The following information is used for educational purposes only.
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.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Simon Sinek-HHRR,Leadership & more-videos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Video 1: If you Don´t Understand People. You Don´t Understand Business
Video 2: Simon Sinek Start Why Interview: Arguably the Single Most Powerful Principle
in Business
Video 3: Simon Sinek speaks at Creative Mornings NYC
Video 4: How to Deal with Customer Service Departments
Video 1: If you Don´t Understand People. You Don´t Understand Business
Video 2: Simon Sinek Start Why Interview: Arguably the Single Most Powerful Principle
in Business
Video 3: Simon Sinek speaks at Creative Mornings NYC
Video 4: How to Deal with Customer Service Departments
HHRR-The Future of HR & more-Videos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Video 1: The future of HR
Video 2: How to Prospect Like a Headhunter!
Video 3: Talent Management Best Practices: Identifying and Developing High Potential Leaders
Video 4: GBR-Lessons in Leadership with Robert Blackwell
Video 1: The future of HR
Video 2: How to Prospect Like a Headhunter!
Video 3: Talent Management Best Practices: Identifying and Developing High Potential Leaders
Video 4: GBR-Lessons in Leadership with Robert Blackwell
HHRR-Dave Ulrich-HR Transformation-Videos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Video 1: Interviews with Dave Ulrich
Videos 2 & 3: World HRD Congress 2010/HR Transformation
Video 1: Interviews with Dave Ulrich
Videos 2 & 3: World HRD Congress 2010/HR Transformation
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Commercial Law-General Information-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Legal English Lessons 1,2 & 3-Elementary Knowledge of Law-Videos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Video 1: Introductory Lesson
Video 2: Divisions of Law
Video 3: Classification of Offenses
Source: www.legaltranz.com
Video 1: Introductory Lesson
Video 2: Divisions of Law
Video 3: Classification of Offenses
Source: www.legaltranz.com
TOLES-Test of Legal English Skills-General Information
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
TOLES-TEST OF LEGAL ENGLISH SKILLS
The world’s leading English exam for lawyers, law students and legal translators
TOLES means Test of Legal English Skills.
About TOLES
Of the many different English exams available, TOLES is favoured by many law firms and other employers when selecting or promoting employees.
The TOLES certificates in legal English are the most accurate and relevant that you can possess.
◦TOLES was the first international legal English examination. It is the undisputed market leader and has 12 years of proven accuracy. The accuracy of the certificates has satisfied candidates, law firms and other employers.
◦TOLES is 100% practical. It meets the needs of global law firms rather than being dominated by the theories of English language teachers. For this reason it is well respected by international law firms, who recognise its relevance, practicality and accuracy.
◦There is no speaking element to TOLES. Law firms report that they are easily able to assess a lawyer’s oral English skills at interview. Law firms are looking for evidence of: good understanding of written contracts, strong drafting skills, accurate writing in letters, opinions and emails.
◦As TOLES is designed as a practical, relevant exam for use by law firms, it contains no superfluous, contrived speaking elements.
◦The TOLES series are no-fail exams. All students will receive a certificate and explanatory statement reflecting their ability in legal English.
About TOLES Advanced exam
TOLES Advanced is the third level of the TOLES exam series. The exam tests a candidate’s ability to use the authentic legal English required by international law firms. At this level, candidates receive a score out of a possible 500 points and there are six grade bands assessed by colour. Green is the lowest score and Gold is the highest.
Time: 2 hours
Skills: Reading and writing
Focus: Legal Language in an authentic context
Level of general English required: Intermediate
This prestigious qualification is the highest level TOLES exam. It consists of one 2 hour reading and writing paper. Active, accurate knowledge and use of legal vocabulary is tested, together with the skills that are part of a lawyer’s everyday life – letter writing, understanding and explaining complex legal documents and appropriate use of drafting as used by a modern commercial lawyer. It is suitable for lawyers, translators, interpreters and law students.
Explanation of Grades
The aim of the TOLES Advanced examination is to provide a scheme of assessment against which candidates, employers and universities may measure achievement and progress. The grades provide a continuous measure of professional competence to any party interested in measuring an individual’s ability in practical legal English skills.
The examination provides a series of six progressively graded results, which are designed to comment exclusively upon legal professionals whose first language is not English. They move from a very low level of proficiency (GREEN 0-100) up to an advanced level of proficiency which approaches native-level ability (GOLD 451-500). Only the most outstanding of candidates are able to achieve the three highest grades.
GOLD (451-500) This candidate has excellent general English skills and is assessed as having EXCELLENT legal English skills.
ORANGE (401-450) This candidate has very good general English skills and is assessed as having VERY GOOD legal English skills.
RED (301-400) This candidate has well-above average English skills and GOOD legal English skills.
PURPLE (201-300) This candidate has good general English skills and is assessed as having SATISFACTORY legal English skills.
BLUE (101-200) This candidate probably has an above average level of general English and is assessed as having APPROACHING SATISFACTORY legal English skills.
GREEN (0-100) This candidate may well have a good knowledge of general English but is assessed as having ONLY BASIC Legal English.
Source: www.cambridgelawstudio.co.uk
TOLES-TEST OF LEGAL ENGLISH SKILLS
The world’s leading English exam for lawyers, law students and legal translators
TOLES means Test of Legal English Skills.
About TOLES
Of the many different English exams available, TOLES is favoured by many law firms and other employers when selecting or promoting employees.
The TOLES certificates in legal English are the most accurate and relevant that you can possess.
◦TOLES was the first international legal English examination. It is the undisputed market leader and has 12 years of proven accuracy. The accuracy of the certificates has satisfied candidates, law firms and other employers.
◦TOLES is 100% practical. It meets the needs of global law firms rather than being dominated by the theories of English language teachers. For this reason it is well respected by international law firms, who recognise its relevance, practicality and accuracy.
◦There is no speaking element to TOLES. Law firms report that they are easily able to assess a lawyer’s oral English skills at interview. Law firms are looking for evidence of: good understanding of written contracts, strong drafting skills, accurate writing in letters, opinions and emails.
◦As TOLES is designed as a practical, relevant exam for use by law firms, it contains no superfluous, contrived speaking elements.
◦The TOLES series are no-fail exams. All students will receive a certificate and explanatory statement reflecting their ability in legal English.
About TOLES Advanced exam
TOLES Advanced is the third level of the TOLES exam series. The exam tests a candidate’s ability to use the authentic legal English required by international law firms. At this level, candidates receive a score out of a possible 500 points and there are six grade bands assessed by colour. Green is the lowest score and Gold is the highest.
Time: 2 hours
Skills: Reading and writing
Focus: Legal Language in an authentic context
Level of general English required: Intermediate
This prestigious qualification is the highest level TOLES exam. It consists of one 2 hour reading and writing paper. Active, accurate knowledge and use of legal vocabulary is tested, together with the skills that are part of a lawyer’s everyday life – letter writing, understanding and explaining complex legal documents and appropriate use of drafting as used by a modern commercial lawyer. It is suitable for lawyers, translators, interpreters and law students.
Explanation of Grades
The aim of the TOLES Advanced examination is to provide a scheme of assessment against which candidates, employers and universities may measure achievement and progress. The grades provide a continuous measure of professional competence to any party interested in measuring an individual’s ability in practical legal English skills.
The examination provides a series of six progressively graded results, which are designed to comment exclusively upon legal professionals whose first language is not English. They move from a very low level of proficiency (GREEN 0-100) up to an advanced level of proficiency which approaches native-level ability (GOLD 451-500). Only the most outstanding of candidates are able to achieve the three highest grades.
GOLD (451-500) This candidate has excellent general English skills and is assessed as having EXCELLENT legal English skills.
ORANGE (401-450) This candidate has very good general English skills and is assessed as having VERY GOOD legal English skills.
RED (301-400) This candidate has well-above average English skills and GOOD legal English skills.
PURPLE (201-300) This candidate has good general English skills and is assessed as having SATISFACTORY legal English skills.
BLUE (101-200) This candidate probably has an above average level of general English and is assessed as having APPROACHING SATISFACTORY legal English skills.
GREEN (0-100) This candidate may well have a good knowledge of general English but is assessed as having ONLY BASIC Legal English.
Source: www.cambridgelawstudio.co.uk
Legal English-Contract Law, Parts 1 & 2-Videos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Source: www.businessenglishpod.com
Source: www.businessenglishpod.com
TECH-TED Talks-Todd Humphreys: How to fool a GPS-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Something happened in the early morning hours of May 2, 2000 that had a profound effect on the way our society operates. Ironically, hardly anyone noticed at the time. The change was silent — imperceptible unless you knew exactly what to look for. That morning, United States President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver across the globe became 10 times more accurate, going from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.
It's hard to overstate the impact of this improvement in accuracy. Before that switch was thrown there were no in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions, because back then, civilian GPS couldn't tell you what block you were on, let alone what street. For geolocation, accuracy matters.
Things have only improved over the last decade. With more ground stations, better algorithms, and better receivers, stand-alone GPS can now tell you not only what street you are on, but what part of the street. This level of accuracy has enabled a firestorm of innovation. In fact, many of you navigated here with the help of your TomTom or your smartphone. Paper maps are becoming obsolete.
We're now on the verge of another revolution in geolocation. What if I told you that the two-meter accuracy that our iPhones and Garmins currently give us is pathetic compared with what we could be getting? For some time now it has been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the GPS signals, and if you've got an Internet connection, you can go from meter-level, to centimeter-level and even millimeter-level positioning. So why don't we have this capability on our smartphones? Only for a lack of imagination.
Manufacturers haven't built this carrier-phase technique into cheap GPS chips because they're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation that is so accurate you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand. But you and I and other innovators can already see the potential of this next revolution in accuracy. Imagine, for example, an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on the physical world. I predict that within the next few years, this type of hyper-precise carrier-phase-based GPS will become ubiquitous and cheap. And the consequences will be fantastic.
The holy grail, of course, is the GPS dot. Do you remember the film "The Da Vinci Code"? Here is Professor Langdon examining a GPS dot, a tracking device said to be accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe. But we know that in the world of non-fiction, this is impossible, right? For one thing GPS doesn't work indoors. For another, they don't make devices this small — especially when the devices have to relay measurements back over a network.
As it turns out, these objections were perfectly valid a few years ago, but things have changed. There has been a strong trend toward miniaturization, better sensitivity and reduced price.When you look at the state-of-the art for a complete GPS receiver, which is less than a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever, you realize that the GPS dot will soon move from fiction to non-fiction.
Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots. It's not just that you'll never lose your keys or your wallet again — or your child at Disneyland — you'll buy dots in bulk and stick them on everything you own worth more than a few dollars. I couldn't find my shoes one recent morning and, as usual, had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I shouldn't have to bother my wife with that triviality. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are. Those of you who use Gmail remember how refreshing it was to switch from organizing your e-mail to searching it. The GPS dot will do the same for our belongings.
There is, of course, a flip side to the GPS dot. A few months back I got a phone call in my office. The woman on the other end of the line — we'll call her Carol — was panicked. An ex-boyfriend of Carol's from California had found her in Texas and was following her around. Now you might wonder at this point why she was calling me. So did I. But there was a technical twist to her case. This ex-boyfriend would show up at the most improbable times and the most improbable locations, and whenever he showed up, he had an open laptop. Over time, Carol realized that this ex-boyfriend had hidden a GPS tracking device on her car. She was asking for my help to disable it.
"Go to a good mechanic and have him search your car," I suggested. "I already have," she said. "He didn't see anything obvious. He said he'd have to take the car apart piece by piece." "Well then you had better go to the police." "I already have — but they're not sure it's harassment and they're not set up technically to find the device." "What about the FBI?" "I've talked to them too, same response." We then talked about performing a radio sweep of her car, but I wasn't sure this would work because some tracking devices only transmit when they're within safe zones or when they sense the car is moving.
So there we were. Carol wasn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, to be left with no escape from this kind of frightening invasion of privacy. In fact, as I looked into her case, I discovered to my surprise it's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else's car. The Supreme Court ruled last month that police have to get a warrant for prolonged tracking, but the law isn't clear about civilians doing this to one another. So it's not only Big Brother we have to worry about, but Big Neighbor.
There is one very effective option Carol could have taken. It's called the Wave Bubble. It's an open source GPS jammer designed by Limor Fried, a graduate student at MIT. Limor calls it a "Tool for Reclaiming our Personal Space." You see, because with the flip of a switch, you create a protective bubble around yourself that drowns out all GPS signals. Limor designed it in part because, like Carol, she felt threatened by GPS tracking. She published her design on the Web. And if you don't have time to build your own Wave Bubble, you can just buy one. Chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the Internet.
You're probably thinking the Wave Bubble sounds great, that it could come in handy if someone ever puts a tracking device on your car, but you should also be aware the Wave Bubble is very much illegal in the U.S. Why? Because it's not a bubble at all. Its jamming signals don't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car, they go on to disrupt GPS receivers for miles around you. If you're Carol or Limor, or someone else who feels threatened by GPS tracking, it might not feel wrong to use a Wave Bubble, but in fact turning one on can be disastrous. Think about it: Say you're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble. Your GPS navigation system goes blank. Now it's just you, the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar. Remember, they don't make or maintain lighthouses and foghorns anymore, and the only backup to GPS, a system called LORAN, was discontinued just over a year ago.
Our modern society has an almost blind reliance on GPS. It's built deep into our systems and infrastructure. Some call it the invisible utility. Turning on a Wave Bubble might not just cause inconvenience, it might be deadly.
But as it turns out, for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability, there is something even more potent and even more subversive than a Wave Bubble. That is a GPS spoofer. The idea behind a spoofer is simple: instead of jamming the GPS signals, you fake them. If you do it right, the GPS device you're spoofing doesn't even know it's being fooled.
So is this really possible? Could someone really manipulate a GPS receiver's timing and positioning just like that with a GPS spoofer? The short answer is yes. The key is that civil GPS signals are completely open. They have no encryption, they have no authentication. They are wide open and vulnerable to being spoofed.
Even so, up until recently nobody worried about GPS spoofing. People figured it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one. But I and a friend of mine from graduate school didn't see it that way. We knew it wouldn't be so hard, and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against spoofing.
I remember vividly the week it all came together. We built it at my home, which meant I got some extra help from my three-year-old son, Ramon. The spoofer was just a jumble of computers and cables at first, though we eventually fit it into a small box. The Dr. Frankenstein moment — when the spoofer finally came alive and I got a glimpse of its awful potential — came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone. I had come to completely trust the little blue dot on my iPhone, and its reassuring blue halo. They seemed to say "here you are, here you are, you can trust me." So something felt very wrong about the world, it was almost a sense of betrayal — I could feel it in my stomach — when I saw this blue dot start from my house and go running off toward the north. Because ... I wasn't moving.
What I then saw in that moving blue dot was the potential for chaos. I saw airplanes and ships veering off course, with the captain completely unaware until it was too late. I saw the GPS-derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers. You can scarcely imagine the mischief that someone could cause if he knew what he was doing with a GPS spoofer. And yet, the spoofer has one redeeming feature: it is the ultimate weapon against an invasion of GPS dots. If someone is tracking you, you can play them for a fool, pretending to be at work when you're really on vacation.
I am fascinated by this looming conflict between the need for privacy on one hand, and the need for a clean radio spectrum on the other. We simply cannot tolerate jammers and spoofers, and yet, given the lack of effective legal means of protecting our privacy from the GPS dot, can we blame people for wanting to use them?
My hope is that we can resolve this conflict with some yet undiscovered technical innovation. Meanwhile, grab some popcorn, because this is going to get interesting. Within a few short years, many of you will be the proud owners of a GPS dot. Maybe you'll have a whole bag full of them. You'll never lose track of your belongings. The GPS dot will fundamentally re-order your life. But will you be able to resist the temptation to track your fellow man? And will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy?
As usual, what we see just beyond the horizon holds both promise and peril, and we wonder how it will all play out.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEDx, a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.
Transcript:
Something happened in the early morning hours of May 2, 2000 that had a profound effect on the way our society operates. Ironically, hardly anyone noticed at the time. The change was silent — imperceptible unless you knew exactly what to look for. That morning, United States President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver across the globe became 10 times more accurate, going from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.
It's hard to overstate the impact of this improvement in accuracy. Before that switch was thrown there were no in-car navigation systems giving turn-by-turn directions, because back then, civilian GPS couldn't tell you what block you were on, let alone what street. For geolocation, accuracy matters.
Things have only improved over the last decade. With more ground stations, better algorithms, and better receivers, stand-alone GPS can now tell you not only what street you are on, but what part of the street. This level of accuracy has enabled a firestorm of innovation. In fact, many of you navigated here with the help of your TomTom or your smartphone. Paper maps are becoming obsolete.
We're now on the verge of another revolution in geolocation. What if I told you that the two-meter accuracy that our iPhones and Garmins currently give us is pathetic compared with what we could be getting? For some time now it has been known that if you pay attention to the carrier phase of the GPS signals, and if you've got an Internet connection, you can go from meter-level, to centimeter-level and even millimeter-level positioning. So why don't we have this capability on our smartphones? Only for a lack of imagination.
Manufacturers haven't built this carrier-phase technique into cheap GPS chips because they're not sure what the general public would do with geolocation that is so accurate you could pinpoint the wrinkles in the palm of your hand. But you and I and other innovators can already see the potential of this next revolution in accuracy. Imagine, for example, an augmented reality app that overlays a virtual world to millimeter-level precision on the physical world. I predict that within the next few years, this type of hyper-precise carrier-phase-based GPS will become ubiquitous and cheap. And the consequences will be fantastic.
The holy grail, of course, is the GPS dot. Do you remember the film "The Da Vinci Code"? Here is Professor Langdon examining a GPS dot, a tracking device said to be accurate within two feet anywhere on the globe. But we know that in the world of non-fiction, this is impossible, right? For one thing GPS doesn't work indoors. For another, they don't make devices this small — especially when the devices have to relay measurements back over a network.
As it turns out, these objections were perfectly valid a few years ago, but things have changed. There has been a strong trend toward miniaturization, better sensitivity and reduced price.When you look at the state-of-the art for a complete GPS receiver, which is less than a centimeter on a side and more sensitive than ever, you realize that the GPS dot will soon move from fiction to non-fiction.
Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots. It's not just that you'll never lose your keys or your wallet again — or your child at Disneyland — you'll buy dots in bulk and stick them on everything you own worth more than a few dollars. I couldn't find my shoes one recent morning and, as usual, had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I shouldn't have to bother my wife with that triviality. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are. Those of you who use Gmail remember how refreshing it was to switch from organizing your e-mail to searching it. The GPS dot will do the same for our belongings.
There is, of course, a flip side to the GPS dot. A few months back I got a phone call in my office. The woman on the other end of the line — we'll call her Carol — was panicked. An ex-boyfriend of Carol's from California had found her in Texas and was following her around. Now you might wonder at this point why she was calling me. So did I. But there was a technical twist to her case. This ex-boyfriend would show up at the most improbable times and the most improbable locations, and whenever he showed up, he had an open laptop. Over time, Carol realized that this ex-boyfriend had hidden a GPS tracking device on her car. She was asking for my help to disable it.
"Go to a good mechanic and have him search your car," I suggested. "I already have," she said. "He didn't see anything obvious. He said he'd have to take the car apart piece by piece." "Well then you had better go to the police." "I already have — but they're not sure it's harassment and they're not set up technically to find the device." "What about the FBI?" "I've talked to them too, same response." We then talked about performing a radio sweep of her car, but I wasn't sure this would work because some tracking devices only transmit when they're within safe zones or when they sense the car is moving.
So there we were. Carol wasn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, to be left with no escape from this kind of frightening invasion of privacy. In fact, as I looked into her case, I discovered to my surprise it's not clearly illegal for you or me to put a tracking device on someone else's car. The Supreme Court ruled last month that police have to get a warrant for prolonged tracking, but the law isn't clear about civilians doing this to one another. So it's not only Big Brother we have to worry about, but Big Neighbor.
There is one very effective option Carol could have taken. It's called the Wave Bubble. It's an open source GPS jammer designed by Limor Fried, a graduate student at MIT. Limor calls it a "Tool for Reclaiming our Personal Space." You see, because with the flip of a switch, you create a protective bubble around yourself that drowns out all GPS signals. Limor designed it in part because, like Carol, she felt threatened by GPS tracking. She published her design on the Web. And if you don't have time to build your own Wave Bubble, you can just buy one. Chinese manufacturers now sell thousands of nearly identical devices on the Internet.
You're probably thinking the Wave Bubble sounds great, that it could come in handy if someone ever puts a tracking device on your car, but you should also be aware the Wave Bubble is very much illegal in the U.S. Why? Because it's not a bubble at all. Its jamming signals don't stop at the edge of your personal space or at the edge of your car, they go on to disrupt GPS receivers for miles around you. If you're Carol or Limor, or someone else who feels threatened by GPS tracking, it might not feel wrong to use a Wave Bubble, but in fact turning one on can be disastrous. Think about it: Say you're the captain of a cruise ship trying to make your way through a thick fog and some passenger in the back turns on a Wave Bubble. Your GPS navigation system goes blank. Now it's just you, the fog and whatever you can pull off the radar. Remember, they don't make or maintain lighthouses and foghorns anymore, and the only backup to GPS, a system called LORAN, was discontinued just over a year ago.
Our modern society has an almost blind reliance on GPS. It's built deep into our systems and infrastructure. Some call it the invisible utility. Turning on a Wave Bubble might not just cause inconvenience, it might be deadly.
But as it turns out, for purposes of protecting your privacy at the expense of general GPS reliability, there is something even more potent and even more subversive than a Wave Bubble. That is a GPS spoofer. The idea behind a spoofer is simple: instead of jamming the GPS signals, you fake them. If you do it right, the GPS device you're spoofing doesn't even know it's being fooled.
So is this really possible? Could someone really manipulate a GPS receiver's timing and positioning just like that with a GPS spoofer? The short answer is yes. The key is that civil GPS signals are completely open. They have no encryption, they have no authentication. They are wide open and vulnerable to being spoofed.
Even so, up until recently nobody worried about GPS spoofing. People figured it would be too complex or too expensive for some hacker to build one. But I and a friend of mine from graduate school didn't see it that way. We knew it wouldn't be so hard, and we wanted to be the first to build one so we could get out in front of the problem and help protect against spoofing.
I remember vividly the week it all came together. We built it at my home, which meant I got some extra help from my three-year-old son, Ramon. The spoofer was just a jumble of computers and cables at first, though we eventually fit it into a small box. The Dr. Frankenstein moment — when the spoofer finally came alive and I got a glimpse of its awful potential — came late one night when I tested the spoofer against my iPhone. I had come to completely trust the little blue dot on my iPhone, and its reassuring blue halo. They seemed to say "here you are, here you are, you can trust me." So something felt very wrong about the world, it was almost a sense of betrayal — I could feel it in my stomach — when I saw this blue dot start from my house and go running off toward the north. Because ... I wasn't moving.
What I then saw in that moving blue dot was the potential for chaos. I saw airplanes and ships veering off course, with the captain completely unaware until it was too late. I saw the GPS-derived timing of the New York Stock Exchange being manipulated by hackers. You can scarcely imagine the mischief that someone could cause if he knew what he was doing with a GPS spoofer. And yet, the spoofer has one redeeming feature: it is the ultimate weapon against an invasion of GPS dots. If someone is tracking you, you can play them for a fool, pretending to be at work when you're really on vacation.
I am fascinated by this looming conflict between the need for privacy on one hand, and the need for a clean radio spectrum on the other. We simply cannot tolerate jammers and spoofers, and yet, given the lack of effective legal means of protecting our privacy from the GPS dot, can we blame people for wanting to use them?
My hope is that we can resolve this conflict with some yet undiscovered technical innovation. Meanwhile, grab some popcorn, because this is going to get interesting. Within a few short years, many of you will be the proud owners of a GPS dot. Maybe you'll have a whole bag full of them. You'll never lose track of your belongings. The GPS dot will fundamentally re-order your life. But will you be able to resist the temptation to track your fellow man? And will you be able to resist the temptation to turn on a GPS spoofer or a Wave Bubble to protect your own privacy?
As usual, what we see just beyond the horizon holds both promise and peril, and we wonder how it will all play out.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEDx, a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event.
TED Talks-Jamie Drummond: Let´s crowdsource the world´s goals-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
So let me start by taking you back,back into the mists of your memoryto perhaps the most anticipated year in your life,but certainly the most anticipated yearin all human history:the year 2000. Remember that?Y2K, the dotcom bubble,stressing about whose party you're going to go toas the clock strikes midnight,before the champagne goes flat,and then there's that inchoate yearningthat was felt, I think, by many, that the millennium,that the year 2000, should mean more,more than just a two and some zeroes.
Well, amazingly, for once, our world leadersactually lived up to that millennium momentand back in 2000 agreed to somepretty extraordinary stuff:visionary, measurable, long-term targetscalled the Millennium Development Goals.
Now, I'm sure you all keep a copy of the goalsunder your pillow, or by the bedside table,but just in case you don't,and your memory needs some jogging,the deal agreed then goes like this:developing countries promised to at least halveextreme poverty, hunger and deaths from disease,alongside some other targets, by 2015,and developed nations promised to help themget that done by dropping debts,increasing smart aid, and trade reform.
Well, we're approaching 2015,so we'd better assess, how are we doing on these goals?But we've also got to decide, do we like such global goals?Some people don't. And if we like them, we've got to decidewhat we want to do on these goals going forward.What does the world want to do together?We've got to decide a process by which we decide.
Well, I definitely think these goals are worth building onand seeing through, and here's just a few reasons why.Incredible partnerships between the private sector,political leaders, philanthropistsand amazing grassroots activistsacross the developing world,but also 250,000 people marched in the streetsof Edinburgh outside this very buildingfor Make Poverty History.
All together, they achieved these results:increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals,life-saving anti-AIDS drugs;nearly halved deaths from malaria;vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved.And combined, this is going to resultin two million fewer children dying every year,last year, than in the year 2000.That's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day,ten times you lot not dead every day,because of all of these partnerships.So I think this is amazing living proof of progressthat more people should know about,but the challenge of communicating this kind of good newsis probably the subject of a different TEDTalk.Anyway, for now, anyone involved in getting these results,thank you. I think this proved these goals are worth it.
But there's still a lot of unfinished business.Still, 7.6 million children die every year of preventable,treatable diseases,and 178 million kids are malnourishedto the point of stunting, a horrible termwhich means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment.So there's plainly a lot more to do on the goals we've got.
But then, a lot of people think there are thingsthat should have been in the original packagethat weren't agreed back then that should now be included,like sustainable development targets,natural resource governance targets,access to opportunity, to knowledge,equity, fighting corruption.All of this is measurable and could be in the new goals.
But the key thing here is,what do you think should be in the new goals?What do you want?Are you annoyed that I didn't talk about gender equalityor education?Should those be in the new package of goals?
And quite frankly, that's a good question,but there's going to be some tough tradeoffsand choices here, so you want to hopethat the process by which the world decidesthese new goals is going to be legitimate, right?
Well, as we gather here in Edinburgh,technocrats appointed by the U.N. and certain governments,with the best intentions, are busying themselvesdesigning a new package of goals,and currently they're doing that through pretty much the same oldlate-20th-century, top-down, elite, closed process.
But, of course, since then, the Web and mobile telephony,along with ubiquitous reality TV formatshave spread all around the world.So what we'd like to propose is that we use themto involve people from all around the worldin an historic first: the world's first truly globalpoll and consultation, where everyone everywherehas an equal voice for the very first time.
I mean, wouldn't it be a huge historic missed opportunitynot to do this, given that we can?There's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake,tens of millions of lives, or deaths, at stake,and, I'd argue, the security and futureof you and your family is also at stake.
So, if you're with me, I'd say there's three essential stepsin this crowdsourcing campaign:collecting, connecting and committing.
So first of all, we've got to ground this campaignin core polling data.Let's go into every country that will let us in,ask 1,001 people what they wantthe new goals to be, making special effortsto reach the poorest, those without accessto modern technology, and let's make sure that their viewsare at the center of the goals going forward.
Then, we've got to commission a baseline surveyto make sure we can monitor and progress the goalsgoing forward. The original goals didn't really havegood baseline survey data,and we're going to need the help of big data through all of this process to make surewe can really monitor the progress.
And then we've got to connect with the big crowd.Now here, we see the role for an unprecedented coalitionof social media giants and upstarts,telecoms companies, reality TV show formats,gaming companies, telecoms, all of them togetherin kind of their "We Are The World" moment.Could they come together and helpthe Millennium Development Goals get rebrandedinto the Millennial Generation's Goals?And if just five percent of the five billion pluswho are currently connected made a comment,and that comment turned into a commitment,we could crowdsource a force of 300 million peoplearound the world to help see these goals through.
If we have this collected data, and this connected crowd,based upon our experience of campaigningand getting world leaders to commit,I think world leaders will committo most of the crowdsourced recommendations.
But the question really is, through this processwill we all have become committed?And if we are, are we ready to iterate, monitorand provide feedback, make sure these promisesare really delivering results?
Well, there's some fantastic examples here to scale up,mostly piloted within Africa, actually.There's Open Data Kenya, which geocodesand crowdsources information about where projects are,are they delivering results.Often, they're not in the right place.And Ushahidi, which means "witness" in Swahili,which geocodes and crowdsources informationin complex emergencies to help target responses.This is some of the most exciting stuffin development and democracy,where citizens on the edge of a networkare helping to force open the processto make sure that the big global aid promisesand vague stuff up at the top really delivers for peopleat a grassroots level and inverts that pyramid.This openness, this forcing openness, is key,and if it wasn't entirely transparent already,I should be open: I've got a completely transparent agenda.
Long-term trends suggest that this centuryis going to be a tough place to live,with population increases, consumption patterns increasing,and conflict over scarce natural resources.And look at the state of global politics today.Look at the Rio Earth Summit that happened just last week,or the Mexican G20, also last week.Both, if we're honest, a bust.Our world leaders, our global politics,currently can't get it done.They need our help. They need the cavalry,and the cavalry's not going to come from Mars.It's got to come from us, and I see this processof deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashionwhat the world wants to work on togetheras one vital means by which we can crowdsourcethe force to really build that constituencythat's going to reinvigorate global governancein the 21st century.
I started in 2000. Let me finish in 2030.
Many people made fun of a big campaign a few years agowe had called Make Poverty History.It was a naive thought in many people's minds,and it's true, it was just a t-shirt sloganthat worked for the moment. But look.The empirical condition of living under a dollar and 25is trending down, and look where it gets to by 2030.It's getting near zero.Now sure, progress in China and Indiaand poverty reduction there was key to that,but recently also in Africa, poverty rates are being reduced.It will get harder as we get towards zero,as the poor will be increasingly locatedin post-conflict, fragile states,or maybe in middle income stateswhere they don't really care about the marginalized.But I'm confident, with the right kind of political campaigningand creative and technological innovation combinedworking together more and more as one,I think we can get this and other goals done.
Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Jamie, here's the puzzle to me.If there was an incident today where a hundred kidsdied in some tragedy or where, say, a hundred kidswere kidnapped and then rescued by special forces,I mean, it would be all over the news for a week, right?You just put up, just as one of your numbers there,that 5,000 -- is that the number?
Jamie Drummond: Fewer children every day.
CA: Five thousand fewer children dying every day.I mean, it dwarfs, dwarfs everythingthat is actually on our news agenda, and it's invisible.This must drive you crazy.
JD: It does, and we're having a huge debate in this countryabout aid levels, for example, and aid alone is notthe whole solution. Nobody thinks it is.But, you know, if people saw the results of this smart aid,I mean, they'd be going crazy for it.I wish the 250,000 people who really did marchoutside this very building knew these results.Right now they don't, and it would be great to find a wayto better communicate it, because we have not.Creatively, we've failed to communicate this success so far.If those kinds of efforts just could multiply their voiceand amplify it at the key moments, I know for a factwe'd get better policy.The Mexican G20 need not have been a bust.Rio, if anyone cares about the environment,need not have been a bust, okay?But these conferences are going on,and I know people get skeptical and cynicalabout the big global summits and the promisesand their never being kept, but actually,the bits that are, are making a difference,and what the politicians needis more permission from the public.
CA: But you haven't fully worked out the Web mechanisms, etc.by which this might happen.I mean, if the people here who've had experienceusing open platforms, you're interested to talk with themthis week and try to take this forward.
JD: Absolutely. CA: All right, well I must say,if this conference led in some wayto advancing that idea, that's a huge idea,and if you carry that forward, that is really awesome,so thank you. JD: I'd love your help.
CA: Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)
Transcript:
So let me start by taking you back,back into the mists of your memoryto perhaps the most anticipated year in your life,but certainly the most anticipated yearin all human history:the year 2000. Remember that?Y2K, the dotcom bubble,stressing about whose party you're going to go toas the clock strikes midnight,before the champagne goes flat,and then there's that inchoate yearningthat was felt, I think, by many, that the millennium,that the year 2000, should mean more,more than just a two and some zeroes.
Well, amazingly, for once, our world leadersactually lived up to that millennium momentand back in 2000 agreed to somepretty extraordinary stuff:visionary, measurable, long-term targetscalled the Millennium Development Goals.
Now, I'm sure you all keep a copy of the goalsunder your pillow, or by the bedside table,but just in case you don't,and your memory needs some jogging,the deal agreed then goes like this:developing countries promised to at least halveextreme poverty, hunger and deaths from disease,alongside some other targets, by 2015,and developed nations promised to help themget that done by dropping debts,increasing smart aid, and trade reform.
Well, we're approaching 2015,so we'd better assess, how are we doing on these goals?But we've also got to decide, do we like such global goals?Some people don't. And if we like them, we've got to decidewhat we want to do on these goals going forward.What does the world want to do together?We've got to decide a process by which we decide.
Well, I definitely think these goals are worth building onand seeing through, and here's just a few reasons why.Incredible partnerships between the private sector,political leaders, philanthropistsand amazing grassroots activistsacross the developing world,but also 250,000 people marched in the streetsof Edinburgh outside this very buildingfor Make Poverty History.
All together, they achieved these results:increased the number of people on anti-retrovirals,life-saving anti-AIDS drugs;nearly halved deaths from malaria;vaccinated so many that 5.4 million lives will be saved.And combined, this is going to resultin two million fewer children dying every year,last year, than in the year 2000.That's 5,000 fewer kids dying every day,ten times you lot not dead every day,because of all of these partnerships.So I think this is amazing living proof of progressthat more people should know about,but the challenge of communicating this kind of good newsis probably the subject of a different TEDTalk.Anyway, for now, anyone involved in getting these results,thank you. I think this proved these goals are worth it.
But there's still a lot of unfinished business.Still, 7.6 million children die every year of preventable,treatable diseases,and 178 million kids are malnourishedto the point of stunting, a horrible termwhich means physical and cognitive lifelong impairment.So there's plainly a lot more to do on the goals we've got.
But then, a lot of people think there are thingsthat should have been in the original packagethat weren't agreed back then that should now be included,like sustainable development targets,natural resource governance targets,access to opportunity, to knowledge,equity, fighting corruption.All of this is measurable and could be in the new goals.
But the key thing here is,what do you think should be in the new goals?What do you want?Are you annoyed that I didn't talk about gender equalityor education?Should those be in the new package of goals?
And quite frankly, that's a good question,but there's going to be some tough tradeoffsand choices here, so you want to hopethat the process by which the world decidesthese new goals is going to be legitimate, right?
Well, as we gather here in Edinburgh,technocrats appointed by the U.N. and certain governments,with the best intentions, are busying themselvesdesigning a new package of goals,and currently they're doing that through pretty much the same oldlate-20th-century, top-down, elite, closed process.
But, of course, since then, the Web and mobile telephony,along with ubiquitous reality TV formatshave spread all around the world.So what we'd like to propose is that we use themto involve people from all around the worldin an historic first: the world's first truly globalpoll and consultation, where everyone everywherehas an equal voice for the very first time.
I mean, wouldn't it be a huge historic missed opportunitynot to do this, given that we can?There's hundreds of billions of your aid dollars at stake,tens of millions of lives, or deaths, at stake,and, I'd argue, the security and futureof you and your family is also at stake.
So, if you're with me, I'd say there's three essential stepsin this crowdsourcing campaign:collecting, connecting and committing.
So first of all, we've got to ground this campaignin core polling data.Let's go into every country that will let us in,ask 1,001 people what they wantthe new goals to be, making special effortsto reach the poorest, those without accessto modern technology, and let's make sure that their viewsare at the center of the goals going forward.
Then, we've got to commission a baseline surveyto make sure we can monitor and progress the goalsgoing forward. The original goals didn't really havegood baseline survey data,and we're going to need the help of big data through all of this process to make surewe can really monitor the progress.
And then we've got to connect with the big crowd.Now here, we see the role for an unprecedented coalitionof social media giants and upstarts,telecoms companies, reality TV show formats,gaming companies, telecoms, all of them togetherin kind of their "We Are The World" moment.Could they come together and helpthe Millennium Development Goals get rebrandedinto the Millennial Generation's Goals?And if just five percent of the five billion pluswho are currently connected made a comment,and that comment turned into a commitment,we could crowdsource a force of 300 million peoplearound the world to help see these goals through.
If we have this collected data, and this connected crowd,based upon our experience of campaigningand getting world leaders to commit,I think world leaders will committo most of the crowdsourced recommendations.
But the question really is, through this processwill we all have become committed?And if we are, are we ready to iterate, monitorand provide feedback, make sure these promisesare really delivering results?
Well, there's some fantastic examples here to scale up,mostly piloted within Africa, actually.There's Open Data Kenya, which geocodesand crowdsources information about where projects are,are they delivering results.Often, they're not in the right place.And Ushahidi, which means "witness" in Swahili,which geocodes and crowdsources informationin complex emergencies to help target responses.This is some of the most exciting stuffin development and democracy,where citizens on the edge of a networkare helping to force open the processto make sure that the big global aid promisesand vague stuff up at the top really delivers for peopleat a grassroots level and inverts that pyramid.This openness, this forcing openness, is key,and if it wasn't entirely transparent already,I should be open: I've got a completely transparent agenda.
Long-term trends suggest that this centuryis going to be a tough place to live,with population increases, consumption patterns increasing,and conflict over scarce natural resources.And look at the state of global politics today.Look at the Rio Earth Summit that happened just last week,or the Mexican G20, also last week.Both, if we're honest, a bust.Our world leaders, our global politics,currently can't get it done.They need our help. They need the cavalry,and the cavalry's not going to come from Mars.It's got to come from us, and I see this processof deciding democratically in a bottom-up fashionwhat the world wants to work on togetheras one vital means by which we can crowdsourcethe force to really build that constituencythat's going to reinvigorate global governancein the 21st century.
I started in 2000. Let me finish in 2030.
Many people made fun of a big campaign a few years agowe had called Make Poverty History.It was a naive thought in many people's minds,and it's true, it was just a t-shirt sloganthat worked for the moment. But look.The empirical condition of living under a dollar and 25is trending down, and look where it gets to by 2030.It's getting near zero.Now sure, progress in China and Indiaand poverty reduction there was key to that,but recently also in Africa, poverty rates are being reduced.It will get harder as we get towards zero,as the poor will be increasingly locatedin post-conflict, fragile states,or maybe in middle income stateswhere they don't really care about the marginalized.But I'm confident, with the right kind of political campaigningand creative and technological innovation combinedworking together more and more as one,I think we can get this and other goals done.
Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Jamie, here's the puzzle to me.If there was an incident today where a hundred kidsdied in some tragedy or where, say, a hundred kidswere kidnapped and then rescued by special forces,I mean, it would be all over the news for a week, right?You just put up, just as one of your numbers there,that 5,000 -- is that the number?
Jamie Drummond: Fewer children every day.
CA: Five thousand fewer children dying every day.I mean, it dwarfs, dwarfs everythingthat is actually on our news agenda, and it's invisible.This must drive you crazy.
JD: It does, and we're having a huge debate in this countryabout aid levels, for example, and aid alone is notthe whole solution. Nobody thinks it is.But, you know, if people saw the results of this smart aid,I mean, they'd be going crazy for it.I wish the 250,000 people who really did marchoutside this very building knew these results.Right now they don't, and it would be great to find a wayto better communicate it, because we have not.Creatively, we've failed to communicate this success so far.If those kinds of efforts just could multiply their voiceand amplify it at the key moments, I know for a factwe'd get better policy.The Mexican G20 need not have been a bust.Rio, if anyone cares about the environment,need not have been a bust, okay?But these conferences are going on,and I know people get skeptical and cynicalabout the big global summits and the promisesand their never being kept, but actually,the bits that are, are making a difference,and what the politicians needis more permission from the public.
CA: But you haven't fully worked out the Web mechanisms, etc.by which this might happen.I mean, if the people here who've had experienceusing open platforms, you're interested to talk with themthis week and try to take this forward.
JD: Absolutely. CA: All right, well I must say,if this conference led in some wayto advancing that idea, that's a huge idea,and if you carry that forward, that is really awesome,so thank you. JD: I'd love your help.
CA: Thank you, thank you.
(Applause)
COMPSCI-TED Talks-John Graham-Cumming:The greatest machine that never was-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
So the machine I'm going to talk you aboutis what I call the greatest machine that never was.It was a machine that was never built,and yet, it will be built.It was a machine that was designedlong before anyone thought about computers.
If you know anything about the history of computers,you will know that in the '30s and the '40s,simple computers were createdthat started the computer revolution we have today,and you would be correct,except for you'd have the wrong century.The first computer was really designedin the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s.It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped,and the bits of it that were built are herein South Kensington.
That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage.Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbagebecause his hair is always completely unkempt like thisin every single picture. (Laughter)He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of,part of the aristocracy of Britain,and on a Saturday night in Marylebone,were you part of the intelligentsia of that period,you would have been invited round to his housefor a soiree — and he invited everybody:kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people —and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines.
I really miss that era, you know, where you couldgo around for a soiree and see a mechanical computerget demonstrated to you. (Laughter)But Babbage, Babbage himself was bornat the end of the 18th century,and was a fairly famous mathematician.He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge,and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking.He's less well known than either of them becausehe got this idea to make mechanical computing devicesand never made any of them.
The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd.Every time he had a good idea, he'd think,"That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one.I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea.I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one."He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister,basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street,and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying,"I bid you good day, sir." (Laughter)
The thing he designed was this monstrosity here,the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this,this is a view from above.Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs,and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive.So as I go through this talk, I want you to imaginethis gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful soundsof what this thing would have sounded like.And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine— that's why it's computer architecture —and tell you about this machine, which is a computer.
So let's talk about the memory. The memoryis very like the memory of a computer today,except it was all made out of metal,stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high.Imagine a thing this high of cogs,hundreds and hundreds of them,and they've got numbers on them.It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal.And he thought about using binary. The problemwith using binary is that the machine would have been sotall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous.So he's got memory.The memory is this bit over here.You see it all like this.
This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like.Of course, it's this big.Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical.This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPUwhich is in the Science Museum.
The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic --so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division --which already is a bit of a feat in metal,but it could also do something that a computer doesand a calculator doesn't:this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision.It could do the "if then" for basic programmers,and that fundamentally made it into a computer.It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more.
Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute,and we think about chips today, we can'tlook inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny.Yet if you did, you would see somethingvery, very similar to this.There's this incredible complexity in the CPU,and this incredible regularity in the memory.If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture,you'll see this. This all looks the same,then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated.
All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does,but of course you need to program this thing, and of course,Babbage used the technology of the dayand the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s,which is punch cards. This thing over hereis one of three punch card readers in here,and this is a program in the Science Museum, justnot far from here, created by Charles Babbage,that is sitting there — you can go see it —waiting for the machine to be built.And there's not just one of these, there's many of them.He prepared programs anticipating this would happen.
Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard,in France, had created the Jacquard loom,which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards,so he was just repurposing the technology of the day,and like everything else he did, he's using the technologyof his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam,mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same yearas Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday,who would completely revolutionize everythingwith the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things.Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology,so steam and things.
Now, he needed accessories.Obviously, you've got a computer now.You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory.You need accessories you're going to come with.You're not just going to have that,
So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell,so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) —or the machine needed the attendant to come to it,there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter)And there's actually an instruction on the punch cardwhich says "Ring the bell." So you can imagine this "Ting!"You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises,this thing, "Click, clack click click click,"steam engine, "Ding," right? (Laughter)
You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer.This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism foranother machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2,which he never built, but which the Science Museumdid build in the '80s and '90s.It's completely mechanical, again, a printer.It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers,but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping,so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that.
You also need graphics, right?I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics,so he said, "Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paperand an ink pen and I'll make it plot."So he designed a plotter as well,and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty mucha pretty good machine.
Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace.Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along.This lady is the daughter of the mad, badand dangerous-to-know Lord Byron,and her mother, being a bit worried that she might haveinherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness,thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution.We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down."(Laughter) Because of course,there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy,so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter)Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training,and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother,and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine.The Duke of Wellington is there, you know,get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it,and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really,who said, "I understand what this does,and I understand the future of this machine."And we owe to her an enormous amount because we knowa lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to buildbecause of her.
Now, some people call her the first programmer.This is actually from one of -- the paper that she translated.This is a program written in a particular style.It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer,and actually, she did something more amazing.Rather than just being a programmer,she saw something that Babbage didn't.
Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics.He was building a machine to do mathematics,and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematicson this machine." And just as you do,everyone in this room already's got a computer on themright now, because they've got a phone.If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phoneor computer or any other computing deviceis mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom.Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers,it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening,and Lovelace said, "Just because you're doingmathematical functions and symbolsdoesn't mean these things can't representother things in the real world, such as music."This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying,"We could compute these amazing functions and print outtables of numbers and draw graphs," — (Laughter) —and Lovelace is there and she says, "Look,this thing could even compose music if youtold it a representation of music numerically."So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap.When you say she's a programmer, she did do some,but the real thing is to have said the future is going to bemuch, much more than this.
Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along,Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again.Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical.Turing's machine was entirely theoretical.Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective,but Turing told us something very important.He laid down the mathematical foundationsfor computer science, and said,"It doesn't matter how you make a computer."It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical,like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today,or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again,mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology.We could go back to Babbage's machineand just make it tiny. All those things are computers.There is in a sense a computing essence.This is called the Church–Turing thesis.
And so suddenly, you get this link where you saythis thing Babbage had built really was a computer.In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do todaywith computers, only really slowly. (Laughter)To give you an idea of how slowly,it had about 1k of memory.It used punch cards, which were being fed in,and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81.It did have a RAM pack.You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to.
(Laughter) So, where does that bring us today?So there are plans.Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives,there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pagesof notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine.One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28,and that is also the name of a charity that I startedwith Doron Swade, who was the curator of computingat the Science Museum, and also the person who drovethe project to build a difference engine,and our plan is to build it.Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine.
The project has a number of parts to it.One was the scanning of Babbage's archive.That's been done. The second is now the studyof all of those plans to determine what to build.The third part is a computer simulation of that machine,and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum.
When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works,because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you,you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "Ah,I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating,I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating." (Laughter)But in between that we're going to do a simulation.
Babbage himself wrote, he said,as soon as the analytical engine exists,it will surely guide the future course of science.Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddlingwith new plans, but when it did get built, of course,in the 1940s, everything changed.
Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks likein motion with a video which showsjust one part of the CPU mechanism working.So this is just three sets of cogs,and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanismin action, so you imagine this gigantic machine.
So, give me five years.Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
Transcript:
So the machine I'm going to talk you aboutis what I call the greatest machine that never was.It was a machine that was never built,and yet, it will be built.It was a machine that was designedlong before anyone thought about computers.
If you know anything about the history of computers,you will know that in the '30s and the '40s,simple computers were createdthat started the computer revolution we have today,and you would be correct,except for you'd have the wrong century.The first computer was really designedin the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s.It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped,and the bits of it that were built are herein South Kensington.
That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage.Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbagebecause his hair is always completely unkempt like thisin every single picture. (Laughter)He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of,part of the aristocracy of Britain,and on a Saturday night in Marylebone,were you part of the intelligentsia of that period,you would have been invited round to his housefor a soiree — and he invited everybody:kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people —and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines.
I really miss that era, you know, where you couldgo around for a soiree and see a mechanical computerget demonstrated to you. (Laughter)But Babbage, Babbage himself was bornat the end of the 18th century,and was a fairly famous mathematician.He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge,and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking.He's less well known than either of them becausehe got this idea to make mechanical computing devicesand never made any of them.
The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd.Every time he had a good idea, he'd think,"That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one.I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea.I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one."He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister,basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street,and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying,"I bid you good day, sir." (Laughter)
The thing he designed was this monstrosity here,the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this,this is a view from above.Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs,and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive.So as I go through this talk, I want you to imaginethis gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful soundsof what this thing would have sounded like.And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine— that's why it's computer architecture —and tell you about this machine, which is a computer.
So let's talk about the memory. The memoryis very like the memory of a computer today,except it was all made out of metal,stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high.Imagine a thing this high of cogs,hundreds and hundreds of them,and they've got numbers on them.It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal.And he thought about using binary. The problemwith using binary is that the machine would have been sotall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous.So he's got memory.The memory is this bit over here.You see it all like this.
This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like.Of course, it's this big.Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical.This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPUwhich is in the Science Museum.
The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic --so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division --which already is a bit of a feat in metal,but it could also do something that a computer doesand a calculator doesn't:this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision.It could do the "if then" for basic programmers,and that fundamentally made it into a computer.It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more.
Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute,and we think about chips today, we can'tlook inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny.Yet if you did, you would see somethingvery, very similar to this.There's this incredible complexity in the CPU,and this incredible regularity in the memory.If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture,you'll see this. This all looks the same,then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated.
All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does,but of course you need to program this thing, and of course,Babbage used the technology of the dayand the technology that would reappear in the '50s, '60s and '70s,which is punch cards. This thing over hereis one of three punch card readers in here,and this is a program in the Science Museum, justnot far from here, created by Charles Babbage,that is sitting there — you can go see it —waiting for the machine to be built.And there's not just one of these, there's many of them.He prepared programs anticipating this would happen.
Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard,in France, had created the Jacquard loom,which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards,so he was just repurposing the technology of the day,and like everything else he did, he's using the technologyof his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam,mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same yearas Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday,who would completely revolutionize everythingwith the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things.Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology,so steam and things.
Now, he needed accessories.Obviously, you've got a computer now.You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory.You need accessories you're going to come with.You're not just going to have that,
So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell,so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) —or the machine needed the attendant to come to it,there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter)And there's actually an instruction on the punch cardwhich says "Ring the bell." So you can imagine this "Ting!"You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises,this thing, "Click, clack click click click,"steam engine, "Ding," right? (Laughter)
You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer.This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism foranother machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2,which he never built, but which the Science Museumdid build in the '80s and '90s.It's completely mechanical, again, a printer.It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers,but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping,so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that.
You also need graphics, right?I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics,so he said, "Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paperand an ink pen and I'll make it plot."So he designed a plotter as well,and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty mucha pretty good machine.
Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace.Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along.This lady is the daughter of the mad, badand dangerous-to-know Lord Byron,and her mother, being a bit worried that she might haveinherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness,thought, "I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution.We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down."(Laughter) Because of course,there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy,so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter)Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training,and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother,and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine.The Duke of Wellington is there, you know,get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it,and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really,who said, "I understand what this does,and I understand the future of this machine."And we owe to her an enormous amount because we knowa lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to buildbecause of her.
Now, some people call her the first programmer.This is actually from one of -- the paper that she translated.This is a program written in a particular style.It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer,and actually, she did something more amazing.Rather than just being a programmer,she saw something that Babbage didn't.
Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics.He was building a machine to do mathematics,and Lovelace said, "You could do more than mathematicson this machine." And just as you do,everyone in this room already's got a computer on themright now, because they've got a phone.If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phoneor computer or any other computing deviceis mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom.Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers,it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening,and Lovelace said, "Just because you're doingmathematical functions and symbolsdoesn't mean these things can't representother things in the real world, such as music."This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying,"We could compute these amazing functions and print outtables of numbers and draw graphs," — (Laughter) —and Lovelace is there and she says, "Look,this thing could even compose music if youtold it a representation of music numerically."So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap.When you say she's a programmer, she did do some,but the real thing is to have said the future is going to bemuch, much more than this.
Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along,Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again.Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical.Turing's machine was entirely theoretical.Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective,but Turing told us something very important.He laid down the mathematical foundationsfor computer science, and said,"It doesn't matter how you make a computer."It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical,like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today,or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again,mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology.We could go back to Babbage's machineand just make it tiny. All those things are computers.There is in a sense a computing essence.This is called the Church–Turing thesis.
And so suddenly, you get this link where you saythis thing Babbage had built really was a computer.In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do todaywith computers, only really slowly. (Laughter)To give you an idea of how slowly,it had about 1k of memory.It used punch cards, which were being fed in,and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81.It did have a RAM pack.You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to.
(Laughter) So, where does that bring us today?So there are plans.Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives,there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pagesof notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine.One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28,and that is also the name of a charity that I startedwith Doron Swade, who was the curator of computingat the Science Museum, and also the person who drovethe project to build a difference engine,and our plan is to build it.Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine.
The project has a number of parts to it.One was the scanning of Babbage's archive.That's been done. The second is now the studyof all of those plans to determine what to build.The third part is a computer simulation of that machine,and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum.
When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works,because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you,you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "Ah,I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating,I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating." (Laughter)But in between that we're going to do a simulation.
Babbage himself wrote, he said,as soon as the analytical engine exists,it will surely guide the future course of science.Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddlingwith new plans, but when it did get built, of course,in the 1940s, everything changed.
Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks likein motion with a video which showsjust one part of the CPU mechanism working.So this is just three sets of cogs,and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanismin action, so you imagine this gigantic machine.
So, give me five years.Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it.
Thank you very much. (Applause)
TECH-TED Talks-Vinay Venkatraman: "Technolgy crafts" for the digitally undeserved-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Frugal Digital is essentially a small research group at C.I.D.where we are looking to findalternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society.That's what we're after.And we do this because we actually believethat silicon technology today is mostly abouta culture of excess.It's about the fastest and the most efficientand the most dazzling gadget you can have,while about two-thirds of the worldcan hardly reach the most basic of this technologyto even address fundamental needs in life,including health care, educationand all these kinds of very fundamental issues.
So before I start, I want to talk about a little anecdote,a little story about a man I met once in Mumbai.So this man, his name is Sathi Shri.He is an outstanding person,because he's a small entrepreneur.He runs a little shopin one of the back streets of Mumbai.He has this little 10-square-meter store,where so much is being done.It's incredible, because I couldn't believe my eyeswhen I once just happened to bump into him.Basically, what he does is, he has all these servicesfor micro-payments and booking ticketsand all kinds of basic things that you would go online for,but he does it for people offlineand connects to the digital world.More importantly, he makes his moneyby selling these mobile recharge coupons, you know,for the prepaid subscriptions.But then, in the backside, he's got this little nookwith a few of his employeeswhere they can fix almost anything.Any cell phone, any gadget you can bring them, they can fix it.And it's pretty incredible because I took my iPhone there,and he was like, "Yeah, do you want an upgrade?""Yes." (Laughter)I was a bit skeptical, but then, I decidedto give him a Nokia instead. (Laughter)
But what I was amazed about is this reverse engineeringand know-how that's built into this little two meters of space.They have figured out everything that's requiredto dismantle, take things apart,rewrite the circuitry, re-flash the firmware,do whatever you want to with the phone,and they can fix anything so quickly.You can hand over a phone this morningand you can go pick it up after lunch,and it was quite incredible.
But then we were wondering whether this isa local phenomenon, or is truly global?And, over time, we started understandingand systematically researchingwhat this tinkering ecosystem is about,because that is something that's happeningnot just in one street corner in Mumbai.It's actually happening in all parts of the country.It's even happening in Africa, like, for example,in Cape Town we did extensive research on this.Even here in Doha I found this little nookwhere you can get alarm clocks and watches fixed,and it's a lot of tiny little parts. It's not easy.You've got to try it on your own to believe it.
But what fuels this?It's this entire ecosystem of low-cost partsand supplies that are produced all over the world, literally,and then redistributed to basically service this industry,and you can even buy salvaged parts.Basically, you don't have to necessarily buybrand new things. You have condemned computersthat are stripped apart,and you can buy salvaged componentsand things that you can reassemble in a new configuration.
But what does this new, sort of, approach give us?That's the real question, because this is somethingthat's been there, part of every societythat's deprived of enough resources.But there's an interesting paradigm.There's the traditional crafts,and then there's the technology crafts.We call it the technology crafts because these are emerging.They're not something that's been established.It's not something that's institutionalized.It's not taught in universities.It's taught [by] word of mouth,and it's an informal education system around this.
So we said, "What can we get out of this?You know, like, what are the key values that we can get out of this?"The main thing is a fix-it-locally culture,which is fantastic because it means that your productor your service doesn't have to go througha huge bureaucratic system to get it fixed.It also affords us cheap fabrication, which is fantastic,so it means that you can do a lot more with it.And then, the most important thing is,it gives us large math for low cost.So it means that you can actually embedpretty clever algorithms and lots of other kindsof extendable ideas into really simple devices.
So, what we call this is a silicon cottage industry.It's basically what was the system or the paradigmbefore the industrial revolution is now re-happeningin a whole new way in small digital shopsacross the planet in most developing countries.
So, we kind of toyed around with this idea,and we said, "What can we do with this?Can we make a little product or a service out of it?"So one of the first things we did is this thing calleda multimedia platform. We call it a lunch box.Basically one of the contexts that we studied wasschools in very remote parts of India.So there is this amazing concept called the one-teacher school,which is basically a single teacher who is a multitaskerwho teaches this amazing little social setting.It's an informal school,but it's really about holistic education.The only thing that they don't haveis access to resources. They don't even have a textbooksometimes, and they don't even have a proper curriculum.
So we said, "What can we do to empower this teacherto do more?" How to access the digital world?Instead of being the sole guardian of information,be a facilitator to all this information.So we said, "What are the steps required to empower the teacher?"How do you make this teacher into a digital gateway,and how do you design an inexpensive multimedia platformthat can be constructed locally and serviced locally?"So we walked around.We went and scavenged the nearby markets,and we tried to understand, "What can we pick up that will make this happen?"
So the thing that we gotwas a little mobile phone with a little pico projectorthat comes for about 60 dollars.We went a bought a flashlight with a very big battery,and a bunch of small speakers.So essentially, the mobile phone gives usa connected multimedia platform.It allows us to get online and allows us to load up filesof different formats and play them.The flashlight gives us this really intense, bright L.E.D.,and six hours worth of rechargeable battery pack,and the lunch box is a nice little packagein which you can put everything inside,and a bunch of mini speakers to sort ofamplify the sound large enough.Believe me, those little classrooms are really noisy.They are kids who scream at the top of their voices,and you really have to get above that.And we took it back to this little tinkering setupof a mobile phone repair shop,and then the magic happens.We dismantle the whole thing,we reassemble it in a new configuration,and we do this hardware mashup,systematically training the guy how to do this.Out comes this, a little lunch box -- form factor.
(Applause)
And we systematically field tested,because in the field testing we learned someimportant lessons, and we went through many iterations.One of the key issues was battery consumption and charging.Luminosity was an issue, when you have too much bright sunlight outside.Often the roofs are broken, so you don't have enoughdarkness in the classroom to do these things.
We extended this idea. We tested it many times over,and the next version we came up with was a boxthat kind of could trickle charge on solar energy,but most importantly connect to a car battery,because a car battery is a ubiquitous source of powerin places where there's not enough electricityor erratic electricity.
And the other key thing that we did wasmake this box run off a USB key, because we realizedthat even though there was GPRS and all that on paper,at least, in theory, it was much more efficientto send the data on a little USB key by surface mail.It might take a few days to get there,but at least it gets there in high definitionand in a reliable quality.So we made this box, and we tested it againand again and again, and we're going throughmultiple iterations to do these things.
But it's not limited to just education.This kind of a technique or metrologycan actually be applied to other kinds of areas,and I'm going to tell you one more little story.It's about this little device called a medi-meter.It's basically a little health care screening tool that we developed.
In India, there is a context of these amazing people,the health care workers called ASHA workers.They are essentially foot soldiers for the health care systemwho live in the local community and are trainedwith basic tools and basic concepts of health care,and the main purpose is basically to inform peopleto basically, how to lead a better life, but alsoto divert or sort of make recommendationsof what kind of health care should they approach?They are basically referral services, essentially.
But the problem with that is that we realizedafter a bunch of research that they are amazingat referring people to the nearest clinicor the public health care system, but what happens at thepublic health care system is this: these incredibly long linesand too many people who overload the systemsimply because there's not enough doctors and facilitiesfor the population that's being referred.So everything from a common coldto a serious case of malaria gets almost the samelevel of attention, and there's no priorities.
So we said, "Come on, there's got to be a better wayof doing this for sure."So we said, "What can we do with the ASHA workerthat'll allow this ASHA worker to become an interesting filter,but not just a filter, a really well thought through referralsystem that allows load balancing of the network,and directs patients to different sources of health carebased on the severity or the criticalness of those situations?"
So the real key question was,how do we empower this woman?How do we empower her with simple toolsthat's not diagnostic but more screening in natureso she at least knows how to advise the patients better?And that'll make such a huge difference on the system,because the amount of waiting time and the amount ofdistances that people need to travel, often sometimesseven to 15 kilometers, sometimes by foot,to get a simple health check done, is very, very detrimentalin the sense that it really dissuades peoplefrom getting access to health care.So if there was something that she could do,that would be amazing.
So what we did was that we converted this deviceinto a medical device.I want to demo this actually,because it's a very simple process.
Bruno, do you want to join us? (Cheers)Come along. (Applause)
So, what we're going to do is thatwe're going to measure a few basic parameters on you,including your pulse rate and the amount of oxygenthat's there in your blood.So you're going to put your thumb on top of this.
Bruno Giussani: Like this, works?
Vinay Venkatraman: Yeah. That's right. BG: Okay.
VV: So I'm going to start it up. I hope it works.(Beeps) It even beeps, because it's an alarm clock, after all.So ... (Laughter)
So I take it into the start position, and thenI press the read button. (Beeps)So it's taking a little reading from you. (Beeps)And then the pointer goes and points to three different options.Let's see what happens here.(Beeps) Oh Bruno, you can go home, actually.
BG: Great. Good news. (Applause)
VV: So ... (Applause)
So the thing about this is thatif the pointer, unfortunately, had pointed to the red spot,we would have to rush you to a hospital.Luckily, not today. And if it had pointed to the orangeor the amber, it basically meant you had to have,sort of, more continuous care from the health care worker.So that was a very simple three-step screening processthat could basically change the equationof how public health care works in so many different ways.
BG: Thank you for the good news. VV: Yeah.
(Applause)So, very briefly, I'll just explain to you how this is done,because that's the more interesting part.So essentially, the three things that are requiredto make this conversion from this guy to this guyis a cheap remote control for a televisionthat you can almost find in every home today,some parts from a computer mouse, basically,something that you can scavenge for very low cost,and a few parts that have to be pre-programmed.Basically this is a micro-controller with a fewextra components that can be shipped for very little costacross the world, and that's what is all requiredwith a little bit of local tinkering talentto convert the device into something else.So we are right now doing some systematic field teststo basically ascertain whether something like this actuallymakes sense to the ASHA worker.
We are going through some reference tests to compare itagainst professional equipment to see if there's a degreeof change in efficacy and if it actually makes an impactin people's lives. But most importantly,what we are trying to do right nowis we are trying to scale this up, because thereare over 250,000 ASHA workers on the groundwho are these amazing foot soldiers, and if we cangive at least a fraction of them the access to these things,it just changes the way the economics of public health careworks, and it changes the way systems actually function,not just on a systematic planning level,but also in a very grassroots, bottom-up level.
So that's it, and we hope to do this in a big way.Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause)
Transcript:
Frugal Digital is essentially a small research group at C.I.D.where we are looking to findalternate visions of how to create a digitally inclusive society.That's what we're after.And we do this because we actually believethat silicon technology today is mostly abouta culture of excess.It's about the fastest and the most efficientand the most dazzling gadget you can have,while about two-thirds of the worldcan hardly reach the most basic of this technologyto even address fundamental needs in life,including health care, educationand all these kinds of very fundamental issues.
So before I start, I want to talk about a little anecdote,a little story about a man I met once in Mumbai.So this man, his name is Sathi Shri.He is an outstanding person,because he's a small entrepreneur.He runs a little shopin one of the back streets of Mumbai.He has this little 10-square-meter store,where so much is being done.It's incredible, because I couldn't believe my eyeswhen I once just happened to bump into him.Basically, what he does is, he has all these servicesfor micro-payments and booking ticketsand all kinds of basic things that you would go online for,but he does it for people offlineand connects to the digital world.More importantly, he makes his moneyby selling these mobile recharge coupons, you know,for the prepaid subscriptions.But then, in the backside, he's got this little nookwith a few of his employeeswhere they can fix almost anything.Any cell phone, any gadget you can bring them, they can fix it.And it's pretty incredible because I took my iPhone there,and he was like, "Yeah, do you want an upgrade?""Yes." (Laughter)I was a bit skeptical, but then, I decidedto give him a Nokia instead. (Laughter)
But what I was amazed about is this reverse engineeringand know-how that's built into this little two meters of space.They have figured out everything that's requiredto dismantle, take things apart,rewrite the circuitry, re-flash the firmware,do whatever you want to with the phone,and they can fix anything so quickly.You can hand over a phone this morningand you can go pick it up after lunch,and it was quite incredible.
But then we were wondering whether this isa local phenomenon, or is truly global?And, over time, we started understandingand systematically researchingwhat this tinkering ecosystem is about,because that is something that's happeningnot just in one street corner in Mumbai.It's actually happening in all parts of the country.It's even happening in Africa, like, for example,in Cape Town we did extensive research on this.Even here in Doha I found this little nookwhere you can get alarm clocks and watches fixed,and it's a lot of tiny little parts. It's not easy.You've got to try it on your own to believe it.
But what fuels this?It's this entire ecosystem of low-cost partsand supplies that are produced all over the world, literally,and then redistributed to basically service this industry,and you can even buy salvaged parts.Basically, you don't have to necessarily buybrand new things. You have condemned computersthat are stripped apart,and you can buy salvaged componentsand things that you can reassemble in a new configuration.
But what does this new, sort of, approach give us?That's the real question, because this is somethingthat's been there, part of every societythat's deprived of enough resources.But there's an interesting paradigm.There's the traditional crafts,and then there's the technology crafts.We call it the technology crafts because these are emerging.They're not something that's been established.It's not something that's institutionalized.It's not taught in universities.It's taught [by] word of mouth,and it's an informal education system around this.
So we said, "What can we get out of this?You know, like, what are the key values that we can get out of this?"The main thing is a fix-it-locally culture,which is fantastic because it means that your productor your service doesn't have to go througha huge bureaucratic system to get it fixed.It also affords us cheap fabrication, which is fantastic,so it means that you can do a lot more with it.And then, the most important thing is,it gives us large math for low cost.So it means that you can actually embedpretty clever algorithms and lots of other kindsof extendable ideas into really simple devices.
So, what we call this is a silicon cottage industry.It's basically what was the system or the paradigmbefore the industrial revolution is now re-happeningin a whole new way in small digital shopsacross the planet in most developing countries.
So, we kind of toyed around with this idea,and we said, "What can we do with this?Can we make a little product or a service out of it?"So one of the first things we did is this thing calleda multimedia platform. We call it a lunch box.Basically one of the contexts that we studied wasschools in very remote parts of India.So there is this amazing concept called the one-teacher school,which is basically a single teacher who is a multitaskerwho teaches this amazing little social setting.It's an informal school,but it's really about holistic education.The only thing that they don't haveis access to resources. They don't even have a textbooksometimes, and they don't even have a proper curriculum.
So we said, "What can we do to empower this teacherto do more?" How to access the digital world?Instead of being the sole guardian of information,be a facilitator to all this information.So we said, "What are the steps required to empower the teacher?"How do you make this teacher into a digital gateway,and how do you design an inexpensive multimedia platformthat can be constructed locally and serviced locally?"So we walked around.We went and scavenged the nearby markets,and we tried to understand, "What can we pick up that will make this happen?"
So the thing that we gotwas a little mobile phone with a little pico projectorthat comes for about 60 dollars.We went a bought a flashlight with a very big battery,and a bunch of small speakers.So essentially, the mobile phone gives usa connected multimedia platform.It allows us to get online and allows us to load up filesof different formats and play them.The flashlight gives us this really intense, bright L.E.D.,and six hours worth of rechargeable battery pack,and the lunch box is a nice little packagein which you can put everything inside,and a bunch of mini speakers to sort ofamplify the sound large enough.Believe me, those little classrooms are really noisy.They are kids who scream at the top of their voices,and you really have to get above that.And we took it back to this little tinkering setupof a mobile phone repair shop,and then the magic happens.We dismantle the whole thing,we reassemble it in a new configuration,and we do this hardware mashup,systematically training the guy how to do this.Out comes this, a little lunch box -- form factor.
(Applause)
And we systematically field tested,because in the field testing we learned someimportant lessons, and we went through many iterations.One of the key issues was battery consumption and charging.Luminosity was an issue, when you have too much bright sunlight outside.Often the roofs are broken, so you don't have enoughdarkness in the classroom to do these things.
We extended this idea. We tested it many times over,and the next version we came up with was a boxthat kind of could trickle charge on solar energy,but most importantly connect to a car battery,because a car battery is a ubiquitous source of powerin places where there's not enough electricityor erratic electricity.
And the other key thing that we did wasmake this box run off a USB key, because we realizedthat even though there was GPRS and all that on paper,at least, in theory, it was much more efficientto send the data on a little USB key by surface mail.It might take a few days to get there,but at least it gets there in high definitionand in a reliable quality.So we made this box, and we tested it againand again and again, and we're going throughmultiple iterations to do these things.
But it's not limited to just education.This kind of a technique or metrologycan actually be applied to other kinds of areas,and I'm going to tell you one more little story.It's about this little device called a medi-meter.It's basically a little health care screening tool that we developed.
In India, there is a context of these amazing people,the health care workers called ASHA workers.They are essentially foot soldiers for the health care systemwho live in the local community and are trainedwith basic tools and basic concepts of health care,and the main purpose is basically to inform peopleto basically, how to lead a better life, but alsoto divert or sort of make recommendationsof what kind of health care should they approach?They are basically referral services, essentially.
But the problem with that is that we realizedafter a bunch of research that they are amazingat referring people to the nearest clinicor the public health care system, but what happens at thepublic health care system is this: these incredibly long linesand too many people who overload the systemsimply because there's not enough doctors and facilitiesfor the population that's being referred.So everything from a common coldto a serious case of malaria gets almost the samelevel of attention, and there's no priorities.
So we said, "Come on, there's got to be a better wayof doing this for sure."So we said, "What can we do with the ASHA workerthat'll allow this ASHA worker to become an interesting filter,but not just a filter, a really well thought through referralsystem that allows load balancing of the network,and directs patients to different sources of health carebased on the severity or the criticalness of those situations?"
So the real key question was,how do we empower this woman?How do we empower her with simple toolsthat's not diagnostic but more screening in natureso she at least knows how to advise the patients better?And that'll make such a huge difference on the system,because the amount of waiting time and the amount ofdistances that people need to travel, often sometimesseven to 15 kilometers, sometimes by foot,to get a simple health check done, is very, very detrimentalin the sense that it really dissuades peoplefrom getting access to health care.So if there was something that she could do,that would be amazing.
So what we did was that we converted this deviceinto a medical device.I want to demo this actually,because it's a very simple process.
Bruno, do you want to join us? (Cheers)Come along. (Applause)
So, what we're going to do is thatwe're going to measure a few basic parameters on you,including your pulse rate and the amount of oxygenthat's there in your blood.So you're going to put your thumb on top of this.
Bruno Giussani: Like this, works?
Vinay Venkatraman: Yeah. That's right. BG: Okay.
VV: So I'm going to start it up. I hope it works.(Beeps) It even beeps, because it's an alarm clock, after all.So ... (Laughter)
So I take it into the start position, and thenI press the read button. (Beeps)So it's taking a little reading from you. (Beeps)And then the pointer goes and points to three different options.Let's see what happens here.(Beeps) Oh Bruno, you can go home, actually.
BG: Great. Good news. (Applause)
VV: So ... (Applause)
So the thing about this is thatif the pointer, unfortunately, had pointed to the red spot,we would have to rush you to a hospital.Luckily, not today. And if it had pointed to the orangeor the amber, it basically meant you had to have,sort of, more continuous care from the health care worker.So that was a very simple three-step screening processthat could basically change the equationof how public health care works in so many different ways.
BG: Thank you for the good news. VV: Yeah.
(Applause)So, very briefly, I'll just explain to you how this is done,because that's the more interesting part.So essentially, the three things that are requiredto make this conversion from this guy to this guyis a cheap remote control for a televisionthat you can almost find in every home today,some parts from a computer mouse, basically,something that you can scavenge for very low cost,and a few parts that have to be pre-programmed.Basically this is a micro-controller with a fewextra components that can be shipped for very little costacross the world, and that's what is all requiredwith a little bit of local tinkering talentto convert the device into something else.So we are right now doing some systematic field teststo basically ascertain whether something like this actuallymakes sense to the ASHA worker.
We are going through some reference tests to compare itagainst professional equipment to see if there's a degreeof change in efficacy and if it actually makes an impactin people's lives. But most importantly,what we are trying to do right nowis we are trying to scale this up, because thereare over 250,000 ASHA workers on the groundwho are these amazing foot soldiers, and if we cangive at least a fraction of them the access to these things,it just changes the way the economics of public health careworks, and it changes the way systems actually function,not just on a systematic planning level,but also in a very grassroots, bottom-up level.
So that's it, and we hope to do this in a big way.Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause)
INTAFF/POL-TED Talks-James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral´s Thoughts on Global Security-Video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
I'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security,because we've got to get better at securityin this 21st century.
Let me start by saying, let's look back to the 20th century,and kind of get a sense of how that style of securityworked for us.
This is Verdun, a battlefield in Francejust north of the NATO headquarters in Belgium.At Verdun, in 1916, over a 300-day period,700,000 people were killed,so about 2,000 a day.
If you roll it forward -- 20th-century security --into the Second World War,you see the Battle of Stalingrad,300 days, 2 million people killed.
We go into the Cold War, and we continueto try and build walls.We go from the trench warfare of the First World Warto the Maginot Line of the Second World War,and then we go into the Cold War,the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall.Walls don't work.
My thesis for us today is, instead of building wallsto create security, we need to build bridges.This is a famous bridge in Europe.It's in Bosnia-Herzegovina.It's the bridge over the Drina River,the subject of a novel by Ivo Andrić,and it talks about how,in that very troubled part of Europe and the Balkans,over time there's been enormous building of walls.More recently, in the last decade, we begin to seethese communities start, hesitatingly,to come together.
I would argue, again, open-source securityis about connecting the international,the interagency, the private-public,and lashing it together with strategic communication,largely in social networks.
So let me talk a little bit about why we need to do that,because our global commons is under attackin a variety of ways,and none of the sources of threat to the global commonswill be solved by building walls.
Now, I'm a sailor, obviously.This is a ship, a liner, clipping through the Indian Ocean.What's wrong with this picture?It's got concertina wire along the sides of it.That's to prevent pirates from attacking it.Piracy is a very active threat todayaround the world. This is in the Indian Ocean.Piracy is also very active in the Strait of Malacca.It's active in the Gulf of Guinea.We see it in the Caribbean.It's a $10-billion-a-year discontinuityin the global transport system.Last year, at this time, there were 20 vessels,500 mariners held hostage.This is an attack on the global commons.We need to think about how to address it.
Let's shift to a different kind of sea,the cyber sea.Here are photographs of two young men.At the moment, they're incarcerated.They conducted a credit card fraud that netted themover 10 billion dollars.This is part of cybercrime which is a $2-trillion-a-yeardiscontinuity in the global economy.Two trillion a year.That's just under the GDP of Great Britain.So this cyber sea, which we know endlesslyis the fundamental piece of radical openness,is very much under threat as well.
Another thing I worry about in the global commonsis the threat posed by trafficking,by the movement of narcotics, opium,here coming out of Afghanistan through Europeover to the United States.We worry about cocainecoming from the Andean Ridge north.We worry about the movement of illegal weaponsand trafficking. Above all, perhaps,we worry about human trafficking, and the awful cost of it.Trafficking moves largely at seabut in other parts of the global commons.
This is a photograph, and I wish I could tell youthat this is a very high-tech piece of US Navy gearthat we're using to stop the trafficking.The bad news is,this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels.It was built in the jungles of South America.We caught it with that low-tech raft — (Laughter) —and it was carrying six tons of cocaine.Crew of four. Sophisticated communications sweep.This kind of trafficking, in narcotics, in humans, in weapons,God forbid, in weapons of mass destruction,is part of the threat to the global commons.
And let's pull it together in Afghanistan today.This is a field of poppies in Afghanistan.Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy,opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan.We also see there, of course, terrorism.This is where al Qaeda is staged from.We also see a very strong insurgency embedded there.So this terrorism concern is also partof the global commons, and what we must address.
So here we are, 21st century.We know our 20th-century tools are not going to work.What should we do?
I would argue that we will not deliver securitysolely from the barrel of a gun.We will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun.We will need the application of military force.When we do it, we must do it well, and competently.
But my thesis is, open-source security is about international,interagency, private-public connection pulled togetherby this idea of strategic communication on the Internet.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way.This is Afghanistan. These are Afghan soldiers.They are all holding books.You should say, "That's odd. I thought I read thatthis demographic, young men and womenin their 20s and 30s, is largely illiterate in Afghanistan."
You would be correct.
Eighty-five percent cannot readwhen they enter the security forces of Afghanistan.Why? Because the Taliban withheld educationduring the period of time in which these men and womenwould have learned to read.
So the question is, so,why are they all standing there holding books?The answer is, we are teaching them to readin literacy courses by NATOin partnership with private sector entities,in partnership with development agencies.We've taught well over 200,000 Afghan Security Forcesto read and write at a basic level.
When you can read and write in Afghanistan,you will typically put a pen in your pocket.At the ceremonies, when these young men and womengraduate, they take that pen with great pride,and put it in their pocket.This is bringing together international— there are 50 nations involved in this mission —interagency — these development agencies —and private-public, to take on this kind of security.
Now, we are also teaching them combat skills, of course,but I would argue, open-source securitymeans connecting in ways that createlonger lasting security effect.
Here's another example.This is a US Navy warship.It's called the Comfort.There's a sister ship called the Mercy.They are hospital ships.This one, the Comfort, operates throughoutthe Caribbean and the coast of South Americaconducting patient treatments.On a typical cruise, they'll do 400,000 patient treatments.It is crewed not strictly by militarybut by a combination of humanitarian organizations:Operation Hope, Project Smile.Other organizations send volunteers.Interagency physicians come out.They're all part of this.
To give you one example of the impact this can have,this little boy, eight years old,walked with his mother two daysto come to the eye clinic put on by the Comfort.When he was fitted, over his extremely myopic eyes,he suddenly looked up and said,"Mama, veo el mundo.""Mom, I see the world."Multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments,this private-public collaboration with security forces,and you begin to see the powerof creating security in a very different way.
Here you see baseball players.Can you pick out the two US Army soldiersin this photograph?They are the two young men on either sideof these young boys. This is part of a seriesof baseball clinics, where we have explored collaborationbetween Major League Baseball,the Department of State,who sets up the diplomatic piece of this,military baseball players, who are real soldierswith real skills but participate in this mission,and they put on clinicsthroughout Latin America and the Caribbean,in Honduras, in Nicaragua,in all of the Central American and Caribbean nationswhere baseball is so popular,and it creates security.It shows role models to young men and womenabout fitness and about life that I would arguehelp create security for us.
Another aspect of this partnershipis in disaster relief.This is a US Air Force helicopter participatingafter the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people.In each of these major disasters — the tsunami in 2004,250,000 dead, the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, 2005,85,000 dead,the Haitian earthquake, about 300,000 dead,more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combinationwhich struck Japan and its nuclear industry —in all of these instances, we see partnershipsbetween international actors,interagency, private-public working with security forcesto respond to this kind of natural disaster.So these are examples of this idea of open-source security.
We tie it together, increasingly, by doing things like this.Now, you're looking at this thinking, "Ah, Admiral,these must be sea lanes of communication,or these might be fiber optic cables."No. This is a graphic of the world according to Twitter.Purple are tweets. Green are geolocation.White is the synthesis.It's a perfect evocation of that great population survey,the six largest nations in the world in descending order:China, India, Facebook, the United States,Twitter and Indonesia. (Laughter)
Why do we want to get in these nets?Why do we want to be involved?We talked earlier about the Arab Spring,and the power of all this.I'll give you another example,and it's how you move this message.
I gave a talk like this in London a while backabout this point. I said, as I say to all of you,I'm on Facebook. Friend me.Got a little laugh from the audience.There was an article which was run by AP, on the wire.Got picked up in two places in the world:Finland and Indonesia.The headline was: NATO Admiral Needs Friends.(Laughter)Thank you. (Applause)Which I do. (Laughter)
And the story was a catalyst,and the next morning I had hundredsof Facebook friend requestsfrom Indonesians and Finns,mostly saying, "Admiral, we heard you need a friend,and oh, by the way, what is NATO?" (Laughter)
So ... (Laughter)
Yeah, we laugh, but this is how we move the message,and moving that message is how we connectinternational, interagency, private-public,and these social nets to help create security.
Now, let me hit a somber note.This is a photograph of a brave British soldier.He's in the Scots Guards.He's standing the watch in Helmand,in southern Afghanistan.I put him here to remind us,I would not want anyone to leave the room thinkingthat we do not need capable, competent militarieswho can create real military effect.That is the core of who we are and what we do,and we do it to protect freedom, freedom of speech,all the things we treasure in our societies.
But, you know, life is not an on-and-off switch.You don't have to have a military that is eitherin hard combat or is in the barracks.
I would argue life is a rheostat.You have to dial it in,and as I think about how we create securityin this 21st century, there will be timeswhen we will apply hard power in true war and crisis,but there will be many instances,as we've talked about today,where our militaries can be part of creating21st-century security, international,interagency, private-public,connected with competent communication.
I would close by saying that we heard earlier todayabout Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia all the timeto look up facts, and as all of you appreciate,Wikipedia is not created by 12 brilliant peoplelocked in a room writing articles.Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of peopleinputting information, and every day millions of peoplewithdrawing that information.It's a perfect image for the fundamental pointthat no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.No one person, no one alliance, no one nation,no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.
The vision statement of Wikipedia is very simple:a world in which every human being can freely sharein the sum of all knowledge.My thesis for you is that by combining international,interagency, private-public, strategic communication,together, in this 21st century,we can create the sum of all security.
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
Transcript:
I'm gonna talk a little bit about open-source security,because we've got to get better at securityin this 21st century.
Let me start by saying, let's look back to the 20th century,and kind of get a sense of how that style of securityworked for us.
This is Verdun, a battlefield in Francejust north of the NATO headquarters in Belgium.At Verdun, in 1916, over a 300-day period,700,000 people were killed,so about 2,000 a day.
If you roll it forward -- 20th-century security --into the Second World War,you see the Battle of Stalingrad,300 days, 2 million people killed.
We go into the Cold War, and we continueto try and build walls.We go from the trench warfare of the First World Warto the Maginot Line of the Second World War,and then we go into the Cold War,the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall.Walls don't work.
My thesis for us today is, instead of building wallsto create security, we need to build bridges.This is a famous bridge in Europe.It's in Bosnia-Herzegovina.It's the bridge over the Drina River,the subject of a novel by Ivo Andrić,and it talks about how,in that very troubled part of Europe and the Balkans,over time there's been enormous building of walls.More recently, in the last decade, we begin to seethese communities start, hesitatingly,to come together.
I would argue, again, open-source securityis about connecting the international,the interagency, the private-public,and lashing it together with strategic communication,largely in social networks.
So let me talk a little bit about why we need to do that,because our global commons is under attackin a variety of ways,and none of the sources of threat to the global commonswill be solved by building walls.
Now, I'm a sailor, obviously.This is a ship, a liner, clipping through the Indian Ocean.What's wrong with this picture?It's got concertina wire along the sides of it.That's to prevent pirates from attacking it.Piracy is a very active threat todayaround the world. This is in the Indian Ocean.Piracy is also very active in the Strait of Malacca.It's active in the Gulf of Guinea.We see it in the Caribbean.It's a $10-billion-a-year discontinuityin the global transport system.Last year, at this time, there were 20 vessels,500 mariners held hostage.This is an attack on the global commons.We need to think about how to address it.
Let's shift to a different kind of sea,the cyber sea.Here are photographs of two young men.At the moment, they're incarcerated.They conducted a credit card fraud that netted themover 10 billion dollars.This is part of cybercrime which is a $2-trillion-a-yeardiscontinuity in the global economy.Two trillion a year.That's just under the GDP of Great Britain.So this cyber sea, which we know endlesslyis the fundamental piece of radical openness,is very much under threat as well.
Another thing I worry about in the global commonsis the threat posed by trafficking,by the movement of narcotics, opium,here coming out of Afghanistan through Europeover to the United States.We worry about cocainecoming from the Andean Ridge north.We worry about the movement of illegal weaponsand trafficking. Above all, perhaps,we worry about human trafficking, and the awful cost of it.Trafficking moves largely at seabut in other parts of the global commons.
This is a photograph, and I wish I could tell youthat this is a very high-tech piece of US Navy gearthat we're using to stop the trafficking.The bad news is,this is a semi-submersible run by drug cartels.It was built in the jungles of South America.We caught it with that low-tech raft — (Laughter) —and it was carrying six tons of cocaine.Crew of four. Sophisticated communications sweep.This kind of trafficking, in narcotics, in humans, in weapons,God forbid, in weapons of mass destruction,is part of the threat to the global commons.
And let's pull it together in Afghanistan today.This is a field of poppies in Afghanistan.Eighty to 90 percent of the world's poppy,opium and heroin, comes out of Afghanistan.We also see there, of course, terrorism.This is where al Qaeda is staged from.We also see a very strong insurgency embedded there.So this terrorism concern is also partof the global commons, and what we must address.
So here we are, 21st century.We know our 20th-century tools are not going to work.What should we do?
I would argue that we will not deliver securitysolely from the barrel of a gun.We will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun.We will need the application of military force.When we do it, we must do it well, and competently.
But my thesis is, open-source security is about international,interagency, private-public connection pulled togetherby this idea of strategic communication on the Internet.
Let me give you a couple of examples of how this works in a positive way.This is Afghanistan. These are Afghan soldiers.They are all holding books.You should say, "That's odd. I thought I read thatthis demographic, young men and womenin their 20s and 30s, is largely illiterate in Afghanistan."
You would be correct.
Eighty-five percent cannot readwhen they enter the security forces of Afghanistan.Why? Because the Taliban withheld educationduring the period of time in which these men and womenwould have learned to read.
So the question is, so,why are they all standing there holding books?The answer is, we are teaching them to readin literacy courses by NATOin partnership with private sector entities,in partnership with development agencies.We've taught well over 200,000 Afghan Security Forcesto read and write at a basic level.
When you can read and write in Afghanistan,you will typically put a pen in your pocket.At the ceremonies, when these young men and womengraduate, they take that pen with great pride,and put it in their pocket.This is bringing together international— there are 50 nations involved in this mission —interagency — these development agencies —and private-public, to take on this kind of security.
Now, we are also teaching them combat skills, of course,but I would argue, open-source securitymeans connecting in ways that createlonger lasting security effect.
Here's another example.This is a US Navy warship.It's called the Comfort.There's a sister ship called the Mercy.They are hospital ships.This one, the Comfort, operates throughoutthe Caribbean and the coast of South Americaconducting patient treatments.On a typical cruise, they'll do 400,000 patient treatments.It is crewed not strictly by militarybut by a combination of humanitarian organizations:Operation Hope, Project Smile.Other organizations send volunteers.Interagency physicians come out.They're all part of this.
To give you one example of the impact this can have,this little boy, eight years old,walked with his mother two daysto come to the eye clinic put on by the Comfort.When he was fitted, over his extremely myopic eyes,he suddenly looked up and said,"Mama, veo el mundo.""Mom, I see the world."Multiply this by 400,000 patient treatments,this private-public collaboration with security forces,and you begin to see the powerof creating security in a very different way.
Here you see baseball players.Can you pick out the two US Army soldiersin this photograph?They are the two young men on either sideof these young boys. This is part of a seriesof baseball clinics, where we have explored collaborationbetween Major League Baseball,the Department of State,who sets up the diplomatic piece of this,military baseball players, who are real soldierswith real skills but participate in this mission,and they put on clinicsthroughout Latin America and the Caribbean,in Honduras, in Nicaragua,in all of the Central American and Caribbean nationswhere baseball is so popular,and it creates security.It shows role models to young men and womenabout fitness and about life that I would arguehelp create security for us.
Another aspect of this partnershipis in disaster relief.This is a US Air Force helicopter participatingafter the tsunami in 2004 which killed 250,000 people.In each of these major disasters — the tsunami in 2004,250,000 dead, the Kashmiri earthquake in Pakistan, 2005,85,000 dead,the Haitian earthquake, about 300,000 dead,more recently the awful earthquake-tsunami combinationwhich struck Japan and its nuclear industry —in all of these instances, we see partnershipsbetween international actors,interagency, private-public working with security forcesto respond to this kind of natural disaster.So these are examples of this idea of open-source security.
We tie it together, increasingly, by doing things like this.Now, you're looking at this thinking, "Ah, Admiral,these must be sea lanes of communication,or these might be fiber optic cables."No. This is a graphic of the world according to Twitter.Purple are tweets. Green are geolocation.White is the synthesis.It's a perfect evocation of that great population survey,the six largest nations in the world in descending order:China, India, Facebook, the United States,Twitter and Indonesia. (Laughter)
Why do we want to get in these nets?Why do we want to be involved?We talked earlier about the Arab Spring,and the power of all this.I'll give you another example,and it's how you move this message.
I gave a talk like this in London a while backabout this point. I said, as I say to all of you,I'm on Facebook. Friend me.Got a little laugh from the audience.There was an article which was run by AP, on the wire.Got picked up in two places in the world:Finland and Indonesia.The headline was: NATO Admiral Needs Friends.(Laughter)Thank you. (Applause)Which I do. (Laughter)
And the story was a catalyst,and the next morning I had hundredsof Facebook friend requestsfrom Indonesians and Finns,mostly saying, "Admiral, we heard you need a friend,and oh, by the way, what is NATO?" (Laughter)
So ... (Laughter)
Yeah, we laugh, but this is how we move the message,and moving that message is how we connectinternational, interagency, private-public,and these social nets to help create security.
Now, let me hit a somber note.This is a photograph of a brave British soldier.He's in the Scots Guards.He's standing the watch in Helmand,in southern Afghanistan.I put him here to remind us,I would not want anyone to leave the room thinkingthat we do not need capable, competent militarieswho can create real military effect.That is the core of who we are and what we do,and we do it to protect freedom, freedom of speech,all the things we treasure in our societies.
But, you know, life is not an on-and-off switch.You don't have to have a military that is eitherin hard combat or is in the barracks.
I would argue life is a rheostat.You have to dial it in,and as I think about how we create securityin this 21st century, there will be timeswhen we will apply hard power in true war and crisis,but there will be many instances,as we've talked about today,where our militaries can be part of creating21st-century security, international,interagency, private-public,connected with competent communication.
I would close by saying that we heard earlier todayabout Wikipedia. I use Wikipedia all the timeto look up facts, and as all of you appreciate,Wikipedia is not created by 12 brilliant peoplelocked in a room writing articles.Wikipedia, every day, is tens of thousands of peopleinputting information, and every day millions of peoplewithdrawing that information.It's a perfect image for the fundamental pointthat no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.No one person, no one alliance, no one nation,no one of us is as smart as all of us thinking together.
The vision statement of Wikipedia is very simple:a world in which every human being can freely sharein the sum of all knowledge.My thesis for you is that by combining international,interagency, private-public, strategic communication,together, in this 21st century,we can create the sum of all security.
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
TED Talks-Malte Spitz: Your phone company is watching
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Hi. This is my mobile phone.A mobile phone can change your life,and gives you individual freedom.With a mobile phone,you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria.With a mobile phone,you can tweet a messageand start a protest in Egypt.And with a mobile phone,you can record a song, load it up toSoundCloud and become famous.All this is possible with your mobile phone.
I'm a child of 1984,and I live in the city of Berlin.Let's go back to that time, to this city.Here you can seehow hundreds of thousands of peoplestood up and protested for change.This is autumn 1989,and imagine that all those people standing upand protesting for change had amobile phone in their pocket.
Who in the room has a mobile phone with you?Hold it up.Hold your phones up, hold your phones up!Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow.That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.
But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone,and how it changed my life.And I will talk about this.These are 35,830 lines of information.Raw data.And why are these informations there?Because in the summer of 2006,the E.U. Commission tabled a directive.
This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive.This directive says that each phone company in Europe,each Internet service company all over Europe,has to store a wide range of information about the users.Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email?Who sends whom a text message?And if you use your mobile phone, where you are.All this information is stored for at least six months,up to two years by your phone companyor your Internet service provider.
And all over Europe, people stood up and said,"We don't want this."They said, we don't want this data retention.We want self-determination in the digital age,and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companieshave to store all this information about us.They were lawyers, journalists, priests,they all said: "We don't want this."
And here you can see, like 10 thousands of peoplewent out on the streets of Berlin and said,"Freedom, not fear."And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0.Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.
And I also ask myself, does it really work?Can they really store all this information about us?Every time I use my mobile phone?So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom,which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany,and I asked them, please,send me all the information you have stored about me.And I asked them once, and I asked them again,and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers.
But then I said, I want to have this information,because this is my life you are protocoling.So I decided to start a lawsuit against them,because I wanted to have this information.But Deutsche Telekom said, no,we will not give you this information.So at the end, I had a settlement with them.I'll put down the lawsuitand they will send me all the information I ask for.Because in the mean time,the German Constitutional Court ruledthat the implementation of this E.U. directiveinto German law was unconstitutional.
So I got this ugly brown envelopewith a C.D. inside.And on the C.D., this was on.Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information.At first I saw it, and I said, okay,it's a huge file. Okay.But then after a while I realized,this is my life.This is six months of my life,into this file.
So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it?Because you can see where I am,where I sleep at night,what I am doing.But then I said, I want to go out with this information.I want to make them public.Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.
So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this.This is a visualization of six months of my life.You can zoom in and zoom out,you can wind back and fast forward.You can see every step I take.And you can even seehow I go from Frankfurt by trainto Cologne, and how often I call in between.
All this is possible with this information.That's a little bit scary.But it is not only about me.It's about all of us.First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me,and we talk to each other a couple of times.And then there are some friends calling me,and they call each other.And after a while you are calling you,and you are calling you, and you have this greatcommunication network.
But you can see how your people are communicating with each other,what times they call each other, when they go to bed.You can see all of this.You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group.If you have access to this information,you can see what your society is doing.If you have access to this information,you can control your society.
This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran.This is a blueprint how to survey your society,because you know who talks to whom,who sends whom an email, all this is possibleif you have access to this information.And this information is stored for at least six monthsin Europe, up to two years.
Like I said at the beginning,imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlinin autumn of 1989had a mobile phone in their pocket.And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest,and if the Stasi would have knownwho are the leaders behind it,this may never have happened.The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there.And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain.Because today, state agencies and companieswant to store as much information as they can get about us,online and offline.They want to have the possibility to track our lives,and they want to store them for all time.
But self-determination and living in the digital ageis no contradiction.But you have to fight for your self-determination today.You have to fight for it every day.So, when you go home,tell your friendsthat privacy is a value of the 21st century,and it's not outdated.When you go home, tell your representativeonly because companies and state agencies have the possibilityto store certain information, they don't have to do it.And if you don't believe me,ask your phone company what information they store about you.
So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone,let it be a reminder to youthat you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.Thank you.
(Applause)
Transcript:
Hi. This is my mobile phone.A mobile phone can change your life,and gives you individual freedom.With a mobile phone,you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria.With a mobile phone,you can tweet a messageand start a protest in Egypt.And with a mobile phone,you can record a song, load it up toSoundCloud and become famous.All this is possible with your mobile phone.
I'm a child of 1984,and I live in the city of Berlin.Let's go back to that time, to this city.Here you can seehow hundreds of thousands of peoplestood up and protested for change.This is autumn 1989,and imagine that all those people standing upand protesting for change had amobile phone in their pocket.
Who in the room has a mobile phone with you?Hold it up.Hold your phones up, hold your phones up!Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow.That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone.
But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone,and how it changed my life.And I will talk about this.These are 35,830 lines of information.Raw data.And why are these informations there?Because in the summer of 2006,the E.U. Commission tabled a directive.
This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive.This directive says that each phone company in Europe,each Internet service company all over Europe,has to store a wide range of information about the users.Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email?Who sends whom a text message?And if you use your mobile phone, where you are.All this information is stored for at least six months,up to two years by your phone companyor your Internet service provider.
And all over Europe, people stood up and said,"We don't want this."They said, we don't want this data retention.We want self-determination in the digital age,and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companieshave to store all this information about us.They were lawyers, journalists, priests,they all said: "We don't want this."
And here you can see, like 10 thousands of peoplewent out on the streets of Berlin and said,"Freedom, not fear."And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0.Stasi was the secret police in East Germany.
And I also ask myself, does it really work?Can they really store all this information about us?Every time I use my mobile phone?So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom,which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany,and I asked them, please,send me all the information you have stored about me.And I asked them once, and I asked them again,and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers.
But then I said, I want to have this information,because this is my life you are protocoling.So I decided to start a lawsuit against them,because I wanted to have this information.But Deutsche Telekom said, no,we will not give you this information.So at the end, I had a settlement with them.I'll put down the lawsuitand they will send me all the information I ask for.Because in the mean time,the German Constitutional Court ruledthat the implementation of this E.U. directiveinto German law was unconstitutional.
So I got this ugly brown envelopewith a C.D. inside.And on the C.D., this was on.Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information.At first I saw it, and I said, okay,it's a huge file. Okay.But then after a while I realized,this is my life.This is six months of my life,into this file.
So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it?Because you can see where I am,where I sleep at night,what I am doing.But then I said, I want to go out with this information.I want to make them public.Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean.
So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this.This is a visualization of six months of my life.You can zoom in and zoom out,you can wind back and fast forward.You can see every step I take.And you can even seehow I go from Frankfurt by trainto Cologne, and how often I call in between.
All this is possible with this information.That's a little bit scary.But it is not only about me.It's about all of us.First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me,and we talk to each other a couple of times.And then there are some friends calling me,and they call each other.And after a while you are calling you,and you are calling you, and you have this greatcommunication network.
But you can see how your people are communicating with each other,what times they call each other, when they go to bed.You can see all of this.You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group.If you have access to this information,you can see what your society is doing.If you have access to this information,you can control your society.
This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran.This is a blueprint how to survey your society,because you know who talks to whom,who sends whom an email, all this is possibleif you have access to this information.And this information is stored for at least six monthsin Europe, up to two years.
Like I said at the beginning,imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlinin autumn of 1989had a mobile phone in their pocket.And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest,and if the Stasi would have knownwho are the leaders behind it,this may never have happened.The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there.And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain.Because today, state agencies and companieswant to store as much information as they can get about us,online and offline.They want to have the possibility to track our lives,and they want to store them for all time.
But self-determination and living in the digital ageis no contradiction.But you have to fight for your self-determination today.You have to fight for it every day.So, when you go home,tell your friendsthat privacy is a value of the 21st century,and it's not outdated.When you go home, tell your representativeonly because companies and state agencies have the possibilityto store certain information, they don't have to do it.And if you don't believe me,ask your phone company what information they store about you.
So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone,let it be a reminder to youthat you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age.Thank you.
(Applause)
Dustin Luke-Videos
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Video 1: Cosas que dicen los Americanos en Español
Video 2: Cosas que dicen los Argentinos, hecho por un yanqui (**)
(**)Warning/Advertencia: En el video se escucharán algunas malas palabras
Video 1: Cosas que dicen los Americanos en Español
Video 2: Cosas que dicen los Argentinos, hecho por un yanqui (**)
(**)Warning/Advertencia: En el video se escucharán algunas malas palabras
Skype makes chats and user data more available to police
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Skype makes chats and user data more available to police
By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima,July 25
Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.
Surveillance of the audio and video feeds remains impractical — even when courts issue warrants, say industry officials with direct knowledge of the matter. But that barrier could eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the world’s most popular forms of telecommunication.
The changes to online chats, which are written messages conveyed almost instantaneously between users, result in part from technical upgrades to Skype that were instituted to address outages and other stability issues since Microsoft bought the company last year. Officials of the United States and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the “going dark” problem.
Microsoft has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the issues would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s plans, who like several people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The company has “a long track record of working successfully with law enforcement here and internationally,” he added.
The changes, which give the authorities access to addresses and credit card numbers, have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility from many activists and analysts.
Authorities had for years complained that Skype’s encryption and other features made tracking drug lords, pedophiles and terrorists more difficult. Jihadis recommended the service on online forums. Police listening to traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear wary suspects say to one another, “Hey, let’s talk on Skype.”
Hacker groups and privacy experts have been speculating for months that Skype had changed its architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor, and many blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying with legal government requests in countries around the world.
“The issue is, to what extent are our communications being purpose-built to make surveillance easy?” said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a digital privacy group. “When you make it easy to do, law enforcement is going to want to use it more and more. If you build it, they will come.’’
Skype was slow to clarify the situation, issuing a statement recently that said, “As was true before the Microsoft acquisition, Skype cooperates with law enforcement agencies as is legally required and technically feasible.”
But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.
In the United States, such requests require a court order, though in other nations rules vary. Skype has more than 600 million users, with some in nearly every nation in the world. Political dissidents relied on it extensively during the Arab Spring to communicate with journalists, human rights workers and each other, in part because of its reputation for security.
Skype’s resistance to government monitoring, part of the company ethos when European engineers founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong encryption and a key technical feature: Skype calls connected computers directly rather than routing data through central servers, as many other Internet-based communication systems do. That makes it more difficult for law enforcement to intercept the call. The authorities long have been able to wiretap Skype calls to traditional phones.
The company created a law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay bought the company in 2005, putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S. law. The company was later sold to private investors before Microsoft bought it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.
The new ownership had at least an indirect role in the security changes. Skype has endured periodic outages, including a disastrous one in December 2010. Company officials concluded that a more robust system was needed if the company was going to reach its potential.
Industry officials said the resulting push for the creation of so-called “supernodes,” which routed some data through centralized servers, made greater cooperation with law enforcement authorities possible.
The access to personal information and online chats, which are kept in Skype’s systems for 30 days, remains short of what some law enforcement officials have requested.
The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.”
Hackers in recent years have demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate Skype, but it’s not clear how often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in June 2011 for “legal intercept” of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and video systems. It is also possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as well as voice and video by hacking into a user’s computer, doing an end run around encryptions.
“If someone wants to compromise a Skype communication, all they have to do is hack the endpoint — the person’s computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is very easy to do,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro, a cloud security company.
Some industry officials, however, say Skype loses some competitive edge in the increasingly crowded world of Internet-based communications systems if users no longer see it as more private than rival services.
“This is just making Skype like every other communication service, no better, no worse,” said one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Skype used to be very special because it really was locked up. Now it’s like Superman without his powers.”
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
Skype makes chats and user data more available to police
By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima,July 25
Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes.
Surveillance of the audio and video feeds remains impractical — even when courts issue warrants, say industry officials with direct knowledge of the matter. But that barrier could eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the world’s most popular forms of telecommunication.
The changes to online chats, which are written messages conveyed almost instantaneously between users, result in part from technical upgrades to Skype that were instituted to address outages and other stability issues since Microsoft bought the company last year. Officials of the United States and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the “going dark” problem.
Microsoft has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the issues would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s plans, who like several people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The company has “a long track record of working successfully with law enforcement here and internationally,” he added.
The changes, which give the authorities access to addresses and credit card numbers, have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility from many activists and analysts.
Authorities had for years complained that Skype’s encryption and other features made tracking drug lords, pedophiles and terrorists more difficult. Jihadis recommended the service on online forums. Police listening to traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear wary suspects say to one another, “Hey, let’s talk on Skype.”
Hacker groups and privacy experts have been speculating for months that Skype had changed its architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor, and many blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying with legal government requests in countries around the world.
“The issue is, to what extent are our communications being purpose-built to make surveillance easy?” said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a digital privacy group. “When you make it easy to do, law enforcement is going to want to use it more and more. If you build it, they will come.’’
Skype was slow to clarify the situation, issuing a statement recently that said, “As was true before the Microsoft acquisition, Skype cooperates with law enforcement agencies as is legally required and technically feasible.”
But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.
In the United States, such requests require a court order, though in other nations rules vary. Skype has more than 600 million users, with some in nearly every nation in the world. Political dissidents relied on it extensively during the Arab Spring to communicate with journalists, human rights workers and each other, in part because of its reputation for security.
Skype’s resistance to government monitoring, part of the company ethos when European engineers founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong encryption and a key technical feature: Skype calls connected computers directly rather than routing data through central servers, as many other Internet-based communication systems do. That makes it more difficult for law enforcement to intercept the call. The authorities long have been able to wiretap Skype calls to traditional phones.
The company created a law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay bought the company in 2005, putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S. law. The company was later sold to private investors before Microsoft bought it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.
The new ownership had at least an indirect role in the security changes. Skype has endured periodic outages, including a disastrous one in December 2010. Company officials concluded that a more robust system was needed if the company was going to reach its potential.
Industry officials said the resulting push for the creation of so-called “supernodes,” which routed some data through centralized servers, made greater cooperation with law enforcement authorities possible.
The access to personal information and online chats, which are kept in Skype’s systems for 30 days, remains short of what some law enforcement officials have requested.
The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.”
Hackers in recent years have demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate Skype, but it’s not clear how often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in June 2011 for “legal intercept” of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and video systems. It is also possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as well as voice and video by hacking into a user’s computer, doing an end run around encryptions.
“If someone wants to compromise a Skype communication, all they have to do is hack the endpoint — the person’s computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is very easy to do,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro, a cloud security company.
Some industry officials, however, say Skype loses some competitive edge in the increasingly crowded world of Internet-based communications systems if users no longer see it as more private than rival services.
“This is just making Skype like every other communication service, no better, no worse,” said one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Skype used to be very special because it really was locked up. Now it’s like Superman without his powers.”
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
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