The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Blake Mycoskie (TOMS' CEO) Interviewed by High School Students
GOOD + Skype have set out to connect the visionaries of today with the social entrepreneurs of tomorrow.
TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie answers the questions of...
Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnip2uuAVkM&feature=share&list=UUeHHAF22PljrnnjskZeljmg …
Source:www.youtube.com/TWITTER: @BlakeMycoskie
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.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
GralInt-TOMS Shoes backs Haiti-Video/TOMS founder on marrying business with charity (Link to Video)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
TOMS Shoes backs Haiti
Added on October 20, 2014
TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie talks about how his company is helping Haiti's women's football and creating jobs.
TOMS founder on marrying business with charity
Oct. 09, 2014
TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie on the company’s one for one strategy.
Link:http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/3830449646001/toms-founder-on-marrying-business-with-charity/#sp=show-clips
Source/Link:(Video 1)http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/business/2014/10/20/wbt-intv-toms-shoes-haiti-help.cnn.html
TOMS Shoes backs Haiti
Added on October 20, 2014
TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie talks about how his company is helping Haiti's women's football and creating jobs.
TOMS founder on marrying business with charity
Oct. 09, 2014
TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie on the company’s one for one strategy.
Link:http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/3830449646001/toms-founder-on-marrying-business-with-charity/#sp=show-clips
Source/Link:(Video 1)http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/business/2014/10/20/wbt-intv-toms-shoes-haiti-help.cnn.html
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
EDUC/GralInt-La educación no es una prioridad para los argentinos (rep)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Fuera de agenda
La educación no es una prioridad para los argentinos
Urgida por temas como la inseguridad y la inflación, la ciudadanía no ejerce sobre las autoridades la presión necesaria para mejorar el sistema de enseñanza
Por Marita Carballo | Para LA NACION
Foto: LA NACION
En los últimos 30 años, la agenda de los argentinos ha girado en torno de tres ejes: inflación, desempleo e inseguridad. La educación no constituye un tema prioritario en la lista de los principales problemas de la sociedad. Este dato de la realidad muestra la necesidad de reposicionar la demanda de una educación de calidad .
En la actualidad, la agenda de los argentinos está dominada por los problemas de la inseguridad, la inflación y la corrupción, que en conjunto son prioritarios para seis de cada diez personas. Les siguen los problemas de las drogas y del desempleo. Para la mayoría de los ciudadanos, sus principales preocupaciones tienen que ver con asuntos que requieren respuestas y gestos políticos inmediatos.
Por esta razón, no sorprende que la educación aparezca en séptimo lugar, asomando como prioridad sólo para uno de cada veinte argentinos. Hoy es difícil para los ciudadanos pensar en el largo plazo y darles prioridad a proyectos que requieren una planificación que debe ir más allá de uno o dos períodos de gobierno -como sería el caso de un proyecto educativo- y cuyos efectos no siempre se ven en el corto plazo. El agravamiento de los problemas urgentes ha desplazado la trascendencia de la educación.
Quienes conducen en democracia suelen preocuparse por lo urgente y por lo que da réditos electorales inmediatos. Por eso se requiere una opinión pública consciente de la importancia de la educación para que el gobierno que la representa le otorgue prioridad al tema.
Estas preocupaciones guiaron a la consultora Voices a realizar una encuesta a nivel nacional con 1000 entrevistas personales y domiciliarias sobre la percepción que los argentinos tienen de la educación y un estudio cualitativo entre estudiantes secundarios.
Existen opiniones divididas sobre la calidad del sistema educativo: cuatro de cada diez entrevistados opinaron de manera positiva (el 38%); una proporción similar dijo que era regular (el 42%), y el 19% lo calificó negativamente. Es decir que alrededor de 6 de cada 10 entrevistados poseen algún tipo de opinión crítica sobre la calidad de la educación.
La educación universitaria es la mejor evaluada, con un 58% de respuestas positivas (20% la considera regular y 8%, negativa). El nivel secundario es el que recibe las opiniones más adversas (40% positivas, 32% de calificaciones regulares, un 21% de negativas). Y un 45% del total de la población evalúa positivamente a la escuela primaria (30% regular y 20% negativa).
Sin embargo, a la hora de evaluar la educación que reciben sus hijos las opiniones son mayoritariamente positivas: 7 de cada 10 manifiestan que sus hijos reciben una buena educación primaria y secundaria, y 8 de cada 10, que es buena o muy buena la educación universitaria.
Estos resultados muestran que la calidad de la enseñanza es percibida de manera dual: se tiene una opinión algo crítica del sistema en general, pero al mismo tiempo existe una idea positiva de la educación de los hijos. Esta discrepancia se denomina third-person effect, un término que viene de las ciencias de la comunicación y describe el prejuicio de creer que un problema afecta a los demás, pero no a mí.
Parecería que la sociedad argentina no tiene aún verdadera conciencia del problema educativo. La evaluación PISA 2012, que mide los logros educativos de alumnos de 15 años, muestra que la Argentina ocupa el puesto 59 entre los 65 países participantes, y el sexto lugar entre los ocho latinoamericanos. Y no alcanza el nivel 2 en lectura, lo cual implica que la mitad de los estudiantes no entienden lo que leen. Y en la última encuesta global WVS, que indagó acerca de la preocupación por no poder dar una buena educación a los hijos, la Argentina figuró en la posición 40 entre las 48 naciones, con sólo un 22% manifestándose muy preocupado.
El mundo del conocimiento científico empieza a demandar mucho más que los tradicionales saberes del pasado: se busca que las personas puedan leer y comprender textos diversos, analizar fuentes de información diferentes y evaluar procesos, entre otras competencias. El desajuste entre lo que la escuela enseña y lo que la sociedad y el mercado de trabajo les piden a los jóvenes es muy grande y la escuela secundaria no está consiguiendo cerrar esa brecha.
Al preguntar qué objetivo es el más importante para un colegio secundario, casi 4 de cada 10 entrevistados destacaron que la escuela debe proveer habilidades y preparación para una salida laboral (36%), luego se mencionó que enseñe cómo razonar y prensar (18%) y que prepare a los estudiantes para la universidad (18%).
El estudio realizado entre estudiantes del secundario muestra que para los jóvenes la principal función de la escuela media debería ser brindarles una buena enseñanza que les permita acceder a la educación superior y que los prepare para el mundo del trabajo y la vida social. El secundario debería darles las herramientas necesarias para poder resolver los problemas que aparezcan a futuro en estos ámbitos. En ese sentido, se valoran la exigencia y la transmisión de valores en relación con una formación integral.
Al preguntar a la población cuál es el mayor problema que enfrenta el sector educativo, la calidad de la educación no aparece como uno de sus principales problemas. Más bien aparecen aquellos que tienen que ver con aspectos gremiales y administrativos (días de paro, sueldos docentes, presupuesto educativo) antes que con la calidad (programa educativo, idoneidad de los docentes, resultados de las evaluaciones de los alumnos).
Se ha invertido, el gobierno actual ha incrementado el presupuesto, se han incorporado docentes, entregado computadoras, becas y subsidios, pero esto no se ha traducido en un incremento en los niveles de la educación.
Mejorar la educación argentina no es sólo tarea de autoridades: también requiere la participación activa de la sociedad civil para que presione a los líderes a fin de que se implementen los cambios necesarios.
Una opinión pública consciente y activa es indispensable para generar las acciones y los cambios de comportamiento necesarios en los distintos actores: gobiernos, directores, docentes, estudiantes, padres y sociedad civil en general, para alcanzar juntos una mejor calidad de educación para todos.
Es indispensable que la ciudadanía conozca y entienda los desafíos que nos plantea la mejora de la educación argentina. Si no estamos a la altura de este compromiso, si no logramos que nuestros jóvenes reciban la formación requerida en estos tiempos de cambio permanente, donde lo fundamental no es repetir conceptos establecidos sino tener bases sólidas y formación intelectual para la adaptación y el cambio, no estaremos simplemente atrasados, sino que perderemos el tren de la historia.
© LA NACION
La autora, socióloga, es presidenta de la consultora Voices y miembro de la Academia Nacional de Educación.
Fuera de agenda
La educación no es una prioridad para los argentinos
Urgida por temas como la inseguridad y la inflación, la ciudadanía no ejerce sobre las autoridades la presión necesaria para mejorar el sistema de enseñanza
Por Marita Carballo | Para LA NACION
Foto: LA NACION
En los últimos 30 años, la agenda de los argentinos ha girado en torno de tres ejes: inflación, desempleo e inseguridad. La educación no constituye un tema prioritario en la lista de los principales problemas de la sociedad. Este dato de la realidad muestra la necesidad de reposicionar la demanda de una educación de calidad .
En la actualidad, la agenda de los argentinos está dominada por los problemas de la inseguridad, la inflación y la corrupción, que en conjunto son prioritarios para seis de cada diez personas. Les siguen los problemas de las drogas y del desempleo. Para la mayoría de los ciudadanos, sus principales preocupaciones tienen que ver con asuntos que requieren respuestas y gestos políticos inmediatos.
Por esta razón, no sorprende que la educación aparezca en séptimo lugar, asomando como prioridad sólo para uno de cada veinte argentinos. Hoy es difícil para los ciudadanos pensar en el largo plazo y darles prioridad a proyectos que requieren una planificación que debe ir más allá de uno o dos períodos de gobierno -como sería el caso de un proyecto educativo- y cuyos efectos no siempre se ven en el corto plazo. El agravamiento de los problemas urgentes ha desplazado la trascendencia de la educación.
Quienes conducen en democracia suelen preocuparse por lo urgente y por lo que da réditos electorales inmediatos. Por eso se requiere una opinión pública consciente de la importancia de la educación para que el gobierno que la representa le otorgue prioridad al tema.
Estas preocupaciones guiaron a la consultora Voices a realizar una encuesta a nivel nacional con 1000 entrevistas personales y domiciliarias sobre la percepción que los argentinos tienen de la educación y un estudio cualitativo entre estudiantes secundarios.
Existen opiniones divididas sobre la calidad del sistema educativo: cuatro de cada diez entrevistados opinaron de manera positiva (el 38%); una proporción similar dijo que era regular (el 42%), y el 19% lo calificó negativamente. Es decir que alrededor de 6 de cada 10 entrevistados poseen algún tipo de opinión crítica sobre la calidad de la educación.
La educación universitaria es la mejor evaluada, con un 58% de respuestas positivas (20% la considera regular y 8%, negativa). El nivel secundario es el que recibe las opiniones más adversas (40% positivas, 32% de calificaciones regulares, un 21% de negativas). Y un 45% del total de la población evalúa positivamente a la escuela primaria (30% regular y 20% negativa).
Sin embargo, a la hora de evaluar la educación que reciben sus hijos las opiniones son mayoritariamente positivas: 7 de cada 10 manifiestan que sus hijos reciben una buena educación primaria y secundaria, y 8 de cada 10, que es buena o muy buena la educación universitaria.
Estos resultados muestran que la calidad de la enseñanza es percibida de manera dual: se tiene una opinión algo crítica del sistema en general, pero al mismo tiempo existe una idea positiva de la educación de los hijos. Esta discrepancia se denomina third-person effect, un término que viene de las ciencias de la comunicación y describe el prejuicio de creer que un problema afecta a los demás, pero no a mí.
Parecería que la sociedad argentina no tiene aún verdadera conciencia del problema educativo. La evaluación PISA 2012, que mide los logros educativos de alumnos de 15 años, muestra que la Argentina ocupa el puesto 59 entre los 65 países participantes, y el sexto lugar entre los ocho latinoamericanos. Y no alcanza el nivel 2 en lectura, lo cual implica que la mitad de los estudiantes no entienden lo que leen. Y en la última encuesta global WVS, que indagó acerca de la preocupación por no poder dar una buena educación a los hijos, la Argentina figuró en la posición 40 entre las 48 naciones, con sólo un 22% manifestándose muy preocupado.
El mundo del conocimiento científico empieza a demandar mucho más que los tradicionales saberes del pasado: se busca que las personas puedan leer y comprender textos diversos, analizar fuentes de información diferentes y evaluar procesos, entre otras competencias. El desajuste entre lo que la escuela enseña y lo que la sociedad y el mercado de trabajo les piden a los jóvenes es muy grande y la escuela secundaria no está consiguiendo cerrar esa brecha.
Al preguntar qué objetivo es el más importante para un colegio secundario, casi 4 de cada 10 entrevistados destacaron que la escuela debe proveer habilidades y preparación para una salida laboral (36%), luego se mencionó que enseñe cómo razonar y prensar (18%) y que prepare a los estudiantes para la universidad (18%).
El estudio realizado entre estudiantes del secundario muestra que para los jóvenes la principal función de la escuela media debería ser brindarles una buena enseñanza que les permita acceder a la educación superior y que los prepare para el mundo del trabajo y la vida social. El secundario debería darles las herramientas necesarias para poder resolver los problemas que aparezcan a futuro en estos ámbitos. En ese sentido, se valoran la exigencia y la transmisión de valores en relación con una formación integral.
Al preguntar a la población cuál es el mayor problema que enfrenta el sector educativo, la calidad de la educación no aparece como uno de sus principales problemas. Más bien aparecen aquellos que tienen que ver con aspectos gremiales y administrativos (días de paro, sueldos docentes, presupuesto educativo) antes que con la calidad (programa educativo, idoneidad de los docentes, resultados de las evaluaciones de los alumnos).
Se ha invertido, el gobierno actual ha incrementado el presupuesto, se han incorporado docentes, entregado computadoras, becas y subsidios, pero esto no se ha traducido en un incremento en los niveles de la educación.
Mejorar la educación argentina no es sólo tarea de autoridades: también requiere la participación activa de la sociedad civil para que presione a los líderes a fin de que se implementen los cambios necesarios.
Una opinión pública consciente y activa es indispensable para generar las acciones y los cambios de comportamiento necesarios en los distintos actores: gobiernos, directores, docentes, estudiantes, padres y sociedad civil en general, para alcanzar juntos una mejor calidad de educación para todos.
Es indispensable que la ciudadanía conozca y entienda los desafíos que nos plantea la mejora de la educación argentina. Si no estamos a la altura de este compromiso, si no logramos que nuestros jóvenes reciban la formación requerida en estos tiempos de cambio permanente, donde lo fundamental no es repetir conceptos establecidos sino tener bases sólidas y formación intelectual para la adaptación y el cambio, no estaremos simplemente atrasados, sino que perderemos el tren de la historia.
© LA NACION
La autora, socióloga, es presidenta de la consultora Voices y miembro de la Academia Nacional de Educación.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
GralInt-TED Talks-Ramanan Laxminarayan: "The coming crisis in antibiotics"
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Ramanan Laxminarayan:
"The coming crisis in antibiotics"
TEDMED2014. Filmed Sep2014.
Antibiotic drugs save lives. But we simply use them too much — and often for non-lifesaving purposes, like treating the flu and even raising cheaper chickens. The result, says researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, is that the drugs will stop working for everyone, as the bacteria they target grow more and more resistant. He calls on all of us (patients and doctors alike) to think of antibiotics — and their ongoing effectiveness — as a finite resource, and to think twice before we tap into it. It’s a sobering look at how global medical trends can strike home.
Transcript:
The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work, he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway.
So they gave Albert Alexander, this Oxford policeman, the drug, and within 24 hours, he started getting better. His fever went down, his appetite came back. Second day, he was doing much better. They were starting to run out of penicillin, so what they would do was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him, and that worked. Day four, well on the way to recovery. This was a miracle. Day five, they ran out of penicillin, and the poor man died.
So that story didn't end that well, but fortunately for millions of other people, like this child who was treated again in the early 1940s, who was again dying of a sepsis, and within just six days, you can see, recovered thanks to this wonder drug, penicillin. Millions have lived, and global health has been transformed. Now, antibiotics have been used for patients like this, but they've also been used rather frivolously in some instances, for treating someone with just a cold or the flu, which they might not have responded to an antibiotic, and they've also been used in large quantities sub-therapeutically, which means in small concentrations, to make chicken and hogs grow faster. Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat, we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals, not for treatment, not for sick animals, but primarily for growth promotion.
Now, what did that lead us to? Basically, the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem, because we've now selected for just the resistant bacteria.
And I'm sure you've all read about this in the newspapers, you've seen this in every magazine that you come across, but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem. This is serious. The next slide I'm about to show you is of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter. Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug, and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug. And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance, mostly under about 10 percent across the United States. Now watch what happens when we play the video.
So I don't know where you live, but wherever it is, it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999, and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance. It's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries, and at the heart of it, you might say, well, isn't this really just a medical issue? If we taught doctors how not to use antibiotics as much, if we taught patients how not to demand antibiotics, perhaps this really wouldn't be an issue, and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics. Now, it turns out that there's something fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs, which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics, not only am I affected but others are affected as well, in the same way as if I choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere, that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere, and I don't necessarily take these costs into consideration. This is what economists might call a problem of the commons, and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case of antibiotics as well: that we don't consider — and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems — do not consider the costs that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used.
Now, that's a problem that's similar to another area that we all know about, which is of fuel use and energy, and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution and climate change. And typically, in the case of energy, there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem. One is, we can make better use of the oil that we have, and that's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics, and we can do this in a number of ways that we'll talk about in a second, but the other option is the "drill, baby, drill" option, which in the case of antibiotics is to go find new antibiotics.
Now, these are not separate. They're related, because if we invest heavily in new oil wells, we reduce the incentives for conservation of oil in the same way that's going to happen for antibiotics. The reverse is also going to happen, which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately, we don't necessarily have to make the investments in new drug development.
And if you thought that these two were entirely, fully balanced between these two options, you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we're playing. The game is really one of coevolution, and coevolution is, in this particular picture, between cheetahs and gazelles. Cheetahs have evolved to run faster, because if they didn't run faster, they wouldn't get any lunch. Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don't run faster, they would be lunch. Now, this is the game we're playing against the bacteria, except we're not the cheetahs, we're the gazelles, and the bacteria would, just in the course of this little talk, would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error, trying it over and over again. Whereas how do we stay ahead of the bacteria? We have drug discovery processes, screening molecules, we have clinical trials, and then, when we think we have a drug, then we have the FDA regulatory process. And once we go through all of that, then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria.
Now, this is clearly not a game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead. We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down, and there are ideas that we can borrow from energy that are helpful in thinking about how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well. Now, if you think about how we deal with energy pricing, for instance, we consider emissions taxes, which means we're imposing the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy. We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well, and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately. There are clean energy subsidies, which are to switch to fuels which don't pollute as much or perhaps don't need fossil fuels. Now, the analogy here is, perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics, and if you think about it, what are good substitutes for antibiotics? Well, turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work, so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people, particularly against the seasonal influenza. And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use, both in this country as well as in many other countries, and that could really help. A third option might include something like tradeable permits. And these seem like faraway scenarios, but if you consider the fact that we might not have antibiotics for many people who have infections, we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others, and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need, but also on the basis of pricing. And certainly consumer education works. Very often, people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so, and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful, both on energy — When you tell someone that they're using a lot of energy during peak hour, they tend to cut back, and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics. A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they'd used in the previous month, and this was purely an informational feedback, there was no shaming, but essentially that provided some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics.
Now, there's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well. If you look at the price of penicillin, the cost per day is about 10 cents. It's a fairly cheap drug. If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive, so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics, the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot. But what is that really telling us? That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap, effective antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future, and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation. That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies, in the same way that gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus, to, say, the development of electric cars. Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention, but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics, they're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs, which might save a patient's life only for a few months or perhaps a year, whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient's life forever. So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift, and it's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country, in many parts of the world, the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable. So we need to think about that.
Now, there are backstop options, which is other alternative technologies that people are working on. It includes bacteriophages, probiotics, quorum sensing, synbiotics.
Now, all of these are useful avenues to pursue, and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new antibiotics starts going higher, and we've seen that the market does actually respond, and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new antibiotics and development. But there are challenges here. We don't want to just throw money at a problem. What we want to be able to do is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics, and that really is the challenge here.
Now, going back to these technologies, you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film, "Nature will find a way." So it's not as if these are permanent solutions. We really have to remember that, whatever the technology might be, that nature will find some way to work around it.
You might think, well, this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria, but it turns out that we have the exact same identical problem in many other fields as well, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a serious problem in India and South Africa. Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive, and in some instances, even those don't work and you have XDR TB. Viruses are becoming resistant. Agricultural pests. Malaria parasites. Right now, much of the world depends on one drug, artemisinin drugs, essentially to treat malaria. Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged, and if this were to become widespread, that puts at risk the single drug that we have to treat malaria around the world in a way that's currently safe and efficacious. Mosquitos develop resistance. If you have kids, you probably know about head lice, and if you're from New York City, I understand that the specialty there is bedbugs. So those are also resistant. And we have to bring an example from across the pond. Turns out that rats are also resistant to poisons.
Now, what's common to all of these things is the idea that we've had these technologies to control nature only for the last 70, 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink, we have squandered our ability to control, because we have not recognized that natural selection and evolution was going to find a way to get back, and we need to completely rethink how we're going to use measures to control biological organisms, and rethink how we incentivize the development, introduction, in the case of antibiotics prescription, and use of these valuable resources. And we really now need to start thinking about them as natural resources. And so we stand at a crossroads. An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business. The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ramanan Laxminarayan:
"The coming crisis in antibiotics"
TEDMED2014. Filmed Sep2014.
Antibiotic drugs save lives. But we simply use them too much — and often for non-lifesaving purposes, like treating the flu and even raising cheaper chickens. The result, says researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, is that the drugs will stop working for everyone, as the bacteria they target grow more and more resistant. He calls on all of us (patients and doctors alike) to think of antibiotics — and their ongoing effectiveness — as a finite resource, and to think twice before we tap into it. It’s a sobering look at how global medical trends can strike home.
Transcript:
The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work, he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway.
So they gave Albert Alexander, this Oxford policeman, the drug, and within 24 hours, he started getting better. His fever went down, his appetite came back. Second day, he was doing much better. They were starting to run out of penicillin, so what they would do was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him, and that worked. Day four, well on the way to recovery. This was a miracle. Day five, they ran out of penicillin, and the poor man died.
So that story didn't end that well, but fortunately for millions of other people, like this child who was treated again in the early 1940s, who was again dying of a sepsis, and within just six days, you can see, recovered thanks to this wonder drug, penicillin. Millions have lived, and global health has been transformed. Now, antibiotics have been used for patients like this, but they've also been used rather frivolously in some instances, for treating someone with just a cold or the flu, which they might not have responded to an antibiotic, and they've also been used in large quantities sub-therapeutically, which means in small concentrations, to make chicken and hogs grow faster. Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat, we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals, not for treatment, not for sick animals, but primarily for growth promotion.
Now, what did that lead us to? Basically, the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem, because we've now selected for just the resistant bacteria.
And I'm sure you've all read about this in the newspapers, you've seen this in every magazine that you come across, but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem. This is serious. The next slide I'm about to show you is of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter. Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug, and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug. And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance, mostly under about 10 percent across the United States. Now watch what happens when we play the video.
So I don't know where you live, but wherever it is, it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999, and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance. It's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries, and at the heart of it, you might say, well, isn't this really just a medical issue? If we taught doctors how not to use antibiotics as much, if we taught patients how not to demand antibiotics, perhaps this really wouldn't be an issue, and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics. Now, it turns out that there's something fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs, which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics, not only am I affected but others are affected as well, in the same way as if I choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere, that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere, and I don't necessarily take these costs into consideration. This is what economists might call a problem of the commons, and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case of antibiotics as well: that we don't consider — and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems — do not consider the costs that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used.
Now, that's a problem that's similar to another area that we all know about, which is of fuel use and energy, and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution and climate change. And typically, in the case of energy, there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem. One is, we can make better use of the oil that we have, and that's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics, and we can do this in a number of ways that we'll talk about in a second, but the other option is the "drill, baby, drill" option, which in the case of antibiotics is to go find new antibiotics.
Now, these are not separate. They're related, because if we invest heavily in new oil wells, we reduce the incentives for conservation of oil in the same way that's going to happen for antibiotics. The reverse is also going to happen, which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately, we don't necessarily have to make the investments in new drug development.
And if you thought that these two were entirely, fully balanced between these two options, you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we're playing. The game is really one of coevolution, and coevolution is, in this particular picture, between cheetahs and gazelles. Cheetahs have evolved to run faster, because if they didn't run faster, they wouldn't get any lunch. Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don't run faster, they would be lunch. Now, this is the game we're playing against the bacteria, except we're not the cheetahs, we're the gazelles, and the bacteria would, just in the course of this little talk, would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error, trying it over and over again. Whereas how do we stay ahead of the bacteria? We have drug discovery processes, screening molecules, we have clinical trials, and then, when we think we have a drug, then we have the FDA regulatory process. And once we go through all of that, then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria.
Now, this is clearly not a game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead. We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down, and there are ideas that we can borrow from energy that are helpful in thinking about how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well. Now, if you think about how we deal with energy pricing, for instance, we consider emissions taxes, which means we're imposing the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy. We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well, and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately. There are clean energy subsidies, which are to switch to fuels which don't pollute as much or perhaps don't need fossil fuels. Now, the analogy here is, perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics, and if you think about it, what are good substitutes for antibiotics? Well, turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work, so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people, particularly against the seasonal influenza. And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use, both in this country as well as in many other countries, and that could really help. A third option might include something like tradeable permits. And these seem like faraway scenarios, but if you consider the fact that we might not have antibiotics for many people who have infections, we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others, and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need, but also on the basis of pricing. And certainly consumer education works. Very often, people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so, and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful, both on energy — When you tell someone that they're using a lot of energy during peak hour, they tend to cut back, and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics. A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they'd used in the previous month, and this was purely an informational feedback, there was no shaming, but essentially that provided some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics.
Now, there's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well. If you look at the price of penicillin, the cost per day is about 10 cents. It's a fairly cheap drug. If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive, so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics, the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot. But what is that really telling us? That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap, effective antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future, and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation. That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies, in the same way that gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus, to, say, the development of electric cars. Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention, but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics, they're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs, which might save a patient's life only for a few months or perhaps a year, whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient's life forever. So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift, and it's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country, in many parts of the world, the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable. So we need to think about that.
Now, there are backstop options, which is other alternative technologies that people are working on. It includes bacteriophages, probiotics, quorum sensing, synbiotics.
Now, all of these are useful avenues to pursue, and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new antibiotics starts going higher, and we've seen that the market does actually respond, and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new antibiotics and development. But there are challenges here. We don't want to just throw money at a problem. What we want to be able to do is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics, and that really is the challenge here.
Now, going back to these technologies, you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film, "Nature will find a way." So it's not as if these are permanent solutions. We really have to remember that, whatever the technology might be, that nature will find some way to work around it.
You might think, well, this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria, but it turns out that we have the exact same identical problem in many other fields as well, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a serious problem in India and South Africa. Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive, and in some instances, even those don't work and you have XDR TB. Viruses are becoming resistant. Agricultural pests. Malaria parasites. Right now, much of the world depends on one drug, artemisinin drugs, essentially to treat malaria. Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged, and if this were to become widespread, that puts at risk the single drug that we have to treat malaria around the world in a way that's currently safe and efficacious. Mosquitos develop resistance. If you have kids, you probably know about head lice, and if you're from New York City, I understand that the specialty there is bedbugs. So those are also resistant. And we have to bring an example from across the pond. Turns out that rats are also resistant to poisons.
Now, what's common to all of these things is the idea that we've had these technologies to control nature only for the last 70, 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink, we have squandered our ability to control, because we have not recognized that natural selection and evolution was going to find a way to get back, and we need to completely rethink how we're going to use measures to control biological organisms, and rethink how we incentivize the development, introduction, in the case of antibiotics prescription, and use of these valuable resources. And we really now need to start thinking about them as natural resources. And so we stand at a crossroads. An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business. The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Michael Green: "What the Social Progress Index can reveal about your country"
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Michael Green:
"What the Social Progress Index can reveal about your country"
TEDGlobal2014. Filmed Oct2014.
The term Gross Domestic Product is often talked about as if it were “handed down from god on tablets of stone.” But this concept was invented by an economist in the 1930s. We need a more effective measurement tool to match 21st century needs, says Michael Green: the Social Progress Index. With charm and wit, he shows how this tool measures societies across the three dimensions that actually matter. And reveals the dramatic reordering of nations that occurs when you use it.
Transcript:
On January 4, 1934, a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on, still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today, still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet. That young man wasn't a politician, he wasn't a businessman, a civil rights activist or a faith leader. He was that most unlikely of heroes, an economist. His name was Simon Kuznets and the report that he delivered was called "National Income, 1929-1932."
Now, you might think this is a rather dry and dull report. And you're absolutely right. It's dry as a bone. But this report is the foundation of how, today, we judge the success of countries: what we know best as Gross Domestic Product, GDP.
GDP has defined and shaped our lives for the last 80 years. And today I want to talk about a different way to measure the success of countries, a different way to define and shape our lives for the next 80 years.
But first, we have to understand how GDP came to dominate our lives. Kuznets' report was delivered at a moment of crisis. The U.S. economy was plummeting into the Great Depression and policy makers were struggling to respond. Struggling because they didn't know what was going on. They didn't have data and statistics. So what Kuznet's report gave them was reliable data on what the U.S. economy was producing, updated year by year. And armed with this information, policy makers were, eventually, able to find a way out of the slump. And because Kuznets' invention was found to be so useful, it spread around the world. And now today, every country produces GDP statistics.
But, in that first report, Kuznets himself delivered a warning. It's in the introductory chapter. On page seven he says, "The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above." It's not the greatest sound bite in the world, and it's dressed up in the cautious language of the economist. But his message was clear: GDP is a tool to help us measure economic performance. It's not a measure of our well-being. And it shouldn't be a guide to all decision making.
But we have ignored Kuznets' warning. We live in a world where GDP is the benchmark of success in a global economy. Our politicians boast when GDP goes up. Markets move and trillions of dollars of capital move around the world based on which countries are going up and which countries are going down, all measured in GDP. Our societies have become engines to create more GDP.
But we know that GDP is flawed. It ignores the environment. It counts bombs and prisons as progress. It can't count happiness or community. And it has nothing to say about fairness or justice. Is it any surprise that our world, marching to the drumbeat of GDP, is teetering on the brink of environmental disaster and filled with anger and conflict?
We need a better way to measure our societies, a measure based on the real things that matter to real people. Do I have enough to eat? Can I read and write? Am I safe? Do I have rights? Do I live in a society where I'm not discriminated against? Is my future and the future of my children prevented from environmental destruction? These are questions that GDP does not and cannot answer.
There have, of course, been efforts in the past to move beyond GDP. But I believe that we're living in a moment when we are ready for a measurement revolution. We're ready because we've seen, in the financial crisis of 2008, how our fetish for economic growth led us so far astray. We've seen, in the Arab Spring, how countries like Tunisia were supposedly economic superstars, but they were societies that were seething with discontentment. We're ready, because today we have the technology to gather and analyze data in ways that would have been unimaginable to Kuznets.
Today, I'd like to introduce you to the Social Progress Index. It's a measure of the well-being of society, completely separate from GDP. It's a whole new way of looking at the world. The Social Progress Index begins by defining what it means to be a good society based around three dimensions. The first is, does everyone have the basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have access to the building blocks to improve their lives: education, information, health and sustainable environment? And then third, does every individual have access to a chance to pursue their goals and dreams and ambitions free from obstacles? Do they have rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination and access to the the world's most advanced knowledge? Together, these 12 components form the Social Progress framework. And for each of these 12 components, we have indicators to measure how countries are performing. Not indicators of effort or intention, but real achievement. We don't measure how much a country spends on healthcare, we measure the length and quality of people's lives. We don't measure whether governments pass laws against discrimination, we measure whether people experience discrimination.
But what you want to know is who's top, don't you? (Laughter) I knew that, I knew that, I knew that. Okay, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you on this chart. So here we are, what I've done here is put on the vertical axis social progress. Higher is better. And then, just for comparison, just for fun, on the horizontal axis is GDP per capita. Further to the right is more. So the country in the world with the highest social progress, the number one country on social progress is New Zealand. (Applause) Well done! Never been; must go. (Laughter) The country with the least social progress, I'm sorry to say, is Chad. I've never been; maybe next year. (Laughter) Or maybe the year after.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Aha, but New Zealand has a higher GDP than Chad!" It's a good point, well made. But let me show you two other countries. Here's the United States — considerably richer than New Zealand, but with a lower level of social progress. And then here's Senegal — it's got a higher level of social progress than Chad, but the same level of GDP. So what's going on? Well, look. Let me bring in the rest of the countries of the world, the 132 we've been able to measure, each one represented by a dot. There we go. Lots of dots. Now, obviously I can't do all of them, so a few highlights for you: The highest ranked G7 country is Canada. My country, the United Kingdom, is sort of middling, sort of dull, but who cares — at least we beat the French. (Laughter) And then looking at the emerging economies, top of the BRICS, pleased to say, is Brazil. (Applause) Come on, cheer! Go, Brazil! Beating South Africa, then Russia, then China and then India. Tucked away on the right-hand side, you will see a dot of a country with a lot of GDP but not a huge amount of social progress — that's Kuwait. Just above Brazil is a social progress superpower — that's Costa Rica. It's got a level of social progress the same as some Western European countries, with a much lower GDP.
Now, my slide is getting a little cluttered and I'd like to step back a bit. So let me take away these countries, and then pop in the regression line. So this shows the average relationship between GDP and social progress. The first thing to notice, is that there's lots of noise around the trend line. And what this shows, what this empirically demonstrates, is that GDP is not destiny. At every level of GDP per capita, there are opportunities for more social progress, risks of less. The second thing to notice is that for poor countries, the curve is really steep. So what this tells us is that if poor countries can get a little bit of extra GDP, and if they reinvest that in doctors, nurses, water supplies, sanitation, etc., there's a lot of social progress bang for your GDP buck. And that's good news, and that's what we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, with a lot of people lifted out of poverty by economic growth and good policies in poorer countries.
But go on a bit further up the curve, and then we see it flattening out. Each extra dollar of GDP is buying less and less social progress. And with more and more of the world's population living on this part of the curve, it means GDP is becoming less and less useful as a guide to our development. I'll show you an example of Brazil.
Here's Brazil: social progress of about 70 out of 100, GDP per capita about 14,000 dollars a year. And look, Brazil's above the line. Brazil is doing a reasonably good job of turning GDP into social progress. But where does Brazil go next? Let's say that Brazil adopts a bold economic plan to double GDP in the next decade. But that is only half a plan. It's less than half a plan, because where does Brazil want to go on social progress? Brazil, it's possible to increase your growth, increase your GDP, while stagnating or going backwards on social progress. We don't want Brazil to become like Russia. What you really want is for Brazil to get ever more efficient at creating social progress from its GDP, so it becomes more like New Zealand. And what that means is that Brazil needs to prioritize social progress in its development plan and see that it's not just growth alone, it's growth with social progress. And that's what the Social Progress Index does: It reframes the debate about development, not just about GDP alone, but inclusive, sustainable growth that brings real improvements in people's lives. And it's not just about countries.
Earlier this year, with our friends from the Imazon nonprofit here in Brazil, we launched the first subnational Social Progress Index. We did it for the Amazon region. It's an area the size of Europe, 24 million people, one of the most deprived parts of the country. And here are the results, and this is broken down into nearly 800 different municipalities. And with this detailed information about the real quality of life in this part of the country, Imazon and other partners from government, business and civil society can work together to construct a development plan that will help really improve people's lives, while protecting that precious global asset that is the Amazon Rainforest. And this is just the beginning, You can create a Social Progress Index for any state, region, city or municipality. We all know and love TEDx; this is Social Pogress-x. This is a tool for anyone to come and use.
Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, GDP was not handed down from God on tablets of stone. (Laughter) It's a measurement tool invented in the 20th century to address the challenges of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we face new challenges: aging, obesity, climate change, and so on. To face those challenges, we need new tools of measurement, new ways of valuing progress.
Imagine if we could measure what nonprofits, charities, volunteers, civil society organizations really contribute to our society. Imagine if businesses competed not just on the basis of their economic contribution, but on their contribution to social progress. Imagine if we could hold politicians to account for really improving people's lives. Imagine if we could work together — government, business, civil society, me, you — and make this century the century of social progress. Thank you. (Applause)
Michael Green:
"What the Social Progress Index can reveal about your country"
TEDGlobal2014. Filmed Oct2014.
The term Gross Domestic Product is often talked about as if it were “handed down from god on tablets of stone.” But this concept was invented by an economist in the 1930s. We need a more effective measurement tool to match 21st century needs, says Michael Green: the Social Progress Index. With charm and wit, he shows how this tool measures societies across the three dimensions that actually matter. And reveals the dramatic reordering of nations that occurs when you use it.
Transcript:
On January 4, 1934, a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on, still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today, still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet. That young man wasn't a politician, he wasn't a businessman, a civil rights activist or a faith leader. He was that most unlikely of heroes, an economist. His name was Simon Kuznets and the report that he delivered was called "National Income, 1929-1932."
Now, you might think this is a rather dry and dull report. And you're absolutely right. It's dry as a bone. But this report is the foundation of how, today, we judge the success of countries: what we know best as Gross Domestic Product, GDP.
GDP has defined and shaped our lives for the last 80 years. And today I want to talk about a different way to measure the success of countries, a different way to define and shape our lives for the next 80 years.
But first, we have to understand how GDP came to dominate our lives. Kuznets' report was delivered at a moment of crisis. The U.S. economy was plummeting into the Great Depression and policy makers were struggling to respond. Struggling because they didn't know what was going on. They didn't have data and statistics. So what Kuznet's report gave them was reliable data on what the U.S. economy was producing, updated year by year. And armed with this information, policy makers were, eventually, able to find a way out of the slump. And because Kuznets' invention was found to be so useful, it spread around the world. And now today, every country produces GDP statistics.
But, in that first report, Kuznets himself delivered a warning. It's in the introductory chapter. On page seven he says, "The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above." It's not the greatest sound bite in the world, and it's dressed up in the cautious language of the economist. But his message was clear: GDP is a tool to help us measure economic performance. It's not a measure of our well-being. And it shouldn't be a guide to all decision making.
But we have ignored Kuznets' warning. We live in a world where GDP is the benchmark of success in a global economy. Our politicians boast when GDP goes up. Markets move and trillions of dollars of capital move around the world based on which countries are going up and which countries are going down, all measured in GDP. Our societies have become engines to create more GDP.
But we know that GDP is flawed. It ignores the environment. It counts bombs and prisons as progress. It can't count happiness or community. And it has nothing to say about fairness or justice. Is it any surprise that our world, marching to the drumbeat of GDP, is teetering on the brink of environmental disaster and filled with anger and conflict?
We need a better way to measure our societies, a measure based on the real things that matter to real people. Do I have enough to eat? Can I read and write? Am I safe? Do I have rights? Do I live in a society where I'm not discriminated against? Is my future and the future of my children prevented from environmental destruction? These are questions that GDP does not and cannot answer.
There have, of course, been efforts in the past to move beyond GDP. But I believe that we're living in a moment when we are ready for a measurement revolution. We're ready because we've seen, in the financial crisis of 2008, how our fetish for economic growth led us so far astray. We've seen, in the Arab Spring, how countries like Tunisia were supposedly economic superstars, but they were societies that were seething with discontentment. We're ready, because today we have the technology to gather and analyze data in ways that would have been unimaginable to Kuznets.
Today, I'd like to introduce you to the Social Progress Index. It's a measure of the well-being of society, completely separate from GDP. It's a whole new way of looking at the world. The Social Progress Index begins by defining what it means to be a good society based around three dimensions. The first is, does everyone have the basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have access to the building blocks to improve their lives: education, information, health and sustainable environment? And then third, does every individual have access to a chance to pursue their goals and dreams and ambitions free from obstacles? Do they have rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination and access to the the world's most advanced knowledge? Together, these 12 components form the Social Progress framework. And for each of these 12 components, we have indicators to measure how countries are performing. Not indicators of effort or intention, but real achievement. We don't measure how much a country spends on healthcare, we measure the length and quality of people's lives. We don't measure whether governments pass laws against discrimination, we measure whether people experience discrimination.
But what you want to know is who's top, don't you? (Laughter) I knew that, I knew that, I knew that. Okay, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you on this chart. So here we are, what I've done here is put on the vertical axis social progress. Higher is better. And then, just for comparison, just for fun, on the horizontal axis is GDP per capita. Further to the right is more. So the country in the world with the highest social progress, the number one country on social progress is New Zealand. (Applause) Well done! Never been; must go. (Laughter) The country with the least social progress, I'm sorry to say, is Chad. I've never been; maybe next year. (Laughter) Or maybe the year after.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Aha, but New Zealand has a higher GDP than Chad!" It's a good point, well made. But let me show you two other countries. Here's the United States — considerably richer than New Zealand, but with a lower level of social progress. And then here's Senegal — it's got a higher level of social progress than Chad, but the same level of GDP. So what's going on? Well, look. Let me bring in the rest of the countries of the world, the 132 we've been able to measure, each one represented by a dot. There we go. Lots of dots. Now, obviously I can't do all of them, so a few highlights for you: The highest ranked G7 country is Canada. My country, the United Kingdom, is sort of middling, sort of dull, but who cares — at least we beat the French. (Laughter) And then looking at the emerging economies, top of the BRICS, pleased to say, is Brazil. (Applause) Come on, cheer! Go, Brazil! Beating South Africa, then Russia, then China and then India. Tucked away on the right-hand side, you will see a dot of a country with a lot of GDP but not a huge amount of social progress — that's Kuwait. Just above Brazil is a social progress superpower — that's Costa Rica. It's got a level of social progress the same as some Western European countries, with a much lower GDP.
Now, my slide is getting a little cluttered and I'd like to step back a bit. So let me take away these countries, and then pop in the regression line. So this shows the average relationship between GDP and social progress. The first thing to notice, is that there's lots of noise around the trend line. And what this shows, what this empirically demonstrates, is that GDP is not destiny. At every level of GDP per capita, there are opportunities for more social progress, risks of less. The second thing to notice is that for poor countries, the curve is really steep. So what this tells us is that if poor countries can get a little bit of extra GDP, and if they reinvest that in doctors, nurses, water supplies, sanitation, etc., there's a lot of social progress bang for your GDP buck. And that's good news, and that's what we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, with a lot of people lifted out of poverty by economic growth and good policies in poorer countries.
But go on a bit further up the curve, and then we see it flattening out. Each extra dollar of GDP is buying less and less social progress. And with more and more of the world's population living on this part of the curve, it means GDP is becoming less and less useful as a guide to our development. I'll show you an example of Brazil.
Here's Brazil: social progress of about 70 out of 100, GDP per capita about 14,000 dollars a year. And look, Brazil's above the line. Brazil is doing a reasonably good job of turning GDP into social progress. But where does Brazil go next? Let's say that Brazil adopts a bold economic plan to double GDP in the next decade. But that is only half a plan. It's less than half a plan, because where does Brazil want to go on social progress? Brazil, it's possible to increase your growth, increase your GDP, while stagnating or going backwards on social progress. We don't want Brazil to become like Russia. What you really want is for Brazil to get ever more efficient at creating social progress from its GDP, so it becomes more like New Zealand. And what that means is that Brazil needs to prioritize social progress in its development plan and see that it's not just growth alone, it's growth with social progress. And that's what the Social Progress Index does: It reframes the debate about development, not just about GDP alone, but inclusive, sustainable growth that brings real improvements in people's lives. And it's not just about countries.
Earlier this year, with our friends from the Imazon nonprofit here in Brazil, we launched the first subnational Social Progress Index. We did it for the Amazon region. It's an area the size of Europe, 24 million people, one of the most deprived parts of the country. And here are the results, and this is broken down into nearly 800 different municipalities. And with this detailed information about the real quality of life in this part of the country, Imazon and other partners from government, business and civil society can work together to construct a development plan that will help really improve people's lives, while protecting that precious global asset that is the Amazon Rainforest. And this is just the beginning, You can create a Social Progress Index for any state, region, city or municipality. We all know and love TEDx; this is Social Pogress-x. This is a tool for anyone to come and use.
Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, GDP was not handed down from God on tablets of stone. (Laughter) It's a measurement tool invented in the 20th century to address the challenges of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we face new challenges: aging, obesity, climate change, and so on. To face those challenges, we need new tools of measurement, new ways of valuing progress.
Imagine if we could measure what nonprofits, charities, volunteers, civil society organizations really contribute to our society. Imagine if businesses competed not just on the basis of their economic contribution, but on their contribution to social progress. Imagine if we could hold politicians to account for really improving people's lives. Imagine if we could work together — government, business, civil society, me, you — and make this century the century of social progress. Thank you. (Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Ethan Nadelmann: "Why we need to end the War on Drugs"
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Ethan Nadelmann: "Why we need to end the War on Drugs"
TEDGlobal2014. Filmed Oct 2014.
Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an impassioned plea to end the "backward, heartless, disastrous" movement to stamp out the drug trade. He gives two big reasons we should focus on intelligent regulation instead.
Transcript:
What has the War on Drugs done to the world? Look at the murder and mayhem in Mexico, Central America, so many other parts of the planet, the global black market estimated at 300 billion dollars a year, prisons packed in the United States and elsewhere, police and military drawn into an unwinnable war that violates basic rights, and ordinary citizens just hope they don't get caught in the crossfire, and meanwhile, more people using more drugs than ever. It's my country's history with alcohol prohibition and Al Capone, times 50.
Which is why it's particularly galling to me as an American that we've been the driving force behind this global drug war. Ask why so many countries criminalize drugs they'd never heard of, why the U.N. drug treaties emphasize criminalization over health, even why most of the money worldwide for dealing with drug abuse goes not to helping agencies but those that punish, and you'll find the good old U.S. of A.
Why did we do this? Some people, especially in Latin America, think it's not really about drugs. It's just a subterfuge for advancing the realpolitik interests of the U.S. But by and large, that's not it. We don't want gangsters and guerrillas funded with illegal drug money terrorizing and taking over other nations. No, the fact is, America really is crazy when it comes to drugs. I mean, don't forget, we're the ones who thought that we could prohibit alcohol. So think about our global drug war not as any sort of rational policy, but as the international projection of a domestic psychosis. (Applause)
But here's the good news. Now it's the Russians leading the Drug War and not us. Most politicians in my country want to roll back the Drug War now, put fewer people behind bars, not more, and I'm proud to say as an American that we now lead the world in reforming marijuana policies. It's now legal for medical purposes in almost half our 50 states, millions of people can purchase their marijuana, their medicine, in government- licensed dispensaries, and over half my fellow citizens now say it's time to legally regulate and tax marijuana more or less like alcohol. That's what Colorado and Washington are doing, and Uruguay, and others are sure to follow.
So that's what I do: work to end the Drug War. I think it all started growing up in a fairly religious, moral family, eldest son of a rabbi, going off to university where I smoked some marijuana and I liked it. (Laughter) And I liked drinking too, but it was obvious that alcohol was really the more dangerous of the two, but my friends and I could get busted for smoking a joint.
Now, that hypocrisy kept bugging me, so I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on international drug control. I talked my way into the State Department. I got a security clearance. I interviewed hundreds of DEA and other law enforcement agents all around Europe and the Americas, and I'd ask them, "What do you think the answer is?" Well, in Latin America, they'd say to me, "You can't really cut off the supply. The answer lies back in the U.S., in cutting off the demand." So then I go back home and I talk to people involved in anti-drug efforts there, and they'd say, "You know, Ethan, you can't really cut off the demand. The answer lies over there. You've got to cut off the supply." Then I'd go and talk to the guys in customs trying to stop drugs at the borders, and they'd say, "You're not going to stop it here. The answer lies over there, in cutting off supply and demand." And it hit me: Everybody involved in this thought the answer lay in that area about which they knew the least.
So that's when I started reading everything I could about psychoactive drugs: the history, the science, the politics, all of it, and the more one read, the more it hit you how a thoughtful, enlightened, intelligent approach took you over here, whereas the politics and laws of my country were taking you over here. And that disparity struck me as this incredible intellectual and moral puzzle.
There's probably never been a drug-free society. Virtually every society has ingested psychoactive substances to deal with pain, increase our energy, socialize, even commune with God. Our desire to alter our consciousness may be as fundamental as our desires for food, companionship and sex. So our true challenge is to learn how to live with drugs so they cause the least possible harm and in some cases the greatest possible benefit.
I'll tell you something else I learned, that the reason some drugs are legal and others not has almost nothing to do with science or health or the relative risk of drugs, and almost everything to do with who uses and who is perceived to use particular drugs. In the late 19th century, when most of the drugs that are now illegal were legal, the principal consumers of opiates in my country and others were middle-aged white women, using them to alleviate aches and pains when few other analgesics were available. And nobody thought about criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to put Grandma behind bars. But when hundreds of thousands of Chinese started showing up in my country, working hard on the railroads and the mines and then kicking back in the evening just like they had in the old country with a few puffs on that opium pipe, that's when you saw the first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada, driven by racist fears of Chinese transforming white women into opium-addicted sex slaves. The first cocaine prohibition laws, similarly prompted by racist fears of black men sniffing that white powder and forgetting their proper place in Southern society. And the first marijuana prohibition laws, all about fears of Mexican migrants in the West and the Southwest. And what was true in my country, is true in so many others as well, with both the origins of these laws and their implementation. Put it this way, and I exaggerate only slightly: If the principal smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principal consumers of Viagra were poor young black men, then smokable cocaine would be easy to get with a prescription from your doctor and selling Viagra would get you five to 10 years behind bars. (Applause)
I used to be a professor teaching about this. Now I'm an activist, a human rights activist, and what drives me is my shame at living in an otherwise great nation that has less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It's the people I meet who have lost someone they love to drug-related violence or prison or overdose or AIDS because our drug policies emphasize criminalization over health. It's good people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom, even their children to the state, not because they hurt anyone but solely because they chose to use one drug instead of another.
So is legalization the answer? On that, I'm torn: three days a week I think yes, three days a week I think no, and on Sundays I'm agnostic. But since today is Tuesday, let me just say that legally regulating and taxing most of the drugs that are now criminalized would radically reduce the crime, violence, corruption and black markets, and the problems of adulterated and unregulated drugs, and improve public safety, and allow taxpayer resources to be developed to more useful purposes. I mean, look, the markets in marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine are global commodities markets just like the global markets in alcohol, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and so many other things. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply. Knock out one source and another inevitably emerges. People tend to think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation when in fact it represents the abdication of regulation with criminals filling the void. Which is why putting criminal laws and police front and center in trying to control a dynamic global commodities market is a recipe for disaster. And what we really need to do is to bring the underground drug markets as much as possible aboveground and regulate them as intelligently as we can to minimize both the harms of drugs and the harms of prohibitionist policies.
Now, with marijuana, that obviously means legally regulating and taxing it like alcohol. The benefits of doing so are enormous, the risks minimal. Will more people use marijuana? Maybe, but it's not going to be young people, because it's not going to be legalized for them, and quite frankly, they already have the best access to marijuana. I think it's going to be older people. It's going to be people in their 40s and 60s and 80s who find they prefer a little marijuana to that drink in the evening or the sleeping pill or that it helps with their arthritis or diabetes or maybe helps spice up a long-term marriage. (Laughter) And that just might be a net public health benefit.
As for the other drugs, look at Portugal, where nobody goes to jail for possessing drugs, and the government's made a serious commitment to treating addiction as a health issue. Look at Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, where people who have been addicted to heroin for many years and repeatedly tried to quit and failed can get pharmaceutical heroin and helping services in medical clinics, and the results are in: Illegal drug abuse and disease and overdoses and crime and arrests all go down, health and well-being improve, taxpayers benefit, and many drug users even put their addictions behind them.
Look at New Zealand, which recently enacted a law allowing certain recreational drugs to be sold legally provided their safety had been established. Look here in Brazil, and some other countries, where a remarkable psychoactive substance, ayahuasca, can be legally bought and consumed provided it's done so within a religious context. Look in Bolivia and Peru, where all sorts of products made from the coca leaf, the source of cocaine, are sold legally over the counter with no apparent harm to people's public health. I mean, don't forget, Coca-Cola had cocaine in it until 1900, and so far as we know was no more addictive than Coca-Cola is today.
Conversely, think about cigarettes: Nothing can both hook you and kill you like cigarettes. When researchers ask heroin addicts what's the toughest drug to quit, most say cigarettes. Yet in my country and many others, half of all the people who were ever addicted to cigarettes have quit without anyone being arrested or put in jail or sent to a "treatment program" by a prosecutor or a judge. What did it were higher taxes and time and place restrictions on sale and use and effective anti-smoking campaigns. Now, could we reduce smoking even more by making it totally illegal? Probably. But just imagine the drug war nightmare that would result.
So the challenges we face today are twofold. The first is the policy challenge of designing and implementing alternatives to ineffective prohibitionist policies, even as we need to get better at regulating and living with the drugs that are now legal. But the second challenge is tougher, because it's about us. The obstacles to reform lie not just out there in the power of the prison industrial complex or other vested interests that want to keep things the way they are, but within each and every one of us. It's our fears and our lack of knowledge and imagination that stands in the way of real reform. And ultimately, I think that boils down to the kids, and to every parent's desire to put our baby in a bubble, and the fear that somehow drugs will pierce that bubble and put our young ones at risk. In fact, sometimes it seems like the entire War on Drugs gets justified as one great big child protection act, which any young person can tell you it's not.
So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education mantra: Safety first.
So this is what I've dedicated my life to, to building an organization and a movement of people who believe we need to turn our backs on the failed prohibitions of the past and embrace new drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights, where people who come from across the political spectrum and every other spectrum as well, where people who love our drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give a damn about drugs, but every one of us believes that this War on Drugs, this backward, heartless, disastrous War on Drugs, has got to end.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you. Thank you.
Chris Anderson: Ethan, congrats — quite the reaction. That was a powerful talk. Not quite a complete standing O, though, and I'm guessing that some people here and maybe a few watching online, maybe someone knows a teenager or a friend or whatever who got sick, maybe died from some drug overdose. I'm sure you've had these people approach you before. What do you say to them?
Ethan Nadelmann: Chris, the most amazing thing that's happened of late is that I've met a growing number of people who have actually lost a sibling or a child to a drug overdose, and 10 years ago, those people just wanted to say, let's line up all the drug dealers and shoot them and that will solve it. And what they've come to understand is that the Drug War did nothing to protect their kids. If anything, it made it more likely that those kids were put at risk. And so they're now becoming part of this drug policy reform movement. There's other people who have kids, one's addicted to alcohol, the other one's addicted to cocaine or heroin, and they ask themselves the question: Why does this kid get to take one step at a time and try to get better and that one's got to deal with jail and police and criminals all the time? So everybody's understanding, the Drug War's not protecting anybody.
CA: Certainly in the U.S., you've got political gridlock on most issues. Is there any realistic chance of anything actually shifting on this issue in the next five years?
EN: I'd say it's quite remarkable. I'm getting all these calls from journalists now who are saying to me, "Ethan, it seems like the only two issues advancing politically in America right now are marijuana law reform and gay marriage. What are you doing right?" And then you're looking at bipartisanship breaking out with, actually, Republicans in the Congress and state legislatures allowing bills to be enacted with majority Democratic support, so we've gone from being sort of the third rail, the most fearful issue of American politics, to becoming one of the most successful.
CA: Ethan, thank you so much for coming to TEDGlobal. EN: Chris, thanks so much.
CA: Thank you. EN: Thank you. (Applause)
Ethan Nadelmann: "Why we need to end the War on Drugs"
TEDGlobal2014. Filmed Oct 2014.
Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an impassioned plea to end the "backward, heartless, disastrous" movement to stamp out the drug trade. He gives two big reasons we should focus on intelligent regulation instead.
Transcript:
What has the War on Drugs done to the world? Look at the murder and mayhem in Mexico, Central America, so many other parts of the planet, the global black market estimated at 300 billion dollars a year, prisons packed in the United States and elsewhere, police and military drawn into an unwinnable war that violates basic rights, and ordinary citizens just hope they don't get caught in the crossfire, and meanwhile, more people using more drugs than ever. It's my country's history with alcohol prohibition and Al Capone, times 50.
Which is why it's particularly galling to me as an American that we've been the driving force behind this global drug war. Ask why so many countries criminalize drugs they'd never heard of, why the U.N. drug treaties emphasize criminalization over health, even why most of the money worldwide for dealing with drug abuse goes not to helping agencies but those that punish, and you'll find the good old U.S. of A.
Why did we do this? Some people, especially in Latin America, think it's not really about drugs. It's just a subterfuge for advancing the realpolitik interests of the U.S. But by and large, that's not it. We don't want gangsters and guerrillas funded with illegal drug money terrorizing and taking over other nations. No, the fact is, America really is crazy when it comes to drugs. I mean, don't forget, we're the ones who thought that we could prohibit alcohol. So think about our global drug war not as any sort of rational policy, but as the international projection of a domestic psychosis. (Applause)
But here's the good news. Now it's the Russians leading the Drug War and not us. Most politicians in my country want to roll back the Drug War now, put fewer people behind bars, not more, and I'm proud to say as an American that we now lead the world in reforming marijuana policies. It's now legal for medical purposes in almost half our 50 states, millions of people can purchase their marijuana, their medicine, in government- licensed dispensaries, and over half my fellow citizens now say it's time to legally regulate and tax marijuana more or less like alcohol. That's what Colorado and Washington are doing, and Uruguay, and others are sure to follow.
So that's what I do: work to end the Drug War. I think it all started growing up in a fairly religious, moral family, eldest son of a rabbi, going off to university where I smoked some marijuana and I liked it. (Laughter) And I liked drinking too, but it was obvious that alcohol was really the more dangerous of the two, but my friends and I could get busted for smoking a joint.
Now, that hypocrisy kept bugging me, so I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on international drug control. I talked my way into the State Department. I got a security clearance. I interviewed hundreds of DEA and other law enforcement agents all around Europe and the Americas, and I'd ask them, "What do you think the answer is?" Well, in Latin America, they'd say to me, "You can't really cut off the supply. The answer lies back in the U.S., in cutting off the demand." So then I go back home and I talk to people involved in anti-drug efforts there, and they'd say, "You know, Ethan, you can't really cut off the demand. The answer lies over there. You've got to cut off the supply." Then I'd go and talk to the guys in customs trying to stop drugs at the borders, and they'd say, "You're not going to stop it here. The answer lies over there, in cutting off supply and demand." And it hit me: Everybody involved in this thought the answer lay in that area about which they knew the least.
So that's when I started reading everything I could about psychoactive drugs: the history, the science, the politics, all of it, and the more one read, the more it hit you how a thoughtful, enlightened, intelligent approach took you over here, whereas the politics and laws of my country were taking you over here. And that disparity struck me as this incredible intellectual and moral puzzle.
There's probably never been a drug-free society. Virtually every society has ingested psychoactive substances to deal with pain, increase our energy, socialize, even commune with God. Our desire to alter our consciousness may be as fundamental as our desires for food, companionship and sex. So our true challenge is to learn how to live with drugs so they cause the least possible harm and in some cases the greatest possible benefit.
I'll tell you something else I learned, that the reason some drugs are legal and others not has almost nothing to do with science or health or the relative risk of drugs, and almost everything to do with who uses and who is perceived to use particular drugs. In the late 19th century, when most of the drugs that are now illegal were legal, the principal consumers of opiates in my country and others were middle-aged white women, using them to alleviate aches and pains when few other analgesics were available. And nobody thought about criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to put Grandma behind bars. But when hundreds of thousands of Chinese started showing up in my country, working hard on the railroads and the mines and then kicking back in the evening just like they had in the old country with a few puffs on that opium pipe, that's when you saw the first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada, driven by racist fears of Chinese transforming white women into opium-addicted sex slaves. The first cocaine prohibition laws, similarly prompted by racist fears of black men sniffing that white powder and forgetting their proper place in Southern society. And the first marijuana prohibition laws, all about fears of Mexican migrants in the West and the Southwest. And what was true in my country, is true in so many others as well, with both the origins of these laws and their implementation. Put it this way, and I exaggerate only slightly: If the principal smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principal consumers of Viagra were poor young black men, then smokable cocaine would be easy to get with a prescription from your doctor and selling Viagra would get you five to 10 years behind bars. (Applause)
I used to be a professor teaching about this. Now I'm an activist, a human rights activist, and what drives me is my shame at living in an otherwise great nation that has less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It's the people I meet who have lost someone they love to drug-related violence or prison or overdose or AIDS because our drug policies emphasize criminalization over health. It's good people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom, even their children to the state, not because they hurt anyone but solely because they chose to use one drug instead of another.
So is legalization the answer? On that, I'm torn: three days a week I think yes, three days a week I think no, and on Sundays I'm agnostic. But since today is Tuesday, let me just say that legally regulating and taxing most of the drugs that are now criminalized would radically reduce the crime, violence, corruption and black markets, and the problems of adulterated and unregulated drugs, and improve public safety, and allow taxpayer resources to be developed to more useful purposes. I mean, look, the markets in marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine are global commodities markets just like the global markets in alcohol, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and so many other things. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply. Knock out one source and another inevitably emerges. People tend to think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation when in fact it represents the abdication of regulation with criminals filling the void. Which is why putting criminal laws and police front and center in trying to control a dynamic global commodities market is a recipe for disaster. And what we really need to do is to bring the underground drug markets as much as possible aboveground and regulate them as intelligently as we can to minimize both the harms of drugs and the harms of prohibitionist policies.
Now, with marijuana, that obviously means legally regulating and taxing it like alcohol. The benefits of doing so are enormous, the risks minimal. Will more people use marijuana? Maybe, but it's not going to be young people, because it's not going to be legalized for them, and quite frankly, they already have the best access to marijuana. I think it's going to be older people. It's going to be people in their 40s and 60s and 80s who find they prefer a little marijuana to that drink in the evening or the sleeping pill or that it helps with their arthritis or diabetes or maybe helps spice up a long-term marriage. (Laughter) And that just might be a net public health benefit.
As for the other drugs, look at Portugal, where nobody goes to jail for possessing drugs, and the government's made a serious commitment to treating addiction as a health issue. Look at Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, where people who have been addicted to heroin for many years and repeatedly tried to quit and failed can get pharmaceutical heroin and helping services in medical clinics, and the results are in: Illegal drug abuse and disease and overdoses and crime and arrests all go down, health and well-being improve, taxpayers benefit, and many drug users even put their addictions behind them.
Look at New Zealand, which recently enacted a law allowing certain recreational drugs to be sold legally provided their safety had been established. Look here in Brazil, and some other countries, where a remarkable psychoactive substance, ayahuasca, can be legally bought and consumed provided it's done so within a religious context. Look in Bolivia and Peru, where all sorts of products made from the coca leaf, the source of cocaine, are sold legally over the counter with no apparent harm to people's public health. I mean, don't forget, Coca-Cola had cocaine in it until 1900, and so far as we know was no more addictive than Coca-Cola is today.
Conversely, think about cigarettes: Nothing can both hook you and kill you like cigarettes. When researchers ask heroin addicts what's the toughest drug to quit, most say cigarettes. Yet in my country and many others, half of all the people who were ever addicted to cigarettes have quit without anyone being arrested or put in jail or sent to a "treatment program" by a prosecutor or a judge. What did it were higher taxes and time and place restrictions on sale and use and effective anti-smoking campaigns. Now, could we reduce smoking even more by making it totally illegal? Probably. But just imagine the drug war nightmare that would result.
So the challenges we face today are twofold. The first is the policy challenge of designing and implementing alternatives to ineffective prohibitionist policies, even as we need to get better at regulating and living with the drugs that are now legal. But the second challenge is tougher, because it's about us. The obstacles to reform lie not just out there in the power of the prison industrial complex or other vested interests that want to keep things the way they are, but within each and every one of us. It's our fears and our lack of knowledge and imagination that stands in the way of real reform. And ultimately, I think that boils down to the kids, and to every parent's desire to put our baby in a bubble, and the fear that somehow drugs will pierce that bubble and put our young ones at risk. In fact, sometimes it seems like the entire War on Drugs gets justified as one great big child protection act, which any young person can tell you it's not.
So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education mantra: Safety first.
So this is what I've dedicated my life to, to building an organization and a movement of people who believe we need to turn our backs on the failed prohibitions of the past and embrace new drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights, where people who come from across the political spectrum and every other spectrum as well, where people who love our drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give a damn about drugs, but every one of us believes that this War on Drugs, this backward, heartless, disastrous War on Drugs, has got to end.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you. Thank you.
Chris Anderson: Ethan, congrats — quite the reaction. That was a powerful talk. Not quite a complete standing O, though, and I'm guessing that some people here and maybe a few watching online, maybe someone knows a teenager or a friend or whatever who got sick, maybe died from some drug overdose. I'm sure you've had these people approach you before. What do you say to them?
Ethan Nadelmann: Chris, the most amazing thing that's happened of late is that I've met a growing number of people who have actually lost a sibling or a child to a drug overdose, and 10 years ago, those people just wanted to say, let's line up all the drug dealers and shoot them and that will solve it. And what they've come to understand is that the Drug War did nothing to protect their kids. If anything, it made it more likely that those kids were put at risk. And so they're now becoming part of this drug policy reform movement. There's other people who have kids, one's addicted to alcohol, the other one's addicted to cocaine or heroin, and they ask themselves the question: Why does this kid get to take one step at a time and try to get better and that one's got to deal with jail and police and criminals all the time? So everybody's understanding, the Drug War's not protecting anybody.
CA: Certainly in the U.S., you've got political gridlock on most issues. Is there any realistic chance of anything actually shifting on this issue in the next five years?
EN: I'd say it's quite remarkable. I'm getting all these calls from journalists now who are saying to me, "Ethan, it seems like the only two issues advancing politically in America right now are marijuana law reform and gay marriage. What are you doing right?" And then you're looking at bipartisanship breaking out with, actually, Republicans in the Congress and state legislatures allowing bills to be enacted with majority Democratic support, so we've gone from being sort of the third rail, the most fearful issue of American politics, to becoming one of the most successful.
CA: Ethan, thank you so much for coming to TEDGlobal. EN: Chris, thanks so much.
CA: Thank you. EN: Thank you. (Applause)
ECON/WORLD/GralInt-Llega la era de la 'nueva China'
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Llega la era de la 'nueva China'
Con bajos salarios y dinamismo, Vietnam, Camboya, Laos, Myanmar y Tailandia crecen como polo industrial
Por Leslie P. Norton | The Wall Street Journal Americas
El crecimiento de las exportaciones de China se ha desacelerado y cuatro países vecinos han salido ganando. Vietnam, Camboya, Laos y Myanmar aumentaron sus exportaciones en casi 20% en los últimos cuatro años, mientras la expansión anual de las ventas externas chinas se redujo de 31% a menos de 8%.
Para los habitantes de estos cuatro países en ascenso, las crecientes exportaciones significan más empleos, más fábricas y más dinero para gastar. La tasa promedio de expansión económica en estos países alcanzó 7,3% en 2013, frente a 5,9% hace cinco años. El crecimiento de China bajó de 9,6% a 7,7%.
En conjunto, Vietnam, Camboya, Laos y Myanmar, junto a Tailandia, su vecino mayor y más desarrollado, van camino a convertirse en la "nueva China".
Aunque sus economías combinadas son mucho más pequeñas que la de China , crecen con rapidez y muestran un dinamismo manufacturero que evoca a la China de los años 90. La producción económica anual conjunta de los cinco países ascendió a US$641.000 millones el año pasado, equivalente a la de China hace unos 20 años.
Una atracción clave para los fabricantes son los bajos salarios, en especial si se comparan con los de China, donde los sueldos fabriles han trepado 14% al año en la última década. El trabajador industrial promedio en China cobra unos US$700 al mes, frente a US$250 en Vietnam, US$130 en Camboya, US$110 en Myanmar y US$140 en Laos.
Mientras China se encarece, las marcas globales como Nike y Adidas están poniendo presión sobre sus proveedores chinos para abrir fábricas en la "nueva China" y otras partes de Asia con salarios bajos. E incluso si el nivel salarial es muy bajo para los estándares occidentales, el flujo de inversiones promete mejorar las vidas de millones de personas que viven en la Nueva China.
En una encuesta del año pasado de la consultora McKinsey, 72% de los compradores extranjeros afirmaron que planeaban obtener menos manufacturas de China y más de otros lugares en Asia con menores costos. "La mayoría de las empresas con las que tenemos contacto" que obtienen todos sus bienes de China "nos dicen que en los próximos cinco a 10 años, 30% a 40% vendrá de China, y 30% a 40% de Vietnam y Camboya", dice Bobby Bao, gestor del fondo Fidelity China Region en Hong Kong.
Un promotor de la región es la firma estadounidense VF, dueña de las marcas Timberland, Nautica y North Face. Ahora VF adquiere 17% de su producción de Vietnam. China representa cerca de 24% de la producción de indumentaria para el aire libre de VF, frente a más de 30% hace un par de años. "Vietnam tiene 93 millones de personas; son bastante jóvenes; necesitan trabajo", dice Tom Nelson, director de tercerización global de VF. "La eficiencia es buena; también es fácil abrir y operar fábricas".
Aunque China aún atrae más de US$300.000 millones en inversión directa, sólo 38% va a fábricas, frente a 56% en 2009.
Estos cambios se deben en parte a las propias políticas chinas. En 2012, su fuerza laboral se redujo por primera vez en la historia debido a su prolongada política del hijo único. China aún tiene un superávit de fuerza laboral en el interior y quiere desarrollar industrias en esas áreas, pero los salarios también crecieron en esas zonas. China se ha centrado en la manufactura que requiere mucho capital, con menos mano de obra barata.
Las políticas de Vietnam, Camboya, Myanmar y Laos han favorecido el flujo de inversión hacia la "nueva China". Sus economías, que en el pasado adoptaron el estilo soviético, flexibilizaron sus reglas para acoger al capitalismo.
Los países de la "nueva China" también deberían beneficiarse de tratados comerciales que se negocian con la Unión Europea y Estados Unidos . China, en tanto, intenta negociar un pacto alternativo con países asiáticos.
La infraestructura sigue siendo un problema en la "nueva China", y aunque necesita al menos inversiones de US$50.000 millones en el rubro, sigue siendo atractiva por sus otras ventajas, incluidas sus amplias costas, que facilitan la distribución, señalan expertos.
El símbolo del éxito del sudeste asiático es Vietnam, que se encuentra en medio de una importante ruta comercial. Se prevé que el año próximo la economía se expandirá 6,2%, frente a 5,4% este año.
El símbolo del éxito del sudeste asiático es Vietnam
Los fabricantes vietnamitas están pasando de bienes livianos a otros más sofisticados. El país se beneficia por estar cerca de la cadena de suministro de electrónicos. El fabricante de chips Intel realizó su primera inversión en el país en 2010. Un motivo: la manufactura de alta gama paga impuestos corporativos de 10%, menos de la mitad de la tasa estándar de 22% de Vietnam. A Intel la siguieron firmas de Taiwán, Corea del Sur y Japón, como Bridgestone y Panasonic.
Samsung Electronics invertirá US$3.000 millones en una fábrica de teléfonos en Vietnam, lo que llevará su inversión total en el país a US$11.000 millones. Para 2015, la compañía prevé enviar 40% de sus smartphones desde ese país. Los teléfonos superan a los textiles como la principal exportación de Vietnam.
En rápido ascenso detrás de Vietnam está Camboya. Con 15 millones de habitantes y un Producto Interno Bruto de US$15.500 millones en 2013, ese país registró un aumento de 12,7% en sus exportaciones el año pasado, en parte debido a su industria textil, cuyos clientes globales incluyen a gigantes como la sueca H&M.
El país exime de impuestos corporativos a los fabricantes de indumentaria que registran ganancias por cinco años tras empezar a operar allí. Al igual que Laos y Myanmar, Camboya tiene un pacto para exportar a Europa sin aranceles.
El siguiente en la fila es Myanmar, con 56 millones de habitantes y un PIB de casi US$57.000 millones. El país dejó atrás 50 años de dictadura militar en 2011 y está reformando con rapidez sus reglas para la inversión extranjera. Tiene importantes recursos naturales, incluyendo petróleo en altamar y una población de gran tamaño. El año pasado, las exportaciones crecieron 15,6%; la inversión extranjera directa subió aún más rápido: 16,9%. Algunos de sus inversionistas más importantes son Ford Motor, General Electric y Mitsubishi.
Laos, por su parte, es grande pero sólo tiene 6,8 millones de habitantes. Su PIB apenas supera los US$10.000 millones al año, pero está atrayendo inversión extranjera, en parte debido a un plan para exportar energía hidroeléctrica al resto del sudeste asiático.
La mayor economía de la "nueva China" es Tailandia
La mayor economía de la "nueva China" es Tailandia, que tiene 68 millones de habitantes y un PIB de US$387.000 millones. El año pasado atrajo US$12.700 millones de inversión extranjera directa. Pero el crecimiento se ha estancado debido a la lenta recuperación de las inundaciones de 2011 y la agitación política que llevó a un golpe de estado este año. Aun así, es uno de los centros de la industria automotriz de Asia y exporta tecnología. Ford y Seagate Technology son grandes inversionistas.
Tailandia tiene la red de caminos más extensa del sudeste asiático y miles de kilómetros de costas y ríos. Hay varios planes de expansión de redes ferroviarias y autopistas. Estas obras mejorarán su capacidad logística y ayudarán a captar más inversión extranjera y comercio regional, señalan analistas. Los consumidores tailandeses ya son los de mejor posición económica en la "nueva China".
China sigue siendo una increíble historia de crecimiento y su industrialización sacó de la pobreza a unos 500 millones de personas. Pero mientras opta por manufacturas más sofisticadas y una mayor parte de su producción se consume dentro del país, los cinco países de la "nueva China" tendrán una oportunidad de escribir su propia historia de crecimiento.
Leslie P. Norton es editora senior y columnista del semanario Barron's. Yue Yiang contribuyó a este artículo..
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Llega la era de la 'nueva China'
Con bajos salarios y dinamismo, Vietnam, Camboya, Laos, Myanmar y Tailandia crecen como polo industrial
Por Leslie P. Norton | The Wall Street Journal Americas
El crecimiento de las exportaciones de China se ha desacelerado y cuatro países vecinos han salido ganando. Vietnam, Camboya, Laos y Myanmar aumentaron sus exportaciones en casi 20% en los últimos cuatro años, mientras la expansión anual de las ventas externas chinas se redujo de 31% a menos de 8%.
Para los habitantes de estos cuatro países en ascenso, las crecientes exportaciones significan más empleos, más fábricas y más dinero para gastar. La tasa promedio de expansión económica en estos países alcanzó 7,3% en 2013, frente a 5,9% hace cinco años. El crecimiento de China bajó de 9,6% a 7,7%.
En conjunto, Vietnam, Camboya, Laos y Myanmar, junto a Tailandia, su vecino mayor y más desarrollado, van camino a convertirse en la "nueva China".
Aunque sus economías combinadas son mucho más pequeñas que la de China , crecen con rapidez y muestran un dinamismo manufacturero que evoca a la China de los años 90. La producción económica anual conjunta de los cinco países ascendió a US$641.000 millones el año pasado, equivalente a la de China hace unos 20 años.
Una atracción clave para los fabricantes son los bajos salarios, en especial si se comparan con los de China, donde los sueldos fabriles han trepado 14% al año en la última década. El trabajador industrial promedio en China cobra unos US$700 al mes, frente a US$250 en Vietnam, US$130 en Camboya, US$110 en Myanmar y US$140 en Laos.
Mientras China se encarece, las marcas globales como Nike y Adidas están poniendo presión sobre sus proveedores chinos para abrir fábricas en la "nueva China" y otras partes de Asia con salarios bajos. E incluso si el nivel salarial es muy bajo para los estándares occidentales, el flujo de inversiones promete mejorar las vidas de millones de personas que viven en la Nueva China.
En una encuesta del año pasado de la consultora McKinsey, 72% de los compradores extranjeros afirmaron que planeaban obtener menos manufacturas de China y más de otros lugares en Asia con menores costos. "La mayoría de las empresas con las que tenemos contacto" que obtienen todos sus bienes de China "nos dicen que en los próximos cinco a 10 años, 30% a 40% vendrá de China, y 30% a 40% de Vietnam y Camboya", dice Bobby Bao, gestor del fondo Fidelity China Region en Hong Kong.
Un promotor de la región es la firma estadounidense VF, dueña de las marcas Timberland, Nautica y North Face. Ahora VF adquiere 17% de su producción de Vietnam. China representa cerca de 24% de la producción de indumentaria para el aire libre de VF, frente a más de 30% hace un par de años. "Vietnam tiene 93 millones de personas; son bastante jóvenes; necesitan trabajo", dice Tom Nelson, director de tercerización global de VF. "La eficiencia es buena; también es fácil abrir y operar fábricas".
Aunque China aún atrae más de US$300.000 millones en inversión directa, sólo 38% va a fábricas, frente a 56% en 2009.
Estos cambios se deben en parte a las propias políticas chinas. En 2012, su fuerza laboral se redujo por primera vez en la historia debido a su prolongada política del hijo único. China aún tiene un superávit de fuerza laboral en el interior y quiere desarrollar industrias en esas áreas, pero los salarios también crecieron en esas zonas. China se ha centrado en la manufactura que requiere mucho capital, con menos mano de obra barata.
Las políticas de Vietnam, Camboya, Myanmar y Laos han favorecido el flujo de inversión hacia la "nueva China". Sus economías, que en el pasado adoptaron el estilo soviético, flexibilizaron sus reglas para acoger al capitalismo.
Los países de la "nueva China" también deberían beneficiarse de tratados comerciales que se negocian con la Unión Europea y Estados Unidos . China, en tanto, intenta negociar un pacto alternativo con países asiáticos.
La infraestructura sigue siendo un problema en la "nueva China", y aunque necesita al menos inversiones de US$50.000 millones en el rubro, sigue siendo atractiva por sus otras ventajas, incluidas sus amplias costas, que facilitan la distribución, señalan expertos.
El símbolo del éxito del sudeste asiático es Vietnam, que se encuentra en medio de una importante ruta comercial. Se prevé que el año próximo la economía se expandirá 6,2%, frente a 5,4% este año.
El símbolo del éxito del sudeste asiático es Vietnam
Los fabricantes vietnamitas están pasando de bienes livianos a otros más sofisticados. El país se beneficia por estar cerca de la cadena de suministro de electrónicos. El fabricante de chips Intel realizó su primera inversión en el país en 2010. Un motivo: la manufactura de alta gama paga impuestos corporativos de 10%, menos de la mitad de la tasa estándar de 22% de Vietnam. A Intel la siguieron firmas de Taiwán, Corea del Sur y Japón, como Bridgestone y Panasonic.
Samsung Electronics invertirá US$3.000 millones en una fábrica de teléfonos en Vietnam, lo que llevará su inversión total en el país a US$11.000 millones. Para 2015, la compañía prevé enviar 40% de sus smartphones desde ese país. Los teléfonos superan a los textiles como la principal exportación de Vietnam.
En rápido ascenso detrás de Vietnam está Camboya. Con 15 millones de habitantes y un Producto Interno Bruto de US$15.500 millones en 2013, ese país registró un aumento de 12,7% en sus exportaciones el año pasado, en parte debido a su industria textil, cuyos clientes globales incluyen a gigantes como la sueca H&M.
El país exime de impuestos corporativos a los fabricantes de indumentaria que registran ganancias por cinco años tras empezar a operar allí. Al igual que Laos y Myanmar, Camboya tiene un pacto para exportar a Europa sin aranceles.
El siguiente en la fila es Myanmar, con 56 millones de habitantes y un PIB de casi US$57.000 millones. El país dejó atrás 50 años de dictadura militar en 2011 y está reformando con rapidez sus reglas para la inversión extranjera. Tiene importantes recursos naturales, incluyendo petróleo en altamar y una población de gran tamaño. El año pasado, las exportaciones crecieron 15,6%; la inversión extranjera directa subió aún más rápido: 16,9%. Algunos de sus inversionistas más importantes son Ford Motor, General Electric y Mitsubishi.
Laos, por su parte, es grande pero sólo tiene 6,8 millones de habitantes. Su PIB apenas supera los US$10.000 millones al año, pero está atrayendo inversión extranjera, en parte debido a un plan para exportar energía hidroeléctrica al resto del sudeste asiático.
La mayor economía de la "nueva China" es Tailandia
La mayor economía de la "nueva China" es Tailandia, que tiene 68 millones de habitantes y un PIB de US$387.000 millones. El año pasado atrajo US$12.700 millones de inversión extranjera directa. Pero el crecimiento se ha estancado debido a la lenta recuperación de las inundaciones de 2011 y la agitación política que llevó a un golpe de estado este año. Aun así, es uno de los centros de la industria automotriz de Asia y exporta tecnología. Ford y Seagate Technology son grandes inversionistas.
Tailandia tiene la red de caminos más extensa del sudeste asiático y miles de kilómetros de costas y ríos. Hay varios planes de expansión de redes ferroviarias y autopistas. Estas obras mejorarán su capacidad logística y ayudarán a captar más inversión extranjera y comercio regional, señalan analistas. Los consumidores tailandeses ya son los de mejor posición económica en la "nueva China".
China sigue siendo una increíble historia de crecimiento y su industrialización sacó de la pobreza a unos 500 millones de personas. Pero mientras opta por manufacturas más sofisticadas y una mayor parte de su producción se consume dentro del país, los cinco países de la "nueva China" tendrán una oportunidad de escribir su propia historia de crecimiento.
Leslie P. Norton es editora senior y columnista del semanario Barron's. Yue Yiang contribuyó a este artículo..
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
EDUC/GralInt-Cuando un maestro exige, nos ayuda a crecer
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Cuando un maestro exige, nos ayuda a crecer
Por Gustavo Iaies | Para LA NACION
"Dale, tirate, yo estoy acá por cualquier cosa, ¡vení tranquilo!", me dijo Julito.
¡Qué miedo tenía! Tirarme a la pileta en la parte profunda me asustaba, pero él estaba convencido, ¿qué me podía pasar? Julito eligió a tres chicos, asumía que íbamos a "sobrevivir" en lo hondo, depositó la confianza en nosotros, nos transmitió la idea de que íbamos a poder y él lo garantizaba.
Y me largué. Recuerdo que casi no me tuvo que sostener, solamente estaba allí, como me había dicho. Yo estaba en lo hondo y me sentía un rey, había podido solo, creía, lo había logrado.
Varias décadas después, pienso en las cosas que nos animamos a hacer cuando el maestro transmite el mensaje "podés, largate que te ayudo". Sentí muchas veces ese mensaje en mi educación, el peso de la palabra de un maestro, que me llevaba a creer que podía y a sentir que me acompañaba.
En eso reside una de las claves del rol docente: la exigencia como invitación a avanzar, con la condición del esfuerzo. El mensaje buscaba garantizarme que podía, si me esforzaba, y que contaba con su apoyo.
Es muy fuerte el peso que tienen esas relaciones y lo que implican para los chicos. Me vino a la memoria ese episodio con Julito en la pileta y con él, todo lo que significaron esas voces fuertes, simbólicas, de autoridad: mis docentes.
Me quedé pensando en la idea de inclusión que manejamos hoy, que podría traducirse como "no importa lo que hagas o dejes de hacer, pero quedate"; nos limitamos a rogarles: "¡No te vayas, por favor!".
¿Un mensaje de este tipo ayuda a los chicos? La experiencia muestra que tampoco los retenemos así. Es obvio que no se transmite el "podés hacerlo, si te lo proponés", sino todo lo contrario. La exigencia debe acompañarse de apuesta, invitación a poder, a partir del esfuerzo. Cuando eso pasa, los efectos son maravillosos.
La experiencia de Julito me había vuelto un héroe, había podido porque él me había ayudado, pero era yo quien había tomado el riesgo de tirarme, yo lo había logrado. Él me dejaba el mensaje de que yo podía, su empujón me impulsaba, pero el logro era mío. Y me lo decía Julito, alguien a quien yo respetaba. No sé qué defectos podía tener, pero para mí Julito era un modelo.
Hace unos años, me vino a visitar una alumna de la escuela que había dirigido, a la que había visto por última vez cuando terminó quinto grado. El motivo explícito era consultarme acerca de un tema de la universidad, un pedido de orientación. Pero cuando empezamos a charlar, fue al punto que le interesaba: la separación de sus padres. Me comentó lo que había pasado, cómo se había sentido, lo que había implicado en su mirada del papá, y finalmente me dijo que en medio de esa situación penosa había pensado en llamarme y no se había animado.
A esta altura de mi vida, volví a pensar en el impacto que tienen para un chico los mensajes de un docente; pensé en el valor de la exigencia y la contención para generar ese vínculo. Ella buscaba a ese director que la escuchaba, la acompañaba, le exigía y la apoyaba.
Probablemente estemos ante un error cuando transmitimos a los chicos el mensaje de que los apoyamos, "más allá de lo que hagan". Ni nos piden esa incondicionalidad ni les sirve que sea así. Necesitan de adultos significativos que les exijan y los acompañen, y que crean en ellos. Terminemos con la idea de retenerlos sin normas ni exigencias. No les sirve.
Necesitan saber que pueden, que deben esforzarse y que estamos para acompañarlos y guiarlos, para que, efectivamente, puedan.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Cuando un maestro exige, nos ayuda a crecer
Por Gustavo Iaies | Para LA NACION
"Dale, tirate, yo estoy acá por cualquier cosa, ¡vení tranquilo!", me dijo Julito.
¡Qué miedo tenía! Tirarme a la pileta en la parte profunda me asustaba, pero él estaba convencido, ¿qué me podía pasar? Julito eligió a tres chicos, asumía que íbamos a "sobrevivir" en lo hondo, depositó la confianza en nosotros, nos transmitió la idea de que íbamos a poder y él lo garantizaba.
Y me largué. Recuerdo que casi no me tuvo que sostener, solamente estaba allí, como me había dicho. Yo estaba en lo hondo y me sentía un rey, había podido solo, creía, lo había logrado.
Varias décadas después, pienso en las cosas que nos animamos a hacer cuando el maestro transmite el mensaje "podés, largate que te ayudo". Sentí muchas veces ese mensaje en mi educación, el peso de la palabra de un maestro, que me llevaba a creer que podía y a sentir que me acompañaba.
En eso reside una de las claves del rol docente: la exigencia como invitación a avanzar, con la condición del esfuerzo. El mensaje buscaba garantizarme que podía, si me esforzaba, y que contaba con su apoyo.
Es muy fuerte el peso que tienen esas relaciones y lo que implican para los chicos. Me vino a la memoria ese episodio con Julito en la pileta y con él, todo lo que significaron esas voces fuertes, simbólicas, de autoridad: mis docentes.
Me quedé pensando en la idea de inclusión que manejamos hoy, que podría traducirse como "no importa lo que hagas o dejes de hacer, pero quedate"; nos limitamos a rogarles: "¡No te vayas, por favor!".
¿Un mensaje de este tipo ayuda a los chicos? La experiencia muestra que tampoco los retenemos así. Es obvio que no se transmite el "podés hacerlo, si te lo proponés", sino todo lo contrario. La exigencia debe acompañarse de apuesta, invitación a poder, a partir del esfuerzo. Cuando eso pasa, los efectos son maravillosos.
La experiencia de Julito me había vuelto un héroe, había podido porque él me había ayudado, pero era yo quien había tomado el riesgo de tirarme, yo lo había logrado. Él me dejaba el mensaje de que yo podía, su empujón me impulsaba, pero el logro era mío. Y me lo decía Julito, alguien a quien yo respetaba. No sé qué defectos podía tener, pero para mí Julito era un modelo.
Hace unos años, me vino a visitar una alumna de la escuela que había dirigido, a la que había visto por última vez cuando terminó quinto grado. El motivo explícito era consultarme acerca de un tema de la universidad, un pedido de orientación. Pero cuando empezamos a charlar, fue al punto que le interesaba: la separación de sus padres. Me comentó lo que había pasado, cómo se había sentido, lo que había implicado en su mirada del papá, y finalmente me dijo que en medio de esa situación penosa había pensado en llamarme y no se había animado.
A esta altura de mi vida, volví a pensar en el impacto que tienen para un chico los mensajes de un docente; pensé en el valor de la exigencia y la contención para generar ese vínculo. Ella buscaba a ese director que la escuchaba, la acompañaba, le exigía y la apoyaba.
Probablemente estemos ante un error cuando transmitimos a los chicos el mensaje de que los apoyamos, "más allá de lo que hagan". Ni nos piden esa incondicionalidad ni les sirve que sea así. Necesitan de adultos significativos que les exijan y los acompañen, y que crean en ellos. Terminemos con la idea de retenerlos sin normas ni exigencias. No les sirve.
Necesitan saber que pueden, que deben esforzarse y que estamos para acompañarlos y guiarlos, para que, efectivamente, puedan.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Sunday, November 16, 2014
ARCH/ENV/GralInt-Amid a Fossil Bonanza, Drilling Deep into Pre-Dinosaurian Rocks
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Feature: The Fourth Extinction
The Rise of Dinosaurs—and the Age of Humans.
Amid a Fossil Bonanza, Drilling Deep into Pre-Dinosaurian Rocks
by Kevin Krajick | 4.29.2014
On a high ridge in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, paleontologist Paul Olsen sits on the fallen trunk of a 215-million-year-old tree, now turned to stone. The tree once loomed 70 or 80 feet above a riverine landscape teeming with fish, turtles, giant crocodilians and tiny, early species of dinosaurs. From here, Olsen can survey the remnants of this lost world: miles and miles of surreal badlands, where sediments built up over millions of years have eroded back down to expose endless cross sections of brightly colored rocks. The layers represent tectonic movements, natural climate cycles, the growth and disappearance of lakes, buildups of river deltas. The petrified trees scattered across the landscape are only the most obvious fossils; others are bleeding out by the ton. It is perhaps the world’s richest trove of rocks from the late Triassic, when dinosaurs, and early mammals, got their evolutionary start. The Triassic was also a hothouse world: a time of high atmospheric carbon dioxide, rapid climate shifts, and fast-moving extinctions. Olsen thinks there may be much to learn from it for our own time.
Paleontologist Paul Olsen of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory co-leads a project to drill a core in the rocks of the Painted Desert, in search of reliable records from a pivotal time in earth’s history, the Triassic, more than 200 million years ago.
Scientists have been digging here since the 1850s, yet much remains unknown about the exact timing of events in the late Triassic, between about 235 million and 201 million years ago. That is why Olsen is here. He is co-leader of a team that is drilling a borehole deep into the rocks. By taking out a continuous core–a first for this region–they hope to assemble a record that will not only help them write a reliable history for this pivotal time, but shed light on how natural climate cycles work, and how they affect ecosystems–knowledge that, among other things, should advance scientists’ ability to assess the prospects for human-induced shifts.
“Even in this area of beautifully outcropping rocks, it’s hard to put together an exact sequence of events, based on what you see,” says Olsen, sweeping his hand over the vast maze of buttes, mesas, canyons and pinnacles. Deeper layers are inaccessible from the surface, and erosion has carried away elements from many shallower ones, making it impossible to see exactly how they relate to each other, and when each was formed. A continuous core will provide “an unimpeachable record,” he says. Because of the richness of fossils and the large number of studies that have already been done, he says, “This is one place in the world, where by resolving exact times of events, we can ask very specific questions about how earth’s systems work. Understanding ancient environments gives us strong clues to future ones. In fact, it’s the only way to test our climate models. Other than letting the experiment [in global warming] we are in right now to run its course. I think we’d like to know that with a little more certainty.”
During this time, the area was dominated by fearsome reptiles that preceded dinosaurs, like these ones dug up at Petrified Forest National Park and reassembled in its museum.
Olsen. a Columbia University professor and researcher at the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, thinks all kinds of questions can be answered here. For one, the core should allow scientists to figure out the timing of repeated shifts in temperature and precipitation caused by periodic shifts in earth’s orbit, and whether such shifts operated on the same schedule during the Triassic as they have in more recent times. These cycles have been documented by Olsen and his colleagues in Triassic-age rocks of the Newark Basin, near New York City–but those rocks don’t contain certain minerals that allow the cycles to be placed in absolute time. The ones at Petrified Forest do. “If we can show that the Newark timescale is correct, we can empirically calibrate the solar system’s behavior,” Olsen told the journal Nature in an article about the project. A more specific question: whether a giant meteorite that left a crater more than 50 miles wide in what is now Quebec had anything to do with a large turnover in flora and fauna during the Triassic. The crater is precisely dated, at 215.5 million years, but the turnover is not; estimates vary by 10 million years or more. If there is a direct connection, Olsen suspects it can be made by dating what he calls an “extinction layer” that outcrops in various parts of the park, where the sediments suddenly change to red and white, and fossils practically disappear, suggesting some kind of catastrophe.
Driller A.J. Chubb removes a core from the drill, which is kept running 24 hours a day. It will penetrate more than 1,700 feet.
Near where Olsen is sitting, on the edge of a nearby butte, a three-man crew is running a roaring diesel-powered drill. Its hollow-tip bit is boring at 1,000 revolutions per minute through one formation after another at a 30-degree angle, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. About every 20 or 30 minutes, the crew hauls out a casing containing a five-foot length of core. Geologists working with Olsen take turns carrying the plastic-swathed core to a tent, labeling it, cutting it into half-sections and piling it in the back of pickup truck. Depending on the layer, the drill brings up mudstones or siltstones in shades of purple, red and brown; some are flecked with gray or white carbonates, and occasionally squiggles that look like they could be fossilized tree roots, or streambed ripples. At one point, the drill hits an unknown obstruction that causes it to veer off course–possibly a fossilized tree, made of extremely hard quartz. Their straight course compromised, the drillers have to pull out and start again.
Project co-leader John Geissman of the University of Texas pulls out a core of rock.
The $970,000 project is a collaboration among Lamont, Rutgers University, the universities of Arizona, Texas and Utah, and other institutions. The drilling, which took place in November and December 2013, took nearly a month, bottoming out at 1,706.5 feet in one hole, then at 830 feet in a second. The deeper hole appears to reach back at least 250 million years–the very start of the Triassic. In coming months, the cores will be examined at various labs using CAT scans, chemical analyses, magnetism and high-resolution photography. Ashes from repeated volcanic eruptions are known to punctuate the sedimentary layers, and those ashes contain mineral grains with radioactive isotopes that can be analyzed to yield absolute ages. Also, sporadic reversals in earth’s magnetic field are recorded in the orientation of grains within the sediments themselves. Lamont paleomagnetics expert Dennis Kent will try to line up these reversals with the volcanic layers. Project co-leader John Geissman, a geologist at the University of Texas, Dallas, says, “It’s a unique opportunity to put together a coherent time framework for a critical [time].” The team hopes this will be the first of a half-dozen sites in a proposed wider study dubbed the Colorado Plateau Coring Project. This is aimed at studying the Four Corners region spanning Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, which shares many of the same rock formations.
Sheathed in protective plastic, the cores will later be split and analyzed using CAT scans, magnetism and radioactive isotopes.
One thing the new core will not address: the apparent sudden mass extinction that ended the Triassic, recently dated to 201.6 million years ago. Rocks from that time have already been washed away from the park, but Olsen and Kent are investigating the end-Triassic elsewhere, from the Newark Basin to the United Kingdom and Morocco. It was that extinction–possibly caused by massive volcanic eruptions, or another meteorite–that cleared the way for the dominance of dinosaurs, who were up until then only a minor group. The remains of dinosaurs themselves are seen in only a few early forms around Petrified Forest. These include one early type, the Chindesaurus–a vaguely lizardlike, possibly feathered, creature that measured around 6 feet long, and probably ran around on two legs chasing after smaller animals to eat. It was first discovered in 1984 near the drill site.
Lamont adjunct researcher Dennis Kent inspects a chart of the rock layers the drill is taking out. By mapping past reversals in earth’s magnetic field, he hopes to corroborate the age of each layer with earlier cores taken in the eastern United States.
Most other animal fossils are non-dinosaurs like those of the Revueltosaurus, one of many large reptiles that walked the land, or slithered through shallow waters covering the region during much of the period. Revueltosaurus, at first known mainly through fragments such as teeth, was in fact long thought to be a type of dinosaur. But the first intact skeleton, unearthed at Petrified Forest in 2005, upset ideas about dinosaur evolution by showing it was actually more related to modern crocodiles–a whole other line. Bill Parker, the park paleontologist, has since dug up a trove of their skulls. In some locales, pieces of them and their contemporaries are so common, they can be scooped by the handful right off the surface–eye sockets, vertebrae, teeth, fragments of limbs, fish scales. Some cliff faces seem entirely made of clams.
“OK, basically right where you’re standing on, you’re standing on a bunch of bone fragments, and coprolites [fossilized feces] that are coming out of this layer,” Parker tells a visitor at a backcountry site he has worked on. With thumb and forefinger, Parker picks out a thumb-size fossil poop maybe 223 million years old from the loose surface. “And right here … that’s a tooth. That’s a phytosaur tooth,” he says, pulling out a nasty triangular thing evidently made for tearing apart flesh. How some creatures disappeared and others took over, whether through sudden shifts in climate or otherwise, is a prime question for Parker and others. They see rising modern extinctions and prospective climate change as an analog.
Along a park road, Olsen and Rutgers University geologist Morgan Schaller (left) inspect outcropping rocks.
“When I first started working here, the story was that there was a forest here, and some dinosaurs running around,” says Parker. He thinks this is hopelessly oversimplified. “That’s like saying, the Battle of Gettysburg was some guys with guns on one side, shooting at guys with guns on the other side. That doesn’t tell you anything about history itself. The goal here with the coring is to tell the story of 20 million years, almost millennium by millennium. It we can put together a really good picture of what happened then, we might even learn about things that are of concern to people today.”
Source: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/04/29/amid-a-fossil-bonanza-drilling-deep-into-pre-dinosaurian-rocks/
Feature: The Fourth Extinction
The Rise of Dinosaurs—and the Age of Humans.
Amid a Fossil Bonanza, Drilling Deep into Pre-Dinosaurian Rocks
by Kevin Krajick | 4.29.2014
On a high ridge in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, paleontologist Paul Olsen sits on the fallen trunk of a 215-million-year-old tree, now turned to stone. The tree once loomed 70 or 80 feet above a riverine landscape teeming with fish, turtles, giant crocodilians and tiny, early species of dinosaurs. From here, Olsen can survey the remnants of this lost world: miles and miles of surreal badlands, where sediments built up over millions of years have eroded back down to expose endless cross sections of brightly colored rocks. The layers represent tectonic movements, natural climate cycles, the growth and disappearance of lakes, buildups of river deltas. The petrified trees scattered across the landscape are only the most obvious fossils; others are bleeding out by the ton. It is perhaps the world’s richest trove of rocks from the late Triassic, when dinosaurs, and early mammals, got their evolutionary start. The Triassic was also a hothouse world: a time of high atmospheric carbon dioxide, rapid climate shifts, and fast-moving extinctions. Olsen thinks there may be much to learn from it for our own time.
Paleontologist Paul Olsen of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory co-leads a project to drill a core in the rocks of the Painted Desert, in search of reliable records from a pivotal time in earth’s history, the Triassic, more than 200 million years ago.
Scientists have been digging here since the 1850s, yet much remains unknown about the exact timing of events in the late Triassic, between about 235 million and 201 million years ago. That is why Olsen is here. He is co-leader of a team that is drilling a borehole deep into the rocks. By taking out a continuous core–a first for this region–they hope to assemble a record that will not only help them write a reliable history for this pivotal time, but shed light on how natural climate cycles work, and how they affect ecosystems–knowledge that, among other things, should advance scientists’ ability to assess the prospects for human-induced shifts.
“Even in this area of beautifully outcropping rocks, it’s hard to put together an exact sequence of events, based on what you see,” says Olsen, sweeping his hand over the vast maze of buttes, mesas, canyons and pinnacles. Deeper layers are inaccessible from the surface, and erosion has carried away elements from many shallower ones, making it impossible to see exactly how they relate to each other, and when each was formed. A continuous core will provide “an unimpeachable record,” he says. Because of the richness of fossils and the large number of studies that have already been done, he says, “This is one place in the world, where by resolving exact times of events, we can ask very specific questions about how earth’s systems work. Understanding ancient environments gives us strong clues to future ones. In fact, it’s the only way to test our climate models. Other than letting the experiment [in global warming] we are in right now to run its course. I think we’d like to know that with a little more certainty.”
During this time, the area was dominated by fearsome reptiles that preceded dinosaurs, like these ones dug up at Petrified Forest National Park and reassembled in its museum.
Olsen. a Columbia University professor and researcher at the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, thinks all kinds of questions can be answered here. For one, the core should allow scientists to figure out the timing of repeated shifts in temperature and precipitation caused by periodic shifts in earth’s orbit, and whether such shifts operated on the same schedule during the Triassic as they have in more recent times. These cycles have been documented by Olsen and his colleagues in Triassic-age rocks of the Newark Basin, near New York City–but those rocks don’t contain certain minerals that allow the cycles to be placed in absolute time. The ones at Petrified Forest do. “If we can show that the Newark timescale is correct, we can empirically calibrate the solar system’s behavior,” Olsen told the journal Nature in an article about the project. A more specific question: whether a giant meteorite that left a crater more than 50 miles wide in what is now Quebec had anything to do with a large turnover in flora and fauna during the Triassic. The crater is precisely dated, at 215.5 million years, but the turnover is not; estimates vary by 10 million years or more. If there is a direct connection, Olsen suspects it can be made by dating what he calls an “extinction layer” that outcrops in various parts of the park, where the sediments suddenly change to red and white, and fossils practically disappear, suggesting some kind of catastrophe.
Driller A.J. Chubb removes a core from the drill, which is kept running 24 hours a day. It will penetrate more than 1,700 feet.
Near where Olsen is sitting, on the edge of a nearby butte, a three-man crew is running a roaring diesel-powered drill. Its hollow-tip bit is boring at 1,000 revolutions per minute through one formation after another at a 30-degree angle, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. About every 20 or 30 minutes, the crew hauls out a casing containing a five-foot length of core. Geologists working with Olsen take turns carrying the plastic-swathed core to a tent, labeling it, cutting it into half-sections and piling it in the back of pickup truck. Depending on the layer, the drill brings up mudstones or siltstones in shades of purple, red and brown; some are flecked with gray or white carbonates, and occasionally squiggles that look like they could be fossilized tree roots, or streambed ripples. At one point, the drill hits an unknown obstruction that causes it to veer off course–possibly a fossilized tree, made of extremely hard quartz. Their straight course compromised, the drillers have to pull out and start again.
Project co-leader John Geissman of the University of Texas pulls out a core of rock.
The $970,000 project is a collaboration among Lamont, Rutgers University, the universities of Arizona, Texas and Utah, and other institutions. The drilling, which took place in November and December 2013, took nearly a month, bottoming out at 1,706.5 feet in one hole, then at 830 feet in a second. The deeper hole appears to reach back at least 250 million years–the very start of the Triassic. In coming months, the cores will be examined at various labs using CAT scans, chemical analyses, magnetism and high-resolution photography. Ashes from repeated volcanic eruptions are known to punctuate the sedimentary layers, and those ashes contain mineral grains with radioactive isotopes that can be analyzed to yield absolute ages. Also, sporadic reversals in earth’s magnetic field are recorded in the orientation of grains within the sediments themselves. Lamont paleomagnetics expert Dennis Kent will try to line up these reversals with the volcanic layers. Project co-leader John Geissman, a geologist at the University of Texas, Dallas, says, “It’s a unique opportunity to put together a coherent time framework for a critical [time].” The team hopes this will be the first of a half-dozen sites in a proposed wider study dubbed the Colorado Plateau Coring Project. This is aimed at studying the Four Corners region spanning Colorado, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, which shares many of the same rock formations.
Sheathed in protective plastic, the cores will later be split and analyzed using CAT scans, magnetism and radioactive isotopes.
One thing the new core will not address: the apparent sudden mass extinction that ended the Triassic, recently dated to 201.6 million years ago. Rocks from that time have already been washed away from the park, but Olsen and Kent are investigating the end-Triassic elsewhere, from the Newark Basin to the United Kingdom and Morocco. It was that extinction–possibly caused by massive volcanic eruptions, or another meteorite–that cleared the way for the dominance of dinosaurs, who were up until then only a minor group. The remains of dinosaurs themselves are seen in only a few early forms around Petrified Forest. These include one early type, the Chindesaurus–a vaguely lizardlike, possibly feathered, creature that measured around 6 feet long, and probably ran around on two legs chasing after smaller animals to eat. It was first discovered in 1984 near the drill site.
Lamont adjunct researcher Dennis Kent inspects a chart of the rock layers the drill is taking out. By mapping past reversals in earth’s magnetic field, he hopes to corroborate the age of each layer with earlier cores taken in the eastern United States.
Most other animal fossils are non-dinosaurs like those of the Revueltosaurus, one of many large reptiles that walked the land, or slithered through shallow waters covering the region during much of the period. Revueltosaurus, at first known mainly through fragments such as teeth, was in fact long thought to be a type of dinosaur. But the first intact skeleton, unearthed at Petrified Forest in 2005, upset ideas about dinosaur evolution by showing it was actually more related to modern crocodiles–a whole other line. Bill Parker, the park paleontologist, has since dug up a trove of their skulls. In some locales, pieces of them and their contemporaries are so common, they can be scooped by the handful right off the surface–eye sockets, vertebrae, teeth, fragments of limbs, fish scales. Some cliff faces seem entirely made of clams.
“OK, basically right where you’re standing on, you’re standing on a bunch of bone fragments, and coprolites [fossilized feces] that are coming out of this layer,” Parker tells a visitor at a backcountry site he has worked on. With thumb and forefinger, Parker picks out a thumb-size fossil poop maybe 223 million years old from the loose surface. “And right here … that’s a tooth. That’s a phytosaur tooth,” he says, pulling out a nasty triangular thing evidently made for tearing apart flesh. How some creatures disappeared and others took over, whether through sudden shifts in climate or otherwise, is a prime question for Parker and others. They see rising modern extinctions and prospective climate change as an analog.
Along a park road, Olsen and Rutgers University geologist Morgan Schaller (left) inspect outcropping rocks.
“When I first started working here, the story was that there was a forest here, and some dinosaurs running around,” says Parker. He thinks this is hopelessly oversimplified. “That’s like saying, the Battle of Gettysburg was some guys with guns on one side, shooting at guys with guns on the other side. That doesn’t tell you anything about history itself. The goal here with the coring is to tell the story of 20 million years, almost millennium by millennium. It we can put together a really good picture of what happened then, we might even learn about things that are of concern to people today.”
Source: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2014/04/29/amid-a-fossil-bonanza-drilling-deep-into-pre-dinosaurian-rocks/
POL/ECON/ENV/GralInt-The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
2011-10-25
The Earth Institute, Columbia University presents a book launch, "The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity", with Jeffrey D. Sachs, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management; Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University; Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Introduction by Steve Cohen, Executive Director, The Earth Institute.
Source: www.earth.columbia.edu
The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
2011-10-25
The Earth Institute, Columbia University presents a book launch, "The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity", with Jeffrey D. Sachs, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management; Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University; Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Introduction by Steve Cohen, Executive Director, The Earth Institute.
Source: www.earth.columbia.edu
Sunday, November 9, 2014
GralInt-TED Talks-Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Kare Anderson:
Be an opportunity maker
TED@IBM · Filmed Sep 2014
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.
Transcript:
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea.
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter)
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" — (Laughter) — "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that.
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players and technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." (Laughter)
Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
Kare Anderson:
Be an opportunity maker
TED@IBM · Filmed Sep 2014
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.
Transcript:
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea.
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter)
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" — (Laughter) — "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that.
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players and technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." (Laughter)
Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
LEAD/GralInt-Pedro Algorta: "Todas las personas son capaces de ejercer el liderazgo"
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Pedro Algorta: "Todas las personas son capaces de ejercer el liderazgo"
El sobreviviente de la tragedia de los Andes y consultor afirma que hay que concentrarse en el presente para alcanzar objetivos
Por Francisco Jueguen y Víctor Pombinho | LA NACION
Pedro, sentado arriba del fuselaje del avión.
"Todos tenemos nuestras montañas", sentencia Pedro. Sus palabras pesan más. Hace 40 años, cuando él tenía 19, pasó 72 días perdido en el Valle de las Lágrimas en los Andes, con sus compañeros del equipo de rugby uruguayo Old Christians. Tras vivir la tragedia, ya en su vida normal, aconseja: "Lo único que podemos hacer es empezar a caminar".
Luego de haber ocupado cargos ejecutivos en Techint, Quilmes y Peñaflor, Pedro Algorta es actualmente consultor en liderazgo adaptativo. "Todas las carreras tienen montañas con subidas y bajadas", afirma sobre el mercado laboral el autor del flamante libro Las montañas siguen allí.
Algorta no fue uno de los que realizó la salvadora expedición por las montañas, como Nando Parrado o Roberto Canessa. Pero aclara: "No es necesario ser jefe para realizar los actos de liderazgo necesarios para que los grupos hagan las cosas que tienen que hacer".
¿Por qué hasta ahora había decidido no hablar de su experiencia en los Andes?
Me llevó 35 años cicatrizar las heridas de los Andes. En realidad, es el tiempo que me llevó ocuparme de hacer mi vida normal. Llegó la hora de ocuparme de la montaña. Hay tres libros que no interpretan la forma en que viví la montaña. Para mí, la experiencia tenía otro sentido y sentí que tenía que contarlo.
¿Cuán importante es contar la historia desde las emociones?
Cuento todo con el corazón en la mano. Muestro mis vulnerabilidades. Soy honesto. No pretendo ser quien no fui, ni en la montaña ni en mi vida empresarial. Para poder transmitir algo, para lograr un cambio, uno no puede llegar con la cabeza. Tiene que ir con la emoción.
-¿Cómo utilizás tu experiencias a nivel empresarial?
-Soy un tipo de empresa, por eso puedo interpretar esta experiencia bajo esa luz. Pero este es un libro para toda la gente. Cuenta cómo sacamos fuerza de la adversidad para vivir. No dependíamos de los de afuera, por lo que la fuerza sale de adentro de uno. Esa automotivación que es necesaria para levantarse y sobrevivir todos los días. Las carreras empresarias son como las montañas. Con subidas y bajadas. No conozco a nadie que haya tenido una carrera lineal, sin dificultades, y las escuelas no te preparan para eso. Y la vida es así. En algún momento te vas a caer en un avión. Lo importante es que una vez que te caigas te agrupes, te encuentres con vos mismo y empieces a caminar. Se puede salir de todas las crisis. Así es la vida, con subidas y bajadas. Los Andes no fueron mis únicas montañas.
-En un momento hablás de la máquina de supervivencia como un fenómeno colectivo. ¿Cuán importante fue el trabajo en equipo en los Andes?
-Porque cada uno luchaba por sobrevivir, trabajamos en equipo. No somos un ejemplo de generosidad. Sabíamos que si queríamos trabajar en equipo teníamos que trabajar entre todos. Hubieron errores, dificultades, tensiones, todo lo que aparece cuando los equipos luchan para adaptarse a situaciones difíciles. Pero hay que desmitificar esto. Volverlo humano. No elegí con quién me caí en los Andes. De la misma manera que uno no elige a su familia, hermanos ni muchas veces en tu vida laboral elegís con quién trabajás. Eso de que uno puede elegir sus colaboradores es muy relativo. La clave fue cómo supimos extraer lo mejor y necesario de cada uno para el grupo. Hay que tomar a la gente con quien está y sacar de ellos lo mejor. Cada uno tiene enormes potencialidades y esas son las que hay que trabajar. No podés esperar a armar un equipo perfecto. Nosotros fuimos un ejemplo de chicos comunes perdidos en las montañas, que se ponen a trabajar. No sabíamos si nos íbamos a salvar o no. Trabajábamos como si nos fuéramos a salvar. Muchas veces en las empresas te ponen mucho el foco en un objetivo y se olvidan del cómo tenés que hacer para alcanzarlo.
- ¿No se te pasó por la mente dejarte morir, dada la magnitud de la tragedia?
- Jamás. Y ninguno de nosotros lo pensó. Siempre quisimos vivir. Eramos jóvenes y teníamos la vida por delante. Hubo un momento en que estuve a punto de morirme tapado por la nieve.me entregué, me estaba asfixiando y justo me abren la boca entra el aire.y vuelve la fuerza.
- ¿Por qué algunos sobrevivieron y otros no?
- No lo sé. Estoy contento de haber sobrevivido yo. Es una pregunta sin respuesta. No tengo una responsabilidad adicional por los que no volvieron. Lo importante es la increíble posibilidad de vivir vidas normales que tuvimos.
En tu libro hablás muy abiertamente sobre el tema de la antropofagia
Me pareció importante contar todo para que la gente entienda que lo nuestro no era un picnic, sino una situación absolutamente límite. Al princio sabíamos de quiénes eran los cuerpos. Los cuerpos de la hermana y la madre de Nando Parrado no los tocamos. Pero eso era hasta que hubiera necesidad. El pacto de que cada uno iba a entregar su cuerpo cuando muriera es el folclore. Pero no era necesario. Son las racionalizaciones que hicimos allí y hacemos hoy. Lo hicimos porque queríamos vivir, teníamos hambre. Al principio tenia un poco de impresión, pero al final no había problema.
En el libro se habla de la actitud diaria frente al trabajo.
-Gracias a que el trabajo fue día a día es que estuvo enfocado en la supervivencia. Eran trabajos pequeños. No salimos de los Andes porque teníamos grandes estrategias, sino porque día a día nos fuimos encargando y animando a sobrevivir. Si hubiésemos olvidado el presente no hubiésemos salido.
¿Cuál era tu rol grupal?
Era un poco el bohemio, el intelectual del grupo. A 400 metros eso no servía para mucho. Pero me destaqué porque trabajaba mucho y eso tenía su efecto sobre los otros miembros del grupo.
¿Quién ejercía el liderazgo?
-Éramos un equipo de rugby y teníamos una figura de autoridad que sabía cómo conducir un equipo en la cancha y en el tercer tiempo, con sus códigos y conductas. Era nuestro jefe. Pero cuando caímos en la montaña no teníamos un equipo de rugby enfrente; teníamos una montaña, el hambre, el frío y la hostilidad del lugar. Las reglas del rugby no servían. Hubo que generar nuevas aptitudes y capacidades para resolver el desafío. Ahí, distintas personas, desde sus fortalezas y debilidades relativas, dieron el paso al vacío y se hicieron cargo de las situaciones. Con errores y aciertos, el grupo se adaptó. Yo veo una diferencia entre la autoridad y el liderazgo. La figura de autoridad era el capitán. Los líderes, en cambio, son aquellos que hicieron acciones de liderazgo, lo que significaba hacer trabajar al grupo en los temas complicados que estábamos enfrentando. En cambio, Nando y Roberto son nuestros héroes, quienes se sacrificaron por el grupo e hicieron lo increíble.
-¿Cuando te hablan de estrés laboral te morías de risa?
(Risas) ?No. Me angustio. Lo bueno es que pudimos volver a la normalidad y me preocupan las cosas pequeñas como a los demás. Todos tenemos nuestras montañas. Y lo único que podemos hacer es empezar a caminar, y ver cómo las subimos y las pasamos..
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Pedro Algorta: "Todas las personas son capaces de ejercer el liderazgo"
El sobreviviente de la tragedia de los Andes y consultor afirma que hay que concentrarse en el presente para alcanzar objetivos
Por Francisco Jueguen y Víctor Pombinho | LA NACION
Pedro, sentado arriba del fuselaje del avión.
"Todos tenemos nuestras montañas", sentencia Pedro. Sus palabras pesan más. Hace 40 años, cuando él tenía 19, pasó 72 días perdido en el Valle de las Lágrimas en los Andes, con sus compañeros del equipo de rugby uruguayo Old Christians. Tras vivir la tragedia, ya en su vida normal, aconseja: "Lo único que podemos hacer es empezar a caminar".
Luego de haber ocupado cargos ejecutivos en Techint, Quilmes y Peñaflor, Pedro Algorta es actualmente consultor en liderazgo adaptativo. "Todas las carreras tienen montañas con subidas y bajadas", afirma sobre el mercado laboral el autor del flamante libro Las montañas siguen allí.
Algorta no fue uno de los que realizó la salvadora expedición por las montañas, como Nando Parrado o Roberto Canessa. Pero aclara: "No es necesario ser jefe para realizar los actos de liderazgo necesarios para que los grupos hagan las cosas que tienen que hacer".
¿Por qué hasta ahora había decidido no hablar de su experiencia en los Andes?
Me llevó 35 años cicatrizar las heridas de los Andes. En realidad, es el tiempo que me llevó ocuparme de hacer mi vida normal. Llegó la hora de ocuparme de la montaña. Hay tres libros que no interpretan la forma en que viví la montaña. Para mí, la experiencia tenía otro sentido y sentí que tenía que contarlo.
¿Cuán importante es contar la historia desde las emociones?
Cuento todo con el corazón en la mano. Muestro mis vulnerabilidades. Soy honesto. No pretendo ser quien no fui, ni en la montaña ni en mi vida empresarial. Para poder transmitir algo, para lograr un cambio, uno no puede llegar con la cabeza. Tiene que ir con la emoción.
-¿Cómo utilizás tu experiencias a nivel empresarial?
-Soy un tipo de empresa, por eso puedo interpretar esta experiencia bajo esa luz. Pero este es un libro para toda la gente. Cuenta cómo sacamos fuerza de la adversidad para vivir. No dependíamos de los de afuera, por lo que la fuerza sale de adentro de uno. Esa automotivación que es necesaria para levantarse y sobrevivir todos los días. Las carreras empresarias son como las montañas. Con subidas y bajadas. No conozco a nadie que haya tenido una carrera lineal, sin dificultades, y las escuelas no te preparan para eso. Y la vida es así. En algún momento te vas a caer en un avión. Lo importante es que una vez que te caigas te agrupes, te encuentres con vos mismo y empieces a caminar. Se puede salir de todas las crisis. Así es la vida, con subidas y bajadas. Los Andes no fueron mis únicas montañas.
-En un momento hablás de la máquina de supervivencia como un fenómeno colectivo. ¿Cuán importante fue el trabajo en equipo en los Andes?
-Porque cada uno luchaba por sobrevivir, trabajamos en equipo. No somos un ejemplo de generosidad. Sabíamos que si queríamos trabajar en equipo teníamos que trabajar entre todos. Hubieron errores, dificultades, tensiones, todo lo que aparece cuando los equipos luchan para adaptarse a situaciones difíciles. Pero hay que desmitificar esto. Volverlo humano. No elegí con quién me caí en los Andes. De la misma manera que uno no elige a su familia, hermanos ni muchas veces en tu vida laboral elegís con quién trabajás. Eso de que uno puede elegir sus colaboradores es muy relativo. La clave fue cómo supimos extraer lo mejor y necesario de cada uno para el grupo. Hay que tomar a la gente con quien está y sacar de ellos lo mejor. Cada uno tiene enormes potencialidades y esas son las que hay que trabajar. No podés esperar a armar un equipo perfecto. Nosotros fuimos un ejemplo de chicos comunes perdidos en las montañas, que se ponen a trabajar. No sabíamos si nos íbamos a salvar o no. Trabajábamos como si nos fuéramos a salvar. Muchas veces en las empresas te ponen mucho el foco en un objetivo y se olvidan del cómo tenés que hacer para alcanzarlo.
- ¿No se te pasó por la mente dejarte morir, dada la magnitud de la tragedia?
- Jamás. Y ninguno de nosotros lo pensó. Siempre quisimos vivir. Eramos jóvenes y teníamos la vida por delante. Hubo un momento en que estuve a punto de morirme tapado por la nieve.me entregué, me estaba asfixiando y justo me abren la boca entra el aire.y vuelve la fuerza.
- ¿Por qué algunos sobrevivieron y otros no?
- No lo sé. Estoy contento de haber sobrevivido yo. Es una pregunta sin respuesta. No tengo una responsabilidad adicional por los que no volvieron. Lo importante es la increíble posibilidad de vivir vidas normales que tuvimos.
En tu libro hablás muy abiertamente sobre el tema de la antropofagia
Me pareció importante contar todo para que la gente entienda que lo nuestro no era un picnic, sino una situación absolutamente límite. Al princio sabíamos de quiénes eran los cuerpos. Los cuerpos de la hermana y la madre de Nando Parrado no los tocamos. Pero eso era hasta que hubiera necesidad. El pacto de que cada uno iba a entregar su cuerpo cuando muriera es el folclore. Pero no era necesario. Son las racionalizaciones que hicimos allí y hacemos hoy. Lo hicimos porque queríamos vivir, teníamos hambre. Al principio tenia un poco de impresión, pero al final no había problema.
En el libro se habla de la actitud diaria frente al trabajo.
-Gracias a que el trabajo fue día a día es que estuvo enfocado en la supervivencia. Eran trabajos pequeños. No salimos de los Andes porque teníamos grandes estrategias, sino porque día a día nos fuimos encargando y animando a sobrevivir. Si hubiésemos olvidado el presente no hubiésemos salido.
¿Cuál era tu rol grupal?
Era un poco el bohemio, el intelectual del grupo. A 400 metros eso no servía para mucho. Pero me destaqué porque trabajaba mucho y eso tenía su efecto sobre los otros miembros del grupo.
¿Quién ejercía el liderazgo?
-Éramos un equipo de rugby y teníamos una figura de autoridad que sabía cómo conducir un equipo en la cancha y en el tercer tiempo, con sus códigos y conductas. Era nuestro jefe. Pero cuando caímos en la montaña no teníamos un equipo de rugby enfrente; teníamos una montaña, el hambre, el frío y la hostilidad del lugar. Las reglas del rugby no servían. Hubo que generar nuevas aptitudes y capacidades para resolver el desafío. Ahí, distintas personas, desde sus fortalezas y debilidades relativas, dieron el paso al vacío y se hicieron cargo de las situaciones. Con errores y aciertos, el grupo se adaptó. Yo veo una diferencia entre la autoridad y el liderazgo. La figura de autoridad era el capitán. Los líderes, en cambio, son aquellos que hicieron acciones de liderazgo, lo que significaba hacer trabajar al grupo en los temas complicados que estábamos enfrentando. En cambio, Nando y Roberto son nuestros héroes, quienes se sacrificaron por el grupo e hicieron lo increíble.
-¿Cuando te hablan de estrés laboral te morías de risa?
(Risas) ?No. Me angustio. Lo bueno es que pudimos volver a la normalidad y me preocupan las cosas pequeñas como a los demás. Todos tenemos nuestras montañas. Y lo único que podemos hacer es empezar a caminar, y ver cómo las subimos y las pasamos..
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
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