I have an advisory position with the U.N. I went through 10 Afghan provinces very rapidly. And everybody was telling me it was a different world. You know, they engage. They see engagement, global engagement, as absolutely necessary to the future of the ordinary people. And the thing that the ordinary Afghan is most concerned with is -- Clare Lockhart is here, so I'll recite a discussion she had with an illiterate woman in Northern Afghanistan. And that woman said she didn't care whether she had food on her table. What she worried about was whether there was a plan for the future, where her children could really have a different life. That gives me hope. CA: How is Afghanistan going to provide alternative income to the many people who are making their living off the drugs trade?
AG: Certainly. Well, the first is, instead of sending a billion dollars on drug eradication and paying it to a couple of security companies, they should give this hundred billion dollars to 50 of the most critically innovative companies in the world to ask them to create one million jobs. The key to the drug eradication is jobs. Look, there's a very little known fact: countries that have a legal average income per capita of 1,000 dollars don't produce drugs.
Second, textile. Trade is the key, not aid. The U.S. and Europe should give us a zero percent tariff. The textile industry is incredibly mobile. If you want us to be able to compete with China and to attract investment, we could probably attract four to six billion dollars quite easily in the textile sector, if there was zero tariffs -- would create the type of job. Cotton does not compete with opium; a t-shirt does. And we need to understand, it's the value chain. Look, the ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of hearing about microcredit. It is important, but what the ordinary women and men who engage in micro-production want is global access. They don't want to sell to the charity bazaars that are only for foreigners -- and the same bloody shirt embroidered time and again. What we want is a partnership with the Italian design firms. Yeah, we have the best embroiderers in the world! Why can't we do what was done with northern Italy? With the Put Out system? So I think economically, the critical issue really is to now think through.
And what I will say here is that aid doesn't work. You know, the aid system is broken. The aid system does not have the knowledge, the vision, the ability. I'm all for it; after all, I raised a lot of it. Yeah, to be exact, you know, I managed to persuade the world that they had to give my country 27.5 billion. They didn't want to give us the money.
CA: And it still didn't work?
AG: No. It's not that it didn't work. It's that a dollar of private investment, in my judgment, is equal at least to 20 dollars of aid, in terms of the dynamic that it generates. Second is that one dollar of aid could be 10 cents; it could be 20 cents; or it could be four dollars. It depends on what form it comes, what degrees of conditionalities are attached to it. You know, the aid system, at first, was designed to benefit entrepreneurs of the developed countries, not to generate growth in the poor countries. And this is, again, one of those assumptions -- the way car seats are an assumption that we've inherited in governments, and doors. You would think that the US government would not think that American firms needed subsidizing to function in developing countries, provide advice, but they do. There's an entire weight of history vis-a-vis aid that now needs to be reexamined. If the goal is to build states that can credibly take care of themselves -- and I'm putting that proposition equally; you know I'm very harsh on my counterparts -- aid must end in each country in a definable period. And every year there must be progress on mobilization of domestic revenue and generation of the economy. Unless that kind of compact is entered into, you will not be able to sustain the consensus.
Filmed July 2005 at TEDGlobal 2005
Ashraf Ghani: How to rebuild a broken state
Ashraf Ghani's passionate and powerful 10-minute talk, emphasizing the necessity of both economic investment and design ingenuity to rebuild broken states, is followed by a conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the future of Afghanistan.
Transcript:
A public, Dewey long ago observed, is constituted through discussion and debate. If we are to call the tyranny of assumptions into question, and avoid doxa, the realm of the unquestioned, then we must be willing to subject our own assumptions to debate and discussion. It is in this spirit that I join into a discussion of one of the critical issues of our time, namely, how to mobilize different forms of capital for the project of state building.
To put the assumptions very clearly: capitalism, after 150 years, has become acceptable, and so has democracy. If we looked in the world of 1945 and looked at the map of capitalist economies and democratic polities, they were the rare exception, not the norm. The question now, however, is both about which form of capitalism and which type of democratic participation. But we must acknowledge that this moment has brought about a rare consensus of assumptions. And that provides the ground for a type of action, because consensus of each moment allows us to act. And it is necessary, no matter how fragile or how provisional our consensus, to be able to move forward.
But the majority of the world neither benefits from capitalism nor from democratic systems. Most of the globe experiences the state as repressive, as an organization that is concerned about denial of rights, about denial of justice, rather than provision of it. And in terms of experience of capitalism, there are two aspects that the rest of the globe experiences. First, extractive industry. Blood diamonds, smuggled emeralds, timber, that is cut right from under the poorest. Second is technical assistance. And technical assistance might shock you, but it's the worst form of -- today -- of the ugly face of the developed world to the developing countries. Tens of billions of dollars are supposedly spent on building capacity with people who are paid up to 1,500 dollars a day, who are incapable of thinking creatively, or organically.
Next assumption -- and of course the events of July 7, I express my deep sympathy, and before that, September 11 -- have reminded us we do not live in three different worlds. We live in one world. But that's easily said. But we are not dealing with the implications of the one world that we are living in. And that is that if we want to have one world, this one world cannot be based on huge pockets of exclusion, and then inclusion for some. We must now finally come to think about the premises of a truly global world, in relationship to the regime of rights and responsibilities and accountabilities that are truly global in scope. Otherwise we will be missing this open moment in history, where we have a consensus on both the form of politics and the form of economics.
What is one of these organizations to pick? We have three critical terms: economy, civil society and the state. I will not deal with those first two, except to say that uncritical transfer of assumptions, from one context to another, can only make for disaster. Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy. The poverty of our knowledge must become the first basis of moving forward, and not imposition of the framework that works on the basis of mathematical modeling, for which I have enormous respect. My colleagues at Johns Hopkins were among the best.
Second, instead of debating endlessly about what is the structure of the state, why don't we simplify and say, what are a series of functions that the state in the 21st century must perform? Clare Lockhart and I are writing a book on this; we hope to share that much widely with -- and third is that we could actually construct an index to measure comparatively how well these functions that we would agree on are being performed in different places.
So what are these functions? We propose 10. And it's legitimate monopoly of means of violence, administrative control, management of public finances, investment in human capital, provision of citizenship rights, provision of infrastructure, management of the tangible and intangible assets of the state through regulation, creation of the market, international agreements, including public borrowing, and then, most importantly, rule of law.
I won't elaborate. I hope the questions will give me an opportunity. This is a feasible goal, basically because, contrary to widespread assumption, I would argue that we know how to do this. Who would have imagined that Germany would be either united or democratic today, if you looked at it from the perspective of Oxford of 1943? But people at Oxford prepared for a democratic Germany and engaged in planning. And there are lots of other examples.
Now in order to do this -- and this brings this group -- we have to rethink the notion of capital. The least important form of capital, in this project, is financial capital -- money. Money is not capital in most of the developing countries. It's just cash. Because it lacks the institutional, organizational, managerial forms to turn it into capital. And what is required is a combination of physical capital, institutional capital, human capital -- and security, of course, is critical, but so is information.
Now, the issue that should concern us here -- and that's the challenge that I would like to pose to this group -- is again, it takes 16 years in your countries to produce somebody with a B.S. degree. It takes 20 years to produce somebody with a Ph.D. The first challenge is to rethink, fundamentally, the issue of the time. Do we need to repeat the modalities that we have inherited? Our educational systems are inherited from the 19th century. What is it that we need to do fundamentally to re-engage in a project, that capital formation is rapid? The absolute majority of the world's population are below 20, and they are growing larger and faster. They need different ways of being approached, different ways of being enfranchised, different ways of being skilled. And that's the first thing.
Second is, you're problem solvers, but you're not engaging your global responsibility. You've stayed away from the problems of corruption. You only want clean environments in which to function. But if you don't think through the problems of corruption, who will? You stay away from design for development. You're great designers, but your designs are selfish. It's for your own immediate use. The world in which I operate operates with designs regarding roads, or dams, or provision of electricity that have not been revisited in 60 years. This is not right. It requires thinking.
But, particularly, what we need more than anything else from this group is your imagination to be brought to bear on problems the way a meme is supposed to work. As the work on paradigms, long time ago showed -- Thomas Kuhn's work -- it's in the intersection of ideas that new developments -- true breakthroughs -- occur. And I hope that this group would be able to deal with the issue of state and development and the empowerment of the majority of the world's poor, through this means. Thank you. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: So, Ashraf, until recently, you were the finance minister of Afghanistan, a country right at the middle of much of the world's agenda. Is the country gonna make it? Will democracy flourish? What scares you most?
Ashraf Ghani: What scares me most is -- is you, lack of your engagement. (Laughter) You asked me. You know I always give the unconventional answer. No. But seriously, the issue of Afghanistan first has to be seen as, at least, a 10- to 20-year perspective. Today the world of globalization is on speed. Time has been compressed. And space does not exist for most people. But in my world -- you know, when I went back to Afghanistan after 23 years, space had expanded. Every conceivable form of infrastructure had broken down. I rode -- traveled -- travel between two cities that used to take three hours now took 12. So the first is when the scale is that, we need to recognize that just the simple things that are infrastructure -- it takes six years to deliver infrastructure. In our world. Any meaningful sort of thing. But the modality of attention, or what is happening today, what's happening tomorrow.
Second is, when a country has been subjected to one of the most immense, brutal forms of exercise of power -- we had the Red Army for 10 continuous years, 110,000 strong, literally terrorizing. The sky: every Afghan sees the sky as a source of fear. We were bombed practically out of existence. Then, tens of thousands of people were trained in terrorism -- from all sides. The United States, Great Britain, joined for instance, Egyptian intelligence service to train thousands of people in resistance and urban terrorism. How to turn a bicycle into an instrument of terror. How to turn a donkey, a carthorse, anything. And the Russians, equally. So, when violence erupts in a country like Afghanistan, it's because of that legacy. But we have to understand that we've been incredibly lucky. I mean, I really can't believe how lucky I am here, standing in front of you, speaking. When I joined as finance minister, I thought that the chances of my living more than three years would not be more than five percent. Those were the risks. They were worth it.
I think we can make it, and the reason we can make it is because of the people. You see, because, I mean -- I give you one statistic. 91 percent of the men in Afghanistan, 86 percent of the women, listen to at least three radio stations a day. In terms of their discourse, in terms of their sophistication of knowledge of the world, I think that I would dare say, they're much more sophisticated than rural Americans with college degrees and the bulk of Europeans -- because the world matters to them. And what is their predominant concern? Abandonment. Afghans have become deeply internationalist.
You know, when I went back in December of 2001, I had absolutely no desire to work with the Afghan government because I'd lived as a nationalist. And I told them -- my people, with the Americans here -- separate. Yes, I have an advisory position with the U.N. I went through 10 Afghan provinces very rapidly. And everybody was telling me it was a different world. You know, they engage. They see engagement, global engagement, as absolutely necessary to the future of the ordinary people. And the thing that the ordinary Afghan is most concerned with is -- Clare Lockhart is here, so I'll recite a discussion she had with an illiterate woman in Northern Afghanistan. And that woman said she didn't care whether she had food on her table. What she worried about was whether there was a plan for the future, where her children could really have a different life. That gives me hope. CA: How is Afghanistan going to provide alternative income to the many people who are making their living off the drugs trade?
AG: Certainly. Well, the first is, instead of sending a billion dollars on drug eradication and paying it to a couple of security companies, they should give this hundred billion dollars to 50 of the most critically innovative companies in the world to ask them to create one million jobs. The key to the drug eradication is jobs. Look, there's a very little known fact: countries that have a legal average income per capita of 1,000 dollars don't produce drugs.
Second, textile. Trade is the key, not aid. The U.S. and Europe should give us a zero percent tariff. The textile industry is incredibly mobile. If you want us to be able to compete with China and to attract investment, we could probably attract four to six billion dollars quite easily in the textile sector, if there was zero tariffs -- would create the type of job. Cotton does not compete with opium; a t-shirt does. And we need to understand, it's the value chain. Look, the ordinary Afghan is sick and tired of hearing about microcredit. It is important, but what the ordinary women and men who engage in micro-production want is global access. They don't want to sell to the charity bazaars that are only for foreigners -- and the same bloody shirt embroidered time and again. What we want is a partnership with the Italian design firms. Yeah, we have the best embroiderers in the world! Why can't we do what was done with northern Italy? With the Put Out system? So I think economically, the critical issue really is to now think through.
And what I will say here is that aid doesn't work. You know, the aid system is broken. The aid system does not have the knowledge, the vision, the ability. I'm all for it; after all, I raised a lot of it. Yeah, to be exact, you know, I managed to persuade the world that they had to give my country 27.5 billion. They didn't want to give us the money.
CA: And it still didn't work?
AG: No. It's not that it didn't work. It's that a dollar of private investment, in my judgment, is equal at least to 20 dollars of aid, in terms of the dynamic that it generates. Second is that one dollar of aid could be 10 cents; it could be 20 cents; or it could be four dollars. It depends on what form it comes, what degrees of conditionalities are attached to it. You know, the aid system, at first, was designed to benefit entrepreneurs of the developed countries, not to generate growth in the poor countries. And this is, again, one of those assumptions -- the way car seats are an assumption that we've inherited in governments, and doors. You would think that the US government would not think that American firms needed subsidizing to function in developing countries, provide advice, but they do. There's an entire weight of history vis-a-vis aid that now needs to be reexamined. If the goal is to build states that can credibly take care of themselves -- and I'm putting that proposition equally; you know I'm very harsh on my counterparts -- aid must end in each country in a definable period. And every year there must be progress on mobilization of domestic revenue and generation of the economy. Unless that kind of compact is entered into, you will not be able to sustain the consensus.
GralInt-Twitter in Plain English (with subtitles in Spanish)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Twitter in Plain English
Source/Link:https://dotsub.com/view/665bd0d5-a9f4-4a07-9d9e-b31ba926ca78
Twitter in Plain English
Source/Link:https://dotsub.com/view/665bd0d5-a9f4-4a07-9d9e-b31ba926ca78
GralInt/ART-TED Talks-Taryn Simon: The stories behind the bloodlines/Photographs of secret sites
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed November 2011 at TEDSalon London Fall 2011
Taryn Simon: The stories behind the bloodlines
Taryn Simon captures the essence of vast, generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of people at the center of the narrative. In this riveting talk she shows a stream of these stories from all over the world, investigating the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces.
Transcript:
This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India. Now Shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in Uttar Pradesh, and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead. His land was no longer registered in his name. His brothers, Chandrabhan and Phoolchand, were also listed as dead.
Family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead, allowing them to inherit their father's share of the ancestral farmland. Because of this, all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home. According to the Yadav family, the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001, but a judge has never appeared.
There are several instances in Uttar Pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review. Shivdutt's father's death and a want for his property led to this corruption. He was laid to rest in the Ganges River, where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water.
Photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they don't exist, and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life. Yet, these men remain dead. This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future.
So this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters." And for this work, I traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. I was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood, chance or circumstance. The subjects I documented ranged from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in India. In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.
Each work that I make is comprised of three segments. On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline. This is followed by a text panel, it's designed in scroll form, in which I construct the narrative at stake. And then on the right is what I refer to as a footnote panel. It's a space that's more intuitive in which I present fragments of the story, beginnings of other stories, photographic evidence. And it's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the Internet, in a less linear form. So it's more disordered. And this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline.
In my past projects I've often worked in serial form, documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation, but in fact, are fairly abstract. In this project I wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog, something that I couldn't interrupt, curate or edit by choice. This led me to blood. A bloodline is determined and ordered. But the project centers on the collision of order and disorder -- the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters.
In chapter two, I photograph the descendants of Arthur Ruppin. He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement. He oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the Palestine Land Development Company whose work led to the establishment of a Jewish state. Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state. And I found these maps which you see here. And these are studies commissioned by the Zionist organization for alternative areas for Jewish settlement. In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate. These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965.
Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits. He's most often paid for his services in cash, cows or goats. But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment. As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren. In his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here.
Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows. One wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits. Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya. It's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes. Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power.
You may notice in several of the chapters that I photographed there are empty portraits. These empty portraits represent individuals, living individuals, who couldn't be present. And the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel. They include dengue fever, imprisonment, army service, women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons. And in this particular chapter, it's children whose mothers wouldn't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it.
Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting. And within a hundred years, that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion. The European rabbit has no natural predators in Australia, and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land. Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth. These rabbits were bred at a government facility, Biosecurity Queensland, where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them. So they're testing its virulence. During the course of this trial, all of the rabbits died, except for a few, which were euthanized.
Haigh's Chocolate, in collaboration with the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia, stopped all production of the Easter Bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the Easter Bilby. Now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that's native to Australia, and actually an animal that is threatened by the European rabbit.
In chapter seven, I focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline. So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. This is the only work in which I visually represent the dead. But I only represent those that were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which is recorded as the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed.
So when you look at a detail of this work, you can see, the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him. Her name is Zumra. She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well. During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave. And I was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains. However, the other individuals are represented by these blue slides, which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to DNA evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals. They've all been given a proper burial, so what remains are these blue slides at the International Commission for Missing Persons.
These are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the Potochari battery factory, which was where the Dutch U.N. soldiers were staying, and also the Serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions. This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them.
Chapter 15 is more of a performance piece. I solicited China's State Council Information Office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent China for this project. They chose a large family from Beijing for its size, and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice. This is one of the rare situations where I have no empty portraits. Everyone showed up. You can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline.
Previously known as the Department of Foreign Propaganda, the State Council Information Office is responsible for all of China's external publicity operations. It controls all foreign media and image production outside of China from foreign media working within China. It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism. For the footnote panel in this work, this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in Beijing. And I also photographed the gift bag they gave me when I left.
These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland. Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history. The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation. There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves. Another section of the family presented their clothing, as opposed to their physical presence, because they didn't want to be identified with the past that I was highlighting. And finally, another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation, so I had to pixelate him out so he's unrecognizable.
In the footnote panel that accompanies this work I photographed an official Adolph Hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by British Intelligence with Hans Frank's image on it. It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power.
Again, talking about fate, I was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art. These paintings were taken by Hans Frank during the time of the Third Reich. And I'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time. They are Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine," Rembrandt's "Landscape With Good Samaritan" and Raphael's "Portrait of a Youth," which has never been found.
Chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making, but becomes their own. So this is the Ferraz family and the Novaes family. And they are in an active blood feud. This feud has been going on since 1991 in Northeast Brazil in Pernambuco, and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud, including hired hit men, innocent bystanders and friends. Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power. But it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors. Installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of Louis Novaes, who's the head of the Novaes family, are these turret holes, which were used for shooting and looking.
Brazil's northeast state of Pernambuco is one of the nation's most violent regions. It's rooted in a principle of retributive justice, or an eye for an eye, so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area. This story, like many of the stories in my chapters, reads almost as an archetypal episode, like something out of Shakespeare, that's happening now and will happen again in the future. I'm interested in these ideas of repetition. So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face.
Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history. Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16. This piece is ordered by age because it can't be ordered by blood. In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted. Children have to leave the orphanage at age 16, despite the fact that there's often nowhere for them to go. It's commonly reported in Ukraine that children, when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution. Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded.
This is a boys' bedroom. There's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing. Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October. This is a girls' bedroom. And the director listed the orphanage's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer, four vacuum cleaners, two computers, a video projector, a copy machine, winter shoes and a dentist's drill. This photograph, which I took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms, shows a sign which I had translated when I got home. And it reads: "Those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future."
There are many more chapters in this project. This is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images. And this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive. And within this accumulation of images and texts, I'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself. But archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information that's collected. And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between. It's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming. And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed July 2009 at TEDGlobal 2009
Taryn Simon: Photographs of secret sites
Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography — to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.
Transcript:
Okay, so 90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. It involves a campaign of letter writing, research and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia. And oddly, the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World, a seemingly innocuous site.
And it read -- I'm just going to read a key sentence: "Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to."
Photography threatens fantasy. They didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths and beliefs, and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth. But there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator's intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented.
Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge.
It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information. And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph. And it's just another place from which to observe, and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders. And the outsider can never really reach the core.
I'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series. It's titled, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," and it's comprised of nearly 70 images. In this context I'll just show you a few. This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State, where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water. A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly. And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America, which you can see here.
And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text. So I create these two poles. Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text. And what I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground. But in this context I'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts.
This is a cryopreservation unit, and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger, who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health, with advancements in science and technology, all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars, for forever.
This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty. Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state, allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage. So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen, allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse, to simulate the loss of virginity.
This is a jury simulation deliberation room, and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror. And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they're hoping for. This process costs 60,000 dollars.
This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room, a contraband room, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. On that table you can see 48 hours' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States. There is a pig's head and African cane rats. And part of my photographic work is I'm not just documenting what's there. I do take certain liberties and intervene. And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting, so I spent some time with the smells and items.
This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, their original headquarters building. And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts. And it's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics. And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency, and had thus come under question, is abstract expressionism.
This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition. And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene.
This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States. It's a research crop marijuana grow room.
And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can't find any discernible formula in how these things -- they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security -- and you can't completely understand how information is being distributed.
These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting North America to Europe. They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability. This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut. But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago, like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn't necessarily progressed.
This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (Laughter) And this is ... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired, and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity. And Playboy is always in the top few. (Laughter) But you'd be surprised, they don't do the photographs. It's just the text. (Laughter)
This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza. This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead. And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States. And the film was shot on 72 millimeter, government-issue film. And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film.
All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding -- that would be mother to son, father to daughter, sister to brother -- to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger. Meaning white fur, ice blue eyes, a pink nose. And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth. It's a very violent process that is little known. And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment. Kenny was born. He actually made it to adulthood. He has since passed away, but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities.
This, on a lighter note, is at George Lucas' personal archive. This is the Death Star. And it's shown here in its true orientation. In the context of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," its mirror image is presented. They flip the negative. And you can see the photoetched brass detailing, and the painted acrylic facade. In the context of the film, this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire, capable of annihilating planets and civilizations, and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet. (Laughter)
This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. It's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site. Essentially they've simulated a city for urban combat, and this is one of the structures that exists in that city. It's called the World Church of God. It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. And after I took this photograph, they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq. And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice. And we put that wall around the World Church of God, and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army. And I put them into my photograph.
This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School, who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity.
And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world. It runs 24 hours a day, commercial free. However, it's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States. And in 2004, they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq, which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq.
Now I'm going to move on to another project I did. It's titled "The Innocents." And for the men in these photographs, photography had been used to create a fantasy. Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth, in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie. I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, violent crimes.
I investigate photography's ability to blur truth and fiction, and its influence on memory, which can lead to severe, even lethal consequences. For the men in these photographs, the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of images. But through exposure to composite sketches, Polaroids, mug shots and line-ups, eyewitness testimony can change.
I'll give you an example from a case. A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker. She saw some similarities in one of the photographs, but couldn't quite make a positive identification. Days later, she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs, except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array. And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory, if there ever was an actual memory.
Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications.
Frederick Daye, who is photographed at his alibi location, where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime. He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape, kidnapping and vehicle theft. And he served 10 years of a life sentence. Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison. But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick's photograph.
Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl walking to school. He served 18 years of a death sentence. I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho. And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction. The scene of arrest, the scene of misidentification, the alibi location. And here, the scene of the crime, it's this place to which he's never been, but changed his life forever. So photographing there, I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, in both his life and in photography.
Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder. He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco, Texas.
Larry Mayes, I photographed at the scene of arrest, where he hid between two mattresses in Gary, Indiana, in this very room to hide from the police. He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery. The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification, days later, from a photo array.
Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival. He is photographed at his alibi location.
Ron Williamson. Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club, and served 11 years of a death sentence. I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A's to play professional baseball just before his conviction. And the state's key witness in Ron's case was, in the end, the actual perpetrator.
Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman. I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago.
William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary. He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky.
Timothy Durham, who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime, was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence, for several charges of rape and robbery. He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim.
Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia. He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery, and served seven years of a 47 year sentence. Troy's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward, but said he looked too old. The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier, which they entered into a photo array days later, and he was positively identified.
Now I'm going to leave you with a self portrait. And it reiterates that distortion is a constant, and our eyes are easily deceived. That's it. Thank you. (Applause)
Filmed November 2011 at TEDSalon London Fall 2011
Taryn Simon: The stories behind the bloodlines
Taryn Simon captures the essence of vast, generation-spanning stories by photographing the descendants of people at the center of the narrative. In this riveting talk she shows a stream of these stories from all over the world, investigating the nature of genealogy and the way our lives are shaped by the interplay of many different forces.
Transcript:
This is Shivdutt Yadav, and he's from Uttar Pradesh, India. Now Shivdutt was visiting the local land registry office in Uttar Pradesh, and he discovered that official records were listing him as dead. His land was no longer registered in his name. His brothers, Chandrabhan and Phoolchand, were also listed as dead.
Family members had bribed officials to interrupt the hereditary transfer of land by having the brothers declared dead, allowing them to inherit their father's share of the ancestral farmland. Because of this, all three brothers and their families had to vacate their home. According to the Yadav family, the local court has been scheduling a case review since 2001, but a judge has never appeared.
There are several instances in Uttar Pradesh of people dying before their case is given a proper review. Shivdutt's father's death and a want for his property led to this corruption. He was laid to rest in the Ganges River, where the dead are cremated along the banks of the river or tied to heavy stones and sunk in the water.
Photographing these brothers was a disorienting exchange because on paper they don't exist, and a photograph is so often used as an evidence of life. Yet, these men remain dead. This quandary led to the title of the project, which considers in many ways that we are all the living dead and that we in some ways represent ghosts of the past and the future.
So this story is the first of 18 chapters in my new body of work titled "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters." And for this work, I traveled around the world over a four-year period researching and recording bloodlines and their related stories. I was interested in ideas surrounding fate and whether our fate is determined by blood, chance or circumstance. The subjects I documented ranged from feuding families in Brazil to victims of genocide in Bosnia to the first woman to hijack an airplane and the living dead in India. In each chapter, you can see the external forces of governance, power and territory or religion colliding with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance.
Each work that I make is comprised of three segments. On the left are one or more portrait panels in which I systematically order the members of a given bloodline. This is followed by a text panel, it's designed in scroll form, in which I construct the narrative at stake. And then on the right is what I refer to as a footnote panel. It's a space that's more intuitive in which I present fragments of the story, beginnings of other stories, photographic evidence. And it's meant to kind of reflect how we engage with histories or stories on the Internet, in a less linear form. So it's more disordered. And this disorder is in direct contrast to the unalterable order of a bloodline.
In my past projects I've often worked in serial form, documenting things that have the appearance of being comprehensive through a determined title and a determined presentation, but in fact, are fairly abstract. In this project I wanted to work in the opposite direction and find an absolute catalog, something that I couldn't interrupt, curate or edit by choice. This led me to blood. A bloodline is determined and ordered. But the project centers on the collision of order and disorder -- the order of blood butting up against the disorder represented in the often chaotic and violent stories that are the subjects of my chapters.
In chapter two, I photograph the descendants of Arthur Ruppin. He was sent in 1907 to Palestine by the Zionist organization to look at areas for Jewish settlement and acquire land for Jewish settlement. He oversaw land acquisition on behalf of the Palestine Land Development Company whose work led to the establishment of a Jewish state. Through my research at the Zionist Archives in Jerusalem, I wanted to look at the early paperwork of the establishment of the Jewish state. And I found these maps which you see here. And these are studies commissioned by the Zionist organization for alternative areas for Jewish settlement. In this, I was interested in the consequences of geography and imagining how the world would be different if Israel were in Uganda, which is what these maps demonstrate. These archives in Jerusalem, they maintain a card index file of the earliest immigrants and applicants for immigration to Palestine, and later Israel, from 1919 to 1965.
Chapter three: Joseph Nyamwanda Jura Ondijo treated patients outside of Kisumu, Kenya for AIDS, tuberculosis, infertility, mental illness, evil spirits. He's most often paid for his services in cash, cows or goats. But sometimes when his female patients can't afford his services, their families give the women to Jura in exchange for medical treatment. As a result of these transactions, Jura has nine wives, 32 children and 63 grandchildren. In his bloodline you see the children and grandchildren here.
Two of his wives were brought to him suffering from infertility and he cured them, three for evil spirits, one for an asthmatic condition and severe chest pain and two wives Ondijo claims he took for love, paying their families a total of 16 cows. One wife deserted him and another passed away during treatment for evil spirits. Polygamy is widely practiced in Kenya. It's common among a privileged class capable of paying numerous dowries and keeping multiple homes. Instances of prominent social and political figures in polygamous relationships has led to the perception of polygamy as a symbol of wealth, status and power.
You may notice in several of the chapters that I photographed there are empty portraits. These empty portraits represent individuals, living individuals, who couldn't be present. And the reasons for their absence are given in my text panel. They include dengue fever, imprisonment, army service, women not allowed to be photographed for religious and cultural reasons. And in this particular chapter, it's children whose mothers wouldn't allow them to travel to the photographic shoot for fear that their fathers would kidnap them during it.
Twenty-four European rabbits were brought to Australia in 1859 by a British settler for sporting purposes, for hunting. And within a hundred years, that population of 24 had exploded to half a billion. The European rabbit has no natural predators in Australia, and it competes with native wildlife and damages native plants and degrades the land. Since the 1950s, Australia has been introducing lethal diseases into the wild rabbit population to control growth. These rabbits were bred at a government facility, Biosecurity Queensland, where they bred three bloodlines of rabbits and have infected them with a lethal disease and are monitoring their progress to see if it will effectively kill them. So they're testing its virulence. During the course of this trial, all of the rabbits died, except for a few, which were euthanized.
Haigh's Chocolate, in collaboration with the Foundation for Rabbit-Free Australia, stopped all production of the Easter Bunny in chocolate and has replaced it with the Easter Bilby. Now this was done to counter the annual celebration of rabbits and presumably make the public more comfortable with the killing of rabbits and promote an animal that's native to Australia, and actually an animal that is threatened by the European rabbit.
In chapter seven, I focus on the effects of a genocidal act on one bloodline. So over a two-day period, six individuals from this bloodline were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. This is the only work in which I visually represent the dead. But I only represent those that were killed in the Srebrenica massacre, which is recorded as the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. And during this massacre, 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically executed.
So when you look at a detail of this work, you can see, the man on the upper-left is the father of the woman sitting next to him. Her name is Zumra. She is followed by her four children, all of whom were killed in the Srebrenica massacre. Following those four children is Zumra's younger sister who is then followed by her children who were killed as well. During the time I was in Bosnia, the mortal remains of Zumra's eldest son were exhumed from a mass grave. And I was therefore able to photograph the fully assembled remains. However, the other individuals are represented by these blue slides, which show tooth and bone samples that were matched to DNA evidence collected from family members to prove they were the identities of those individuals. They've all been given a proper burial, so what remains are these blue slides at the International Commission for Missing Persons.
These are personal effects dug up from a mass grave that are awaiting identification from family members and graffiti at the Potochari battery factory, which was where the Dutch U.N. soldiers were staying, and also the Serbian soldiers later during the times of the executions. This is video footage used at the Milosevic trial, which from top to bottom shows a Serbian scorpion unit being blessed by an Orthodox priest before rounding up the boys and men and killing them.
Chapter 15 is more of a performance piece. I solicited China's State Council Information Office in 2009 to select a multi-generational bloodline to represent China for this project. They chose a large family from Beijing for its size, and they declined to give me any further reasoning for their choice. This is one of the rare situations where I have no empty portraits. Everyone showed up. You can also see the evolution of the one-child-only policy as it travels through the bloodline.
Previously known as the Department of Foreign Propaganda, the State Council Information Office is responsible for all of China's external publicity operations. It controls all foreign media and image production outside of China from foreign media working within China. It also monitors the Internet and instructs local media on how to handle any potentially controversial issues, including Tibet, ethnic minorities, Human Rights, religion, democracy movements and terrorism. For the footnote panel in this work, this office instructed me to photograph their central television tower in Beijing. And I also photographed the gift bag they gave me when I left.
These are the descendants of Hans Frank who was Hitler's personal legal advisor and governor general of occupied Poland. Now this bloodline includes numerous empty portraits, highlighting a complex relationship to one's family history. The reasons for these absences include people who declined participation. There's also parents who participated who wouldn't let their children participate because they thought they were too young to decide for themselves. Another section of the family presented their clothing, as opposed to their physical presence, because they didn't want to be identified with the past that I was highlighting. And finally, another individual sat for me from behind and later rescinded his participation, so I had to pixelate him out so he's unrecognizable.
In the footnote panel that accompanies this work I photographed an official Adolph Hitler postage stamp and an imitation of that stamp produced by British Intelligence with Hans Frank's image on it. It was released in Poland to create friction between Frank and Hitler, so that Hitler would imagine Frank was trying to usurp his power.
Again, talking about fate, I was interested in the stories and fate of particular works of art. These paintings were taken by Hans Frank during the time of the Third Reich. And I'm interested in the impact of their absence and presence through time. They are Leonardo da Vinci's "Lady With an Ermine," Rembrandt's "Landscape With Good Samaritan" and Raphael's "Portrait of a Youth," which has never been found.
Chapter 12 highlights people being born into a battle that is not of their making, but becomes their own. So this is the Ferraz family and the Novaes family. And they are in an active blood feud. This feud has been going on since 1991 in Northeast Brazil in Pernambuco, and it involved the deaths of 20 members of the families and 40 others associated with the feud, including hired hit men, innocent bystanders and friends. Tensions between these two families date back to 1913 when there was a dispute over local political power. But it got violent in the last two decades and includes decapitation and the death of two mayors. Installed into a protective wall surrounding the suburban home of Louis Novaes, who's the head of the Novaes family, are these turret holes, which were used for shooting and looking.
Brazil's northeast state of Pernambuco is one of the nation's most violent regions. It's rooted in a principle of retributive justice, or an eye for an eye, so retaliatory killings have led to several deaths in the area. This story, like many of the stories in my chapters, reads almost as an archetypal episode, like something out of Shakespeare, that's happening now and will happen again in the future. I'm interested in these ideas of repetition. So after I returned home, I received word that one member of the family had been shot 30 times in the face.
Chapter 17 is an exploration of the absence of a bloodline and the absence of a history. Children at this Ukrainian orphanage are between the ages of six and 16. This piece is ordered by age because it can't be ordered by blood. In a 12-month period when I was at the orphanage, only one child had been adopted. Children have to leave the orphanage at age 16, despite the fact that there's often nowhere for them to go. It's commonly reported in Ukraine that children, when leaving the orphanage are targeted for human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution. Many have to turn to criminal activity for their survival, and high rates of suicide are recorded.
This is a boys' bedroom. There's an insufficient supply of beds at the orphanage and not enough warm clothing. Children bathe infrequently because the hot water isn't turned on until October. This is a girls' bedroom. And the director listed the orphanage's most urgent needs as an industrial size washing machine and dryer, four vacuum cleaners, two computers, a video projector, a copy machine, winter shoes and a dentist's drill. This photograph, which I took at the orphanage of one of the classrooms, shows a sign which I had translated when I got home. And it reads: "Those who do not know their past are not worthy of their future."
There are many more chapters in this project. This is just an abridged rendering of over a thousand images. And this mass pile of images and stories forms an archive. And within this accumulation of images and texts, I'm struggling to find patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself. But archives exist because there's something that can't necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information that's collected. And there's this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between. It's almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming. And in this, I'm considering, is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed July 2009 at TEDGlobal 2009
Taryn Simon: Photographs of secret sites
Taryn Simon exhibits her startling take on photography — to reveal worlds and people we would never see otherwise. She shares two projects: one documents otherworldly locations typically kept secret from the public, the other involves haunting portraits of men convicted for crimes they did not commit.
Transcript:
Okay, so 90 percent of my photographic process is, in fact, not photographic. It involves a campaign of letter writing, research and phone calls to access my subjects, which can range from Hamas leaders in Gaza to a hibernating black bear in its cave in West Virginia. And oddly, the most notable letter of rejection I ever received came from Walt Disney World, a seemingly innocuous site.
And it read -- I'm just going to read a key sentence: "Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast upon guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to."
Photography threatens fantasy. They didn't want to let my camera in because it confronts constructed realities, myths and beliefs, and provides what appears to be evidence of a truth. But there are multiple truths attached to every image, depending on the creator's intention, the viewer and the context in which it is presented.
Over a five year period following September 11th, when the American media and government were seeking hidden and unknown sites beyond its borders, most notably weapons of mass destruction, I chose to look inward at that which was integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning. I wanted to confront the boundaries of the citizen, self-imposed and real, and confront the divide between privileged and public access to knowledge.
It was a critical moment in American history and global history where one felt they didn't have access to accurate information. And I wanted to see the center with my own eyes, but what I came away with is a photograph. And it's just another place from which to observe, and the understanding that there are no absolute, all-knowing insiders. And the outsider can never really reach the core.
I'm going to run through some of the photographs in this series. It's titled, "An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar," and it's comprised of nearly 70 images. In this context I'll just show you a few. This is a nuclear waste storage and encapsulation facility at Hanford site in Washington State, where there are over 1,900 stainless steel capsules containing nuclear waste submerged in water. A human standing in front of an unprotected capsule would die instantly. And I found one section amongst all of these that actually resembled the outline of the United States of America, which you can see here.
And a big part of the work that is sort of absent in this context is text. So I create these two poles. Every image is accompanied with a very detailed factual text. And what I'm most interested in is the invisible space between a text and its accompanying image, and how the image is transformed by the text and the text by the image. So, at best, the image is meant to float away into abstraction and multiple truths and fantasy. And then the text functions as this cruel anchor that kind of nails it to the ground. But in this context I'm just going to read an abridged version of those texts.
This is a cryopreservation unit, and it holds the bodies of the wife and mother of cryonics pioneer Robert Ettinger, who hoped to be awoken one day to extended life in good health, with advancements in science and technology, all for the cost of 35 thousand dollars, for forever.
This is a 21-year-old Palestinian woman undergoing hymenoplasty. Hymenoplasty is a surgical procedure which restores the virginal state, allowing her to adhere to certain cultural expectations regarding virginity and marriage. So it essentially reconstructs a ruptured hymen, allowing her to bleed upon having sexual intercourse, to simulate the loss of virginity.
This is a jury simulation deliberation room, and you can see beyond that two-way mirror jury advisers standing in a room behind the mirror. And they observe deliberations after mock trial proceedings so that they can better advise their clients how to adjust their trial strategy to have the outcome that they're hoping for. This process costs 60,000 dollars.
This is a U.S. Customs and Border Protection room, a contraband room, at John F. Kennedy International Airport. On that table you can see 48 hours' worth of seized goods from passengers entering in to the United States. There is a pig's head and African cane rats. And part of my photographic work is I'm not just documenting what's there. I do take certain liberties and intervene. And in this I really wanted it to resemble an early still-life painting, so I spent some time with the smells and items.
This is the exhibited art on the walls of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, their original headquarters building. And the CIA has had a long history with both covert and public cultural diplomacy efforts. And it's speculated that some of their interest in the arts was designed to counter Soviet communism and promote what it considered to be pro-American thoughts and aesthetics. And one of the art forms that elicited the interest of the agency, and had thus come under question, is abstract expressionism.
This is the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, and on a six acre plot there are approximately 75 cadavers at any given time that are being studied by forensic anthropologists and researchers who are interested in monitoring a rate of corpse decomposition. And in this particular photograph the body of a young boy has been used to reenact a crime scene.
This is the only federally funded site where it is legal to cultivate cannabis for scientific research in the United States. It's a research crop marijuana grow room.
And part of the work that I hope for is that there is a sort of disorienting entropy where you can't find any discernible formula in how these things -- they sort of awkwardly jump from government to science to religion to security -- and you can't completely understand how information is being distributed.
These are transatlantic submarine communication cables that travel across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting North America to Europe. They carry over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, and in a lot of the government and technology sites there was just this very apparent vulnerability. This one is almost humorous because it feels like I could just snip all of that conversation in one easy cut. But stuff did feel like it could have been taken 30 or 40 years ago, like it was locked in the Cold War era and hadn't necessarily progressed.
This is a Braille edition of Playboy magazine. (Laughter) And this is ... a division of the Library of Congress produces a free national library service for the blind and visually impaired, and the publications they choose to publish are based on reader popularity. And Playboy is always in the top few. (Laughter) But you'd be surprised, they don't do the photographs. It's just the text. (Laughter)
This is an avian quarantine facility where all imported birds coming into America are required to undergo a 30-day quarantine, where they are tested for diseases including Exotic Newcastle Disease and Avian Influenza. This film shows the testing of a new explosive fill on a warhead. And the Air Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is responsible for the deployment and testing of all air-delivered weaponry coming from the United States. And the film was shot on 72 millimeter, government-issue film. And that red dot is a marking on the government-issue film.
All living white tigers in North America are the result of selective inbreeding -- that would be mother to son, father to daughter, sister to brother -- to allow for the genetic conditions that create a salable white tiger. Meaning white fur, ice blue eyes, a pink nose. And the majority of these white tigers are not born in a salable state and are killed at birth. It's a very violent process that is little known. And the white tiger is obviously celebrated in several forms of entertainment. Kenny was born. He actually made it to adulthood. He has since passed away, but was mentally retarded and suffers from severe bone abnormalities.
This, on a lighter note, is at George Lucas' personal archive. This is the Death Star. And it's shown here in its true orientation. In the context of "Star Wars: Return of the Jedi," its mirror image is presented. They flip the negative. And you can see the photoetched brass detailing, and the painted acrylic facade. In the context of the film, this is a deep-space battle station of the Galactic Empire, capable of annihilating planets and civilizations, and in reality it measures about four feet by two feet. (Laughter)
This is at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. It's a Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain site. Essentially they've simulated a city for urban combat, and this is one of the structures that exists in that city. It's called the World Church of God. It's supposed to be a generic site of worship. And after I took this photograph, they constructed a wall around the World Church of God to mimic the set-up of mosques in Afghanistan or Iraq. And I worked with Mehta Vihar who creates virtual simulations for the army for tactical practice. And we put that wall around the World Church of God, and also used the characters and vehicles and explosions that are offered in the video games for the army. And I put them into my photograph.
This is live HIV virus at Harvard Medical School, who is working with the U.S. Government to develop sterilizing immunity.
And Alhurra is a U.S. Government- sponsored Arabic language television network that distributes news and information to over 22 countries in the Arab world. It runs 24 hours a day, commercial free. However, it's illegal to broadcast Alhurra within the United States. And in 2004, they developed a channel called Alhurra Iraq, which specifically deals with events occurring in Iraq and is broadcast to Iraq.
Now I'm going to move on to another project I did. It's titled "The Innocents." And for the men in these photographs, photography had been used to create a fantasy. Contradicting its function as evidence of a truth, in these instances it furthered the fabrication of a lie. I traveled across the United States photographing men and women who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes they did not commit, violent crimes.
I investigate photography's ability to blur truth and fiction, and its influence on memory, which can lead to severe, even lethal consequences. For the men in these photographs, the primary cause of their wrongful conviction was mistaken identification. A victim or eyewitness identifies a suspected perpetrator through law enforcement's use of images. But through exposure to composite sketches, Polaroids, mug shots and line-ups, eyewitness testimony can change.
I'll give you an example from a case. A woman was raped and presented with a series of photographs from which to identify her attacker. She saw some similarities in one of the photographs, but couldn't quite make a positive identification. Days later, she is presented with another photo array of all new photographs, except that one photograph that she had some draw to from the earlier array is repeated in the second array. And a positive identification is made because the photograph replaced the memory, if there ever was an actual memory.
Photography offered the criminal justice system a tool that transformed innocent citizens into criminals, and the criminal justice system failed to recognize the limitations of relying on photographic identifications.
Frederick Daye, who is photographed at his alibi location, where 13 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime. He was convicted by an all-white jury of rape, kidnapping and vehicle theft. And he served 10 years of a life sentence. Now DNA exonerated Frederick and it also implicated another man who was serving time in prison. But the victim refused to press charges because she claimed that law enforcement had permanently altered her memory through the use of Frederick's photograph.
Charles Fain was convicted of kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl walking to school. He served 18 years of a death sentence. I photographed him at the scene of the crime at the Snake River in Idaho. And I photographed all of the wrongfully convicted at sites that came to particular significance in the history of their wrongful conviction. The scene of arrest, the scene of misidentification, the alibi location. And here, the scene of the crime, it's this place to which he's never been, but changed his life forever. So photographing there, I was hoping to highlight the tenuous relationship between truth and fiction, in both his life and in photography.
Calvin Washington was convicted of capital murder. He served 13 years of a life sentence in Waco, Texas.
Larry Mayes, I photographed at the scene of arrest, where he hid between two mattresses in Gary, Indiana, in this very room to hide from the police. He ended up serving 18 and a half years of an 80 year sentence for rape and robbery. The victim failed to identify Larry in two live lineups and then made a positive identification, days later, from a photo array.
Larry Youngblood served eight years of a 10 and half year sentence in Arizona for the abduction and repeated sodomizing of a 10 year old boy at a carnival. He is photographed at his alibi location.
Ron Williamson. Ron was convicted of the rape and murder of a barmaid at a club, and served 11 years of a death sentence. I photographed Ron at a baseball field because he had been drafted to the Oakland A's to play professional baseball just before his conviction. And the state's key witness in Ron's case was, in the end, the actual perpetrator.
Ronald Jones served eight years of a death sentence for rape and murder of a 28-year-old woman. I photographed him at the scene of arrest in Chicago.
William Gregory was convicted of rape and burglary. He served seven years of a 70 year sentence in Kentucky.
Timothy Durham, who I photographed at his alibi location where 11 witnesses placed him at the time of the crime, was convicted of 3.5 years of a 3220 year sentence, for several charges of rape and robbery. He had been misidentified by an 11-year-old victim.
Troy Webb is photographed here at the scene of the crime in Virginia. He was convicted of rape, kidnapping and robbery, and served seven years of a 47 year sentence. Troy's picture was in a photo array that the victim tentatively had some draw toward, but said he looked too old. The police went and found a photograph of Troy Webb from four years earlier, which they entered into a photo array days later, and he was positively identified.
Now I'm going to leave you with a self portrait. And it reiterates that distortion is a constant, and our eyes are easily deceived. That's it. Thank you. (Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Laura Carstensen: Older people are happier
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed December 2011 at TEDxWomen 2011
Laura Carstensen: Older people are happier
In the 20th century we added an unprecedented number of years to our lifespans, but is the quality of life as good? Surprisingly, yes! At TEDxWomen psychologist Laura Carstensen shows research that demonstrates that as people get older they become happier, more content, and have a more positive outlook on the world. (Filmed at TEDxWomen.)
Transcript:
People are living longer and societies are getting grayer. You hear about it all the time. You read about it in your newspapers. You hear about it on your television sets. Sometimes I'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency, even ease. But make no mistake, longer lives can and, I believe, will improve quality of life at all ages.
Now to put this in perspective, let me just zoom out for a minute. More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined. In the blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of time that we're living. So if you ever feel like you don't have this aging thing quite pegged, don't kick yourself. It's brand new.
And because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population, with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age is being reshaped into a rectangle.
And now, if you're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics, these are the ones that should do it. Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the Developed World are having the opportunity to grow old.
How did this happen? Well we're no genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago. This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture -- the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being. Through cultural changes, our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives.
Now there are problems associated with aging -- diseases, poverty, loss of social status. It's hardly time to rest on our laurels. But the more we learn about aging, the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate. Aging brings some rather remarkable improvements -- increased knowledge, expertise -- and emotional aspects of life improve. That's right, older people are happy. They're happier than middle-aged people, and younger people certainly. Study after study is coming to the same conclusion.
The CDC recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week. And fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people, and younger people as well. And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day. And stress, worry, anger all decrease with age.
Now social scientists call this the paradox of aging. After all, aging is not a piece of cake. So we've asked all sorts of questions to see if we could undo this finding. We've asked whether it may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations. That is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older. We've asked, well maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence. (Laughter) But the more we've tried to disavow this finding, the more evidence we find to support it.
Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period. Originally the sample was aged 18 to 94. And we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older. Our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time, and we'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times. And every time we paged them we'd ask them to answer several questions -- On a one to seven scale, how happy are you right now? How sad are you right now? How frustrated are you right now? -- so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives.
And using this intense study of individuals, we find that it's not one particular generation that's doing better than the others, but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience. Now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages. And there is a slight downturn. But at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood.
Now it's really too simplistic to say that older people are "happy." In our study, they are more positive, but they're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions -- sadness at the same time you experience happiness; you know, that tear in the eye when you're smiling at a friend. And other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably. They're more accepting of sadness than younger people are. And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly-charged emotional conflicts and debates. Older people can view injustice with compassion, but not despair.
And all things being equal, older people direct their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, to positive information more than negative. If we show older, middle-aged, younger people images, like the ones you see on the screen, and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can, older people, but not younger people, remember more positive images than negative images. We've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies, some frowning, some smiling. Older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning, angry faces. In day-to-day life, this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction.
But as social scientists, we continue to ask about possible alternatives. We've said, well maybe older people report more positive emotions because they're cognitively impaired. (Laughter) We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions? Maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we're unable to process negative emotions anymore. But that's not the case. The most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect the most. And under conditions where it really matters, older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information.
So how can this be? Well in our research, we've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time -- not just clock time and calendar time, but lifetime. And if there's a paradox of aging, it's that recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways. When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. We might spend time with people we don't even like because it's somehow interesting. We might learn something unexpected. (Laughter) We go on blind dates. (Laughter) You know, after all, if it doesn't work out, there's always tomorrow. People over 50 don't go on blind dates.
(Laughter)
As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly. We take less notice of trivial matters. We savor life. We're more appreciative, more open to reconciliation. We invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better, so we're happier day-to-day. But that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice.
By 2015, there will be more people in the United States over the age of 60 than under 15. What will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people? The numbers won't determine the outcome. Culture will. If we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people, then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages. Societies with millions of talented, emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them, armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known.
My father, who is 92, likes to say, "Let's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed December 2011 at TEDxWomen 2011
Laura Carstensen: Older people are happier
In the 20th century we added an unprecedented number of years to our lifespans, but is the quality of life as good? Surprisingly, yes! At TEDxWomen psychologist Laura Carstensen shows research that demonstrates that as people get older they become happier, more content, and have a more positive outlook on the world. (Filmed at TEDxWomen.)
Transcript:
People are living longer and societies are getting grayer. You hear about it all the time. You read about it in your newspapers. You hear about it on your television sets. Sometimes I'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency, even ease. But make no mistake, longer lives can and, I believe, will improve quality of life at all ages.
Now to put this in perspective, let me just zoom out for a minute. More years were added to average life expectancy in the 20th century than all years added across all prior millennia of human evolution combined. In the blink of an eye, we nearly doubled the length of time that we're living. So if you ever feel like you don't have this aging thing quite pegged, don't kick yourself. It's brand new.
And because fertility rates fell across that very same period that life expectancy was going up, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of age in the population, with many young ones at the bottom winnowed to a tiny peak of older people who make it and survive to old age is being reshaped into a rectangle.
And now, if you're the kind of person who can get chills from population statistics, these are the ones that should do it. Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the Developed World are having the opportunity to grow old.
How did this happen? Well we're no genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago. This increase in life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture -- the crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well-being. Through cultural changes, our ancestors largely eliminated early death so that people can now live out their full lives.
Now there are problems associated with aging -- diseases, poverty, loss of social status. It's hardly time to rest on our laurels. But the more we learn about aging, the clearer it becomes that a sweeping downward course is grossly inaccurate. Aging brings some rather remarkable improvements -- increased knowledge, expertise -- and emotional aspects of life improve. That's right, older people are happy. They're happier than middle-aged people, and younger people certainly. Study after study is coming to the same conclusion.
The CDC recently conducted a survey where they asked respondents simply to tell them whether they experienced significant psychological distress in the previous week. And fewer older people answered affirmatively to that question than middle-aged people, and younger people as well. And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress and worry and anger they had experienced the previous day. And stress, worry, anger all decrease with age.
Now social scientists call this the paradox of aging. After all, aging is not a piece of cake. So we've asked all sorts of questions to see if we could undo this finding. We've asked whether it may be that the current generations of older people are and always have been the greatest generations. That is that younger people today may not typically experience these improvements as they grow older. We've asked, well maybe older people are just trying to put a positive spin on an otherwise depressing existence. (Laughter) But the more we've tried to disavow this finding, the more evidence we find to support it.
Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study where we followed the same group of people over a 10-year period. Originally the sample was aged 18 to 94. And we studied whether and how their emotional experiences changed as they grew older. Our participants would carry electronic pagers for a week at a time, and we'd page them throughout the day and evenings at random times. And every time we paged them we'd ask them to answer several questions -- On a one to seven scale, how happy are you right now? How sad are you right now? How frustrated are you right now? -- so that we could get a sense of the kinds of emotions and feelings they were having in their day-to-day lives.
And using this intense study of individuals, we find that it's not one particular generation that's doing better than the others, but the same individuals over time come to report relatively greater positive experience. Now you see this slight downturn at very advanced ages. And there is a slight downturn. But at no point does it return to the levels we see in early adulthood.
Now it's really too simplistic to say that older people are "happy." In our study, they are more positive, but they're also more likely than younger people to experience mixed emotions -- sadness at the same time you experience happiness; you know, that tear in the eye when you're smiling at a friend. And other research has shown that older people seem to engage with sadness more comfortably. They're more accepting of sadness than younger people are. And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly-charged emotional conflicts and debates. Older people can view injustice with compassion, but not despair.
And all things being equal, older people direct their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, to positive information more than negative. If we show older, middle-aged, younger people images, like the ones you see on the screen, and we later ask them to recall all the images that they can, older people, but not younger people, remember more positive images than negative images. We've asked older and younger people to view faces in laboratory studies, some frowning, some smiling. Older people look toward the smiling faces and away from the frowning, angry faces. In day-to-day life, this translates into greater enjoyment and satisfaction.
But as social scientists, we continue to ask about possible alternatives. We've said, well maybe older people report more positive emotions because they're cognitively impaired. (Laughter) We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions? Maybe our neural centers in our brain are degraded such that we're unable to process negative emotions anymore. But that's not the case. The most mentally sharp older adults are the ones who show this positivity effect the most. And under conditions where it really matters, older people do process the negative information just as well as the positive information.
So how can this be? Well in our research, we've found that these changes are grounded fundamentally in the uniquely human ability to monitor time -- not just clock time and calendar time, but lifetime. And if there's a paradox of aging, it's that recognizing that we won't live forever changes our perspective on life in positive ways. When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. We might spend time with people we don't even like because it's somehow interesting. We might learn something unexpected. (Laughter) We go on blind dates. (Laughter) You know, after all, if it doesn't work out, there's always tomorrow. People over 50 don't go on blind dates.
(Laughter)
As we age, our time horizons grow shorter and our goals change. When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities most clearly. We take less notice of trivial matters. We savor life. We're more appreciative, more open to reconciliation. We invest in more emotionally important parts of life, and life gets better, so we're happier day-to-day. But that same shift in perspective leads us to have less tolerance than ever for injustice.
By 2015, there will be more people in the United States over the age of 60 than under 15. What will happen to societies that are top-heavy with older people? The numbers won't determine the outcome. Culture will. If we invest in science and technology and find solutions for the real problems that older people face and we capitalize on the very real strengths of older people, then added years of life can dramatically improve quality of life at all ages. Societies with millions of talented, emotionally stable citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generations before them, armed with knowledge about the practical matters of life and motivated to solve the big issues can be better societies than we have ever known.
My father, who is 92, likes to say, "Let's stop talking only about how to save the old folks and start talking about how to get them to save us all."
Thank you.
(Applause)
MUS/GralInt-Get Lucky - Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams LYRICS (Official Audio)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Daft Punk - Get Lucky (Official Audio) ft. Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers
Published on Apr 18, 2013
Get Lucky - Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams LYRICS (Official Audio)
Published on Apr 20, 2013
Daft Punk performing "Get Lucky" featuring Nile Rodgers & Pharrell Williams , from tthe Random Access Memories, video editing & subtitled by myself.
Source: www.youtube.com
Daft Punk - Get Lucky (Official Audio) ft. Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers
Published on Apr 18, 2013
Get Lucky - Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams LYRICS (Official Audio)
Published on Apr 20, 2013
Daft Punk performing "Get Lucky" featuring Nile Rodgers & Pharrell Williams , from tthe Random Access Memories, video editing & subtitled by myself.
Source: www.youtube.com
Saturday, July 25, 2015
SH/BUS/GralInt-Amira Willighagen - La niña holandesa que sorprende al mundo-
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Amira Willighagen- (Subtitulos Español) ¡¡ No te lo pierdas !!!
Published on Nov 6, 2013
Amira Willighagen - La niña holandesa que sorprende al mundo-
Participa en el programa Holandes de talentos y gana el certamen
Aqui, también, la final: http://youtu.be/_voUAXZtXpk
Source:www.youtube.com
Amira Willighagen- (Subtitulos Español) ¡¡ No te lo pierdas !!!
Published on Nov 6, 2013
Amira Willighagen - La niña holandesa que sorprende al mundo-
Participa en el programa Holandes de talentos y gana el certamen
Aqui, también, la final: http://youtu.be/_voUAXZtXpk
Source:www.youtube.com
SHBUS/GralInt-TOP 30 BEST MOMENTS OF TALENT AND THE BIGGEST SURPRISE EVER
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
TOP 30 BEST MOMENTS OF TALENT AND THE BIGGEST SURPRISE EVER
Published on Oct 4, 2013
Source:www.youtube.com
TOP 30 BEST MOMENTS OF TALENT AND THE BIGGEST SURPRISE EVER
Published on Oct 4, 2013
Source:www.youtube.com
SHBUS/GralInt- Attraction Performances- Britain's Got Talent 2013
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Attraction (Shadow Theatre Group) 1st Audition Britain's Got Talent
Published on Apr 13, 2013
Attraction perform an emotional love story.
***SONG: EMELI SANDÉ - READ ALL ABOUT IT (PART 3)*** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFXRQK...
The song at the *END* of the video is 'Footprints In The Sand' by Leona Lewis
Simon Cowell cry - Attraction Semi Final [HD] - Britain's Got Talent 2013
Published on Jun 3, 2013
Britain's Got Talent 2013: Attraction the Shadow Theater Group bring the house down & make Simon Cowell cry like a baby, at semi final
Attraction had more to prove tonight than any other act on Britain's Got Talent.
The Hungarian dancers have been the bookies' favourite to win the ITV series ever since their first audition and when they made Amanda Holden cry with their sad and moving routine, they seemed to win a place in the public's heart.
Tonight, the troupe promised new scenes and a very 'special' performance for the semi final, and revealed that they were desperate to make next weekend's grand finale.
Attraction tweeted their fans today saying:
"Our team have a lot planned for tomorrows live show!
Last minute rehearsals tomorrow! Wish the team luck! @AttractionBLT x"
One of their performers revealed:
"Tonight we are telling a story. It's my story and it's a very emotional story and I dedicate it to my mum."
The routine started with a mother and a baby and their life together throughout the boy's early and formative years. The scenes took in Africa, India, showed the Taj Mahal and and elephant and all just with lights and bodies. It was really very amazing.
The tears were definitely flowing at the end, when the son nursed his mother as she died and the routine ended with his now pregnant wife comforting him with the sound of his new baby's heartbeat.
The judges said:
David Walliams: It is quite simply one of the most beautiful things we have ever seen. Absolutely stunning.
Alesha Dixon: Game over. That was incredible.
Amanda Holden: It's just remarkable how something so simple and beautiful can strike at your heart within seconds. Simon was crying, you have turned us into a complete mess.
Simon Cowell: Guys I am seriously blown away by that. I know the show is Britain's Got Talent but I am honored that you chose the show to show your talent. I genuinely feel privileged that we just seen one of the most amazing things we have ever seen on this show.
Did you enjoy the performance tonight? Leave your comments below...
======================================
Source: http://www.unrealitytv.co.uk/britains...
Original Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/BritainsG...
Category
Entertainment
License
Standard YouTube License
Source:www,youtube.com
Attraction (Shadow Theatre Group) 1st Audition Britain's Got Talent
Published on Apr 13, 2013
Attraction perform an emotional love story.
***SONG: EMELI SANDÉ - READ ALL ABOUT IT (PART 3)*** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFXRQK...
The song at the *END* of the video is 'Footprints In The Sand' by Leona Lewis
Simon Cowell cry - Attraction Semi Final [HD] - Britain's Got Talent 2013
Published on Jun 3, 2013
Britain's Got Talent 2013: Attraction the Shadow Theater Group bring the house down & make Simon Cowell cry like a baby, at semi final
Attraction had more to prove tonight than any other act on Britain's Got Talent.
The Hungarian dancers have been the bookies' favourite to win the ITV series ever since their first audition and when they made Amanda Holden cry with their sad and moving routine, they seemed to win a place in the public's heart.
Tonight, the troupe promised new scenes and a very 'special' performance for the semi final, and revealed that they were desperate to make next weekend's grand finale.
Attraction tweeted their fans today saying:
"Our team have a lot planned for tomorrows live show!
Last minute rehearsals tomorrow! Wish the team luck! @AttractionBLT x"
One of their performers revealed:
"Tonight we are telling a story. It's my story and it's a very emotional story and I dedicate it to my mum."
The routine started with a mother and a baby and their life together throughout the boy's early and formative years. The scenes took in Africa, India, showed the Taj Mahal and and elephant and all just with lights and bodies. It was really very amazing.
The tears were definitely flowing at the end, when the son nursed his mother as she died and the routine ended with his now pregnant wife comforting him with the sound of his new baby's heartbeat.
The judges said:
David Walliams: It is quite simply one of the most beautiful things we have ever seen. Absolutely stunning.
Alesha Dixon: Game over. That was incredible.
Amanda Holden: It's just remarkable how something so simple and beautiful can strike at your heart within seconds. Simon was crying, you have turned us into a complete mess.
Simon Cowell: Guys I am seriously blown away by that. I know the show is Britain's Got Talent but I am honored that you chose the show to show your talent. I genuinely feel privileged that we just seen one of the most amazing things we have ever seen on this show.
Did you enjoy the performance tonight? Leave your comments below...
======================================
Source: http://www.unrealitytv.co.uk/britains...
Original Video: http://www.youtube.com/user/BritainsG...
Category
Entertainment
License
Standard YouTube License
Source:www,youtube.com
Friday, July 24, 2015
MED/GralInt-Ocho inventos médicos de bajo costo que pueden salvar millones de vidas
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Ocho inventos médicos de bajo costo que pueden salvar millones de vidas
Desde un condón para evitar que una mujer se desangre al dar a luz, hasta una caja mecánica que podría detectar parásitos de la malaria en un segundo
Soluciones simples para grandes problemas y que cuestan pocos dólares: el invento perfecto para países en desarrollo. Foto: Archivo
Desde un condón para evitar que una mujer se desangre al dar a luz, hasta una caja mecánica que podría detectar parásitos de la malaria en un segundo. Algunos de los nuevos avances en tratamiento médico son soluciones simples para grandes problemas, y sólo cuestan unos pocos dólares.
Treinta de ellas fueron elegidas recientemente en un informe de la asociación Innovation Countdown 2030, una iniciativa que identifica tecnologías de gran impacto que pueden transformar el mundo en los próximos 15 años.
La iniciativa cuenta con el soporte de la Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation y la Agencia Estadounidense para el Desarrollo Internacional, entre otras y tiene como objetivo que estén disponibles para todo el mundo, aunque los derechos de patente son a veces un desafío.
Uno de cada 10 niños tienen problemas para respirar al nacer. Foto: Archivo / BBC
Son herramientas que podrían revolucionar la salud mundial y salvar millones de vidas en todo el planeta. Seleccionamos los ocho mejores. Una ayuda de nailon para partos complicados
Originalmente creado por el mecánico argentino Jorge Odón, este artilugio de bajo coste ayuda durante las etapas finales de los partos difíciles, donde las complicaciones pueden conducir a hemorragias en la madre y la asfixia y traumas en el recién nacido.
El "dispositivo de Odón", una manga de polietileno que se envuelve y se infla alrededor de la cabeza del bebé, es más seguro y fácil de aplicar que el fórceps o un extractor de vacío, siendo una buena alternativa para los trabajadores de salud menos capacitados. Y viene doblado en una pequeña y modesta bolsita, muy útil para lugares remotos.
UNA CAJA PARA BEBER AGUA SEGURA
Con esta solución para tener agua potable se podrían salvar 1,5 millones de vidas. Foto: Archivo / BBC
La máquina de clorar Zimba aborda la crisis del agua en los países en desarrollo y se está probando en hogares de la India, Bangladesh y Nepal.
Esta gran caja azul tiene un dispensador precargado con una solución de hipoclorito de sodio (lejía, en otras palabras).
Cuando está conectado a una fuente de agua, la presión del líquido entrante desencadena la liberación de la cantidad correcta de cloro para desinfectar el agua: una simple solución que los expertos estiman que podría salvar 1,5 millones de vidas para 2030.
UN CONDÓN Y UN CATÉTER PARA SALVAR A LAS MUJERES
Un condón conectado a un catéter. Este dispositivo de bajo coste fue la solución que se le ocurrió al Hospital General de Massachusetts para ayudar a mitigar el gran número de mujeres que morían durante el parto: una cada dos minutos, según las cifras globales de la ONG Saving Lives at Birth.
Este dispositivo crea una presión en el útero que contiene una posible hemorragia. Foto: Archivo / BBC
Este kit de materiales de fácil acceso está destinado a detener la hemorragia severa posparto está actualmente usándose en Kenia y Sierra Leona.
¿Cómo funciona? El condón se inserta en el útero y se infla con agua caliente mediante el catéter, creando así una presión que detiene la hemorragia. El respirador vertical para recién nacidos en riesgo
Uno de cada diez recién nacidos en el mundo tienen problemas para respirar inmediatamente después de nacer. Este reutilizable y fácil de utilizar resucitador está diseñado para prevenir muertes en entornos de bajos recursos, donde puede no haber acceso a un equipo apropiado que ayude a los bebés a respirar.
Tiene un bulbo de plástico que infla los pulmones del bebé inconsciente cuando la enfermera lo aprieta. Y también el diseño vertical es único para mejorar el sellado de la mascarilla en un escenario donde cada partícula de aire cuenta.
ANTICONCEPTIVO EN UN SOLO PINCHAZO
Una simple dosis proporciona tres meses de protección. Foto: Archivo / BBC
El anticonceptivo inyectable es uno de los métodos más populares para prevenir embarazos en los países en desarrollo, pero hasta ahora no ha estado disponible ampliamente en todos los hospitales y centros médicos.
Ahora, una simple dosis de un anticonceptivo, embalado en una burbuja, con una aguja para inyectar bajo la piel está siendo distribuida en Burkina Faso, Níger, Senegal y Uganda.
Un pinchazo proporciona tres meses de protección, y los expertos en salud destacan que puede ser aplicado con un entrenamiento mínimo, lo que podría permitir a las mujeres administrárselas ellas mismas.
DIAGNOSIS DE MALARIA EN UN SEGUNDO
La detección temprana de la malaria es vital, y este invento puede ayudar en esta tarea. Foto: Archivo / BBC
La epidemia mundial de malaria asciende a 200 millones de casos al año y están en riesgo 3,3 millones en todo el mundo.
La detección temprana es crucial, y una gran ayuda en la batalla contra la enfermedad la puede proporcionar esta caja portátil: el dispositivo Evaluación Rápida de la Malaria (RAM en sus siglas en inglés) se desarrolló en 2014 por la corporación Disease Diagnostic Group.
Este equipo utiliza campos magnéticos y luz para detectar parásitos de malaria, un método más simple que aquellos basados en reactivos sensibles a la temperatura. También es más rápido, ya que el análisis de una muestra de sangre puede tomar sólo uno o dos segundos.
CHEQUEO DE OJOS PARA NO EXPERTOS
Una vez recopilados los datos de forma sencilla, se volcarían a una web para que un oftalmólogo los evalúe. Foto: Archivo / BBC
La mayoría de los 300 millones de personas que sufren pérdida de visión importante o ceguera en el mundo viven en países de bajos ingresos, especialmente en Asia. Y los problemas de visión probablemente crecerán con el envejecimiento de la población.
De modo que los expertos creen que el acceso al diagnóstico es clave y mejor cuanto más portable sea el instrumental.
Éste dispositivo de pantallas detecta los primeros signos de enfermedades en los ojos. Muchos otros lo hacen, pero lo que diferencia a este es que fácil de llevar y fácil de manejar por un técnico mínimamente capacitado que luego podrá almacenar los datos en una web para que los evalúe un oftalmólogo que esté en cualquier lugar.
UN DETECTOR DE RIESGO DE PREECLAMPSIA
La preeclampsia es una condición asociada con una presión arterial muy elevada durante el embarazo. Foto: Archivo / BBC
Una de cada 20 mujeres sufre preeclampsia, una condición asociada con una presión arterial muy elevada durante el embarazo que pone a la madre en riesgo de convulsionar y que no muestra signos en numerosas ocasiones hasta que es demasiado tarde.
Aquí entra el Microlife Vital Signs Alert (VSA), una herramienta manual de 20 dólares que puede calcular el riesgo de entrar en shock del paciente y que parpadea en rojo si necesita un tratamiento urgente.
Se está probando en siete países de África y Asia, y próximamente se hará en Sudáfrica, Pakistán y la India.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Ocho inventos médicos de bajo costo que pueden salvar millones de vidas
Desde un condón para evitar que una mujer se desangre al dar a luz, hasta una caja mecánica que podría detectar parásitos de la malaria en un segundo
Soluciones simples para grandes problemas y que cuestan pocos dólares: el invento perfecto para países en desarrollo. Foto: Archivo
Desde un condón para evitar que una mujer se desangre al dar a luz, hasta una caja mecánica que podría detectar parásitos de la malaria en un segundo. Algunos de los nuevos avances en tratamiento médico son soluciones simples para grandes problemas, y sólo cuestan unos pocos dólares.
Treinta de ellas fueron elegidas recientemente en un informe de la asociación Innovation Countdown 2030, una iniciativa que identifica tecnologías de gran impacto que pueden transformar el mundo en los próximos 15 años.
La iniciativa cuenta con el soporte de la Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation y la Agencia Estadounidense para el Desarrollo Internacional, entre otras y tiene como objetivo que estén disponibles para todo el mundo, aunque los derechos de patente son a veces un desafío.
Uno de cada 10 niños tienen problemas para respirar al nacer. Foto: Archivo / BBC
Son herramientas que podrían revolucionar la salud mundial y salvar millones de vidas en todo el planeta. Seleccionamos los ocho mejores. Una ayuda de nailon para partos complicados
Originalmente creado por el mecánico argentino Jorge Odón, este artilugio de bajo coste ayuda durante las etapas finales de los partos difíciles, donde las complicaciones pueden conducir a hemorragias en la madre y la asfixia y traumas en el recién nacido.
El "dispositivo de Odón", una manga de polietileno que se envuelve y se infla alrededor de la cabeza del bebé, es más seguro y fácil de aplicar que el fórceps o un extractor de vacío, siendo una buena alternativa para los trabajadores de salud menos capacitados. Y viene doblado en una pequeña y modesta bolsita, muy útil para lugares remotos.
UNA CAJA PARA BEBER AGUA SEGURA
Con esta solución para tener agua potable se podrían salvar 1,5 millones de vidas. Foto: Archivo / BBC
La máquina de clorar Zimba aborda la crisis del agua en los países en desarrollo y se está probando en hogares de la India, Bangladesh y Nepal.
Esta gran caja azul tiene un dispensador precargado con una solución de hipoclorito de sodio (lejía, en otras palabras).
Cuando está conectado a una fuente de agua, la presión del líquido entrante desencadena la liberación de la cantidad correcta de cloro para desinfectar el agua: una simple solución que los expertos estiman que podría salvar 1,5 millones de vidas para 2030.
UN CONDÓN Y UN CATÉTER PARA SALVAR A LAS MUJERES
Un condón conectado a un catéter. Este dispositivo de bajo coste fue la solución que se le ocurrió al Hospital General de Massachusetts para ayudar a mitigar el gran número de mujeres que morían durante el parto: una cada dos minutos, según las cifras globales de la ONG Saving Lives at Birth.
Este dispositivo crea una presión en el útero que contiene una posible hemorragia. Foto: Archivo / BBC
Este kit de materiales de fácil acceso está destinado a detener la hemorragia severa posparto está actualmente usándose en Kenia y Sierra Leona.
¿Cómo funciona? El condón se inserta en el útero y se infla con agua caliente mediante el catéter, creando así una presión que detiene la hemorragia. El respirador vertical para recién nacidos en riesgo
Uno de cada diez recién nacidos en el mundo tienen problemas para respirar inmediatamente después de nacer. Este reutilizable y fácil de utilizar resucitador está diseñado para prevenir muertes en entornos de bajos recursos, donde puede no haber acceso a un equipo apropiado que ayude a los bebés a respirar.
Tiene un bulbo de plástico que infla los pulmones del bebé inconsciente cuando la enfermera lo aprieta. Y también el diseño vertical es único para mejorar el sellado de la mascarilla en un escenario donde cada partícula de aire cuenta.
ANTICONCEPTIVO EN UN SOLO PINCHAZO
Una simple dosis proporciona tres meses de protección. Foto: Archivo / BBC
El anticonceptivo inyectable es uno de los métodos más populares para prevenir embarazos en los países en desarrollo, pero hasta ahora no ha estado disponible ampliamente en todos los hospitales y centros médicos.
Ahora, una simple dosis de un anticonceptivo, embalado en una burbuja, con una aguja para inyectar bajo la piel está siendo distribuida en Burkina Faso, Níger, Senegal y Uganda.
Un pinchazo proporciona tres meses de protección, y los expertos en salud destacan que puede ser aplicado con un entrenamiento mínimo, lo que podría permitir a las mujeres administrárselas ellas mismas.
DIAGNOSIS DE MALARIA EN UN SEGUNDO
La detección temprana de la malaria es vital, y este invento puede ayudar en esta tarea. Foto: Archivo / BBC
La epidemia mundial de malaria asciende a 200 millones de casos al año y están en riesgo 3,3 millones en todo el mundo.
La detección temprana es crucial, y una gran ayuda en la batalla contra la enfermedad la puede proporcionar esta caja portátil: el dispositivo Evaluación Rápida de la Malaria (RAM en sus siglas en inglés) se desarrolló en 2014 por la corporación Disease Diagnostic Group.
Este equipo utiliza campos magnéticos y luz para detectar parásitos de malaria, un método más simple que aquellos basados en reactivos sensibles a la temperatura. También es más rápido, ya que el análisis de una muestra de sangre puede tomar sólo uno o dos segundos.
CHEQUEO DE OJOS PARA NO EXPERTOS
Una vez recopilados los datos de forma sencilla, se volcarían a una web para que un oftalmólogo los evalúe. Foto: Archivo / BBC
La mayoría de los 300 millones de personas que sufren pérdida de visión importante o ceguera en el mundo viven en países de bajos ingresos, especialmente en Asia. Y los problemas de visión probablemente crecerán con el envejecimiento de la población.
De modo que los expertos creen que el acceso al diagnóstico es clave y mejor cuanto más portable sea el instrumental.
Éste dispositivo de pantallas detecta los primeros signos de enfermedades en los ojos. Muchos otros lo hacen, pero lo que diferencia a este es que fácil de llevar y fácil de manejar por un técnico mínimamente capacitado que luego podrá almacenar los datos en una web para que los evalúe un oftalmólogo que esté en cualquier lugar.
UN DETECTOR DE RIESGO DE PREECLAMPSIA
La preeclampsia es una condición asociada con una presión arterial muy elevada durante el embarazo. Foto: Archivo / BBC
Una de cada 20 mujeres sufre preeclampsia, una condición asociada con una presión arterial muy elevada durante el embarazo que pone a la madre en riesgo de convulsionar y que no muestra signos en numerosas ocasiones hasta que es demasiado tarde.
Aquí entra el Microlife Vital Signs Alert (VSA), una herramienta manual de 20 dólares que puede calcular el riesgo de entrar en shock del paciente y que parpadea en rojo si necesita un tratamiento urgente.
Se está probando en siete países de África y Asia, y próximamente se hará en Sudáfrica, Pakistán y la India.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
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