The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Rethinking Education
An inspiring Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) Animate taken from a speech given by Sir Ken Robinson,
world-renowned education expert and recipient of the RSA Benjamin Franklin award.
Source: www.languagemagazine.com
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Friday, February 20, 2015
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
INT/TECH/GralInt-How the Internet of Things is Changing the World
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
How the Internet of Things is Changing the World
By Lorraine K. Lee on January 21, 2015
The Internet of Things promises to connect our entire world, and with the rising popularity of FitBits, smartwatches, and even connected cars, it’s no wonder it’s been called a trillion dollar market. What do these new technologies mean for our future, and how do they affect us?
Discover the latest on this rising trend, learn about the gadgets and tools that will help connect our lives, and what you need to know to leverage this market. Share your IoT insights, too!
A Trillion Dollar Market?
The Internet of Things will generate $14.4 billion of value over the next decade, according to Extreme Networks CMO Vala Afshar. With inventions like the HAPIfork, which helps you monitor and track your eating habits, and apps to help keep track of your propane tank, glucose levels and everything in between, a world where connected gadgets are deeply integrated into our everyday lives doesn’t seem so far away. Afshar picks 40 IoT inventions that could transform the way we live:
An Internet of Things Roadmap
By 2020, half of the planet will be connected to the Internet, and more than 1 billion homes will have Wi-Fi, says Business Insider Intelligence. This deck highlights how the IoT will develop, potential barriers it might face, as well as how it will affect consumers like you.
Investing in the Internet of Things
There’s another way to participate in the Internet of Things phenomenon aside from actually owning gadgets – and that’s through investments. The Motley Fool shares why NVIDIA is the one IoT stock you may be overlooking — but shouldn’t be.
Source:https://blog.slideshare.net
How the Internet of Things is Changing the World
By Lorraine K. Lee on January 21, 2015
The Internet of Things promises to connect our entire world, and with the rising popularity of FitBits, smartwatches, and even connected cars, it’s no wonder it’s been called a trillion dollar market. What do these new technologies mean for our future, and how do they affect us?
Discover the latest on this rising trend, learn about the gadgets and tools that will help connect our lives, and what you need to know to leverage this market. Share your IoT insights, too!
A Trillion Dollar Market?
The Internet of Things will generate $14.4 billion of value over the next decade, according to Extreme Networks CMO Vala Afshar. With inventions like the HAPIfork, which helps you monitor and track your eating habits, and apps to help keep track of your propane tank, glucose levels and everything in between, a world where connected gadgets are deeply integrated into our everyday lives doesn’t seem so far away. Afshar picks 40 IoT inventions that could transform the way we live:
An Internet of Things Roadmap
By 2020, half of the planet will be connected to the Internet, and more than 1 billion homes will have Wi-Fi, says Business Insider Intelligence. This deck highlights how the IoT will develop, potential barriers it might face, as well as how it will affect consumers like you.
Investing in the Internet of Things
There’s another way to participate in the Internet of Things phenomenon aside from actually owning gadgets – and that’s through investments. The Motley Fool shares why NVIDIA is the one IoT stock you may be overlooking — but shouldn’t be.
Source:https://blog.slideshare.net
PRESENT/GralInt-Steve Jobs: What We Can Learn From His Success
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Steve Jobs: What We Can Learn From His Success
By Moumita Basu on February 2, 2015
Apple reported historically high quarterly revenues, largely thanks to its iPhone sales, and few would deny that much of the company’s success can be attributed to the iconic Steve
Jobs — entrepreneur, inventor, visionary and former Apple CEO.
From Jobs’ powerful presentations skills to his business philosophies, there’s no shortage of learnings. View SlideShares on Jobs and share your favorite lessons from Jobs, too.
Presentation Tips from the Master
Known for delivering awe-inspiring and captivating presentations, Jobs always practiced his presentations down to the last detail. From building on a central theme to demonstrating enthusiasm, here’s how you can present like Jobs.
Best Jobs Quotes to Live By
No advice is better than advice straight from the source. Check out some of Jobs’ most prolific words to live by:
Innovation Secrets of Steve
Your passion is everything that you need in order to innovate. That’s one of the principles Jobs lived by as he set to create products that changed the world. This deck by author Carmine Gallo details just how Jobs achieved his success:
Source:https://blog.slideshare.net
Steve Jobs: What We Can Learn From His Success
By Moumita Basu on February 2, 2015
Apple reported historically high quarterly revenues, largely thanks to its iPhone sales, and few would deny that much of the company’s success can be attributed to the iconic Steve
Jobs — entrepreneur, inventor, visionary and former Apple CEO.
From Jobs’ powerful presentations skills to his business philosophies, there’s no shortage of learnings. View SlideShares on Jobs and share your favorite lessons from Jobs, too.
Presentation Tips from the Master
Known for delivering awe-inspiring and captivating presentations, Jobs always practiced his presentations down to the last detail. From building on a central theme to demonstrating enthusiasm, here’s how you can present like Jobs.
Best Jobs Quotes to Live By
No advice is better than advice straight from the source. Check out some of Jobs’ most prolific words to live by:
Innovation Secrets of Steve
Your passion is everything that you need in order to innovate. That’s one of the principles Jobs lived by as he set to create products that changed the world. This deck by author Carmine Gallo details just how Jobs achieved his success:
Source:https://blog.slideshare.net
TECH/SOCMD/GralInt-Social Media Secrets
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Secrets to Snapchat
Snapchat has recently been adding features to transform itself into a social platform that goes beyond just disappearing photos. With all these new features in place, how exactly do you take advantage of the app that has 100 million active monthly users — 71% of whom are under 25 years of age? From using hidden colors to enlarging emoticons, there are a few tricks for engaging the Snapchat audience, which social media pro Gary Vaynerchuk reveals:
Our Recipe for Social Media Success
You’d think a social media enterprise solutions firms would have a few tricks up their sleeve. Well, you’re right! Simplify360 reveals its 7 ingredients for social media secret sauce. Among their tips? Get on Quora, and steal fans from your competitors (it’s easier than you might think!):
How to Gain Followers — and Time
When you have more than 1.4 million followers on Twitter, you must be doing something right. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick, who have co-authored “The Art of Social Media,” share their top tips for going viral on Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and beyond:
20 Secret Features That Will Up Your Coolness Factor
Did you know that you can replace Facebook ads with cute pictures of pets? Or find out who’s unfollowed you on Twitter? Hubspot reveals 20 secret features on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest:
Source:https://blog.slideshare.net
Secrets to Snapchat
Snapchat has recently been adding features to transform itself into a social platform that goes beyond just disappearing photos. With all these new features in place, how exactly do you take advantage of the app that has 100 million active monthly users — 71% of whom are under 25 years of age? From using hidden colors to enlarging emoticons, there are a few tricks for engaging the Snapchat audience, which social media pro Gary Vaynerchuk reveals:
Our Recipe for Social Media Success
You’d think a social media enterprise solutions firms would have a few tricks up their sleeve. Well, you’re right! Simplify360 reveals its 7 ingredients for social media secret sauce. Among their tips? Get on Quora, and steal fans from your competitors (it’s easier than you might think!):
How to Gain Followers — and Time
When you have more than 1.4 million followers on Twitter, you must be doing something right. Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick, who have co-authored “The Art of Social Media,” share their top tips for going viral on Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and beyond:
20 Secret Features That Will Up Your Coolness Factor
Did you know that you can replace Facebook ads with cute pictures of pets? Or find out who’s unfollowed you on Twitter? Hubspot reveals 20 secret features on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest:
20 Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Pinterest Features You Didn't Know Existed (But Totally Should) from HubSpot
Source:https://blog.slideshare.net
POL/SOC/GralInt-TED Talks-Severine Autesserre: To solve mass violence, look to locals
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Severine Autesserre:
To solve mass violence, look to locals
TEDGlobal 2014 · Filmed Oct 2014
Severine Autesserre studies the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is in the middle of the deadliest conflict since World War II; it's been called "the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world.” The conflict seems hopelessly, unsolvably large. But her insight from decades of listening and engaging: The conflicts are often locally based. And instead of focusing on solutions that scale to a national level, leaders and aid groups might be better served solving local crises before they ignite.
Transcript:
I want to speak about a forgotten conflict. It's a conflict that rarely hits the headlines. It happens right here, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now, most people outside of Africa don't know much about the war in Congo, so let me give you a couple of key facts. The Congolese conflict is the deadliest conflict since World War II. It has caused almost four million deaths. It has destabilized most of Central Africa for the past 18 years. It is the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world.
That's why I first went to Congo in 2001. I was a young humanitarian aid worker, and I met this woman who was my age. She was called Isabelle. Local militias had attacked Isabelle's village. They had killed many men, raped many women. They had looted everything. And then they wanted to take Isabelle, but her husband stepped in, and he said, "No, please don't take Isabelle. Take me instead." So he had gone to the forest with the militias, and Isabelle had never seen him again.
Well, it's because of people like Isabelle and her husband that I have devoted my career to studying this war that we know so little about.
Although there is one story about Congo that you may have heard. It's a story about minerals and rape. Policy statements and media reports both usually focus on a primary cause of violence in Congo -- the illegal exploitation and trafficking of natural resources -- and on a main consequence -- sexual abuse of women and girls as a weapon of war.
So, not that these two issues aren't important and tragic. They are. But today I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you a story that emphasizes a core cause of the ongoing conflict. Violence in Congo is in large part driven by local bottom-up conflicts that international peace efforts have failed to help address.
The story starts from the fact that not only is Congo notable for being the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis, but it is also home to some of the largest international peacebuilding efforts in the world. Congo hosts the largest and most expensive United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. It was also the site of the first European-led peacekeeping mission, and for its first cases ever, the International Criminal Court chose to prosecute Congolese warlords. In 2006, when Congo held the first free national elections in its history, many observers thought that an end to violence in the region had finally come. The international community lauded the successful organization of these elections as finally an example of successful international intervention in a failed state.
But the eastern provinces have continued to face massive population displacements and horrific human rights violations. Shortly before I went back there last summer, there was a horrible massacre in the province of South Kivu. Thirty-three people were killed. They were mostly women and children, and many of them were hacked to death. During the past eight years, fighting in the eastern provinces has regularly reignited full-scale civil and international war. So basically, every time we feel that we are on the brink of peace, the conflict explodes again.
Why? Why have the massive international efforts failed to help Congo achieve lasting peace and security? Well, my answer to this question revolves around two central observations. First, one of the main reasons for the continuation of violence in Congo is fundamentally local -- and when I say local, I really mean at the level of the individual, the family, the clan, the municipality, the community, the district, sometimes the ethnic group. For instance, you remember the story of Isabelle that I told you. Well, the reason why militias had attacked Isabelle's village was because they wanted to take the land that the villagers needed to cultivate food and to survive.
The second central observation is that international peace efforts have failed to help address local conflicts because of the presence of a dominant peacebuilding culture. So what I mean is that Western and African diplomats, United Nations peacekeepers, donors, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations that work with the resolution of conflict, they all share a specific way of seeing the world. And I was one of these people, and I shared this culture, so I know all too well how powerful it is. Throughout the world, and throughout conflict zones, this common culture shapes the intervener's understanding of the causes of violence as something that is primarily located in the national and international spheres. It shapes our understanding of the path toward peace as something again that requires top-down intervention to address national and international tensions. And it shapes our understanding of the roles of foreign actors as engaging in national and international peace processes. Even more importantly, this common culture enables international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level tensions that often jeopardize the macro-level settlements.
So for instance, in Congo, because of how they are socialized and trained, United Nations officials, donors, diplomats, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations, they interpret continued fighting and massacres as a top-down problem. To them, the violence they see is the consequence of tensions between President Kabila and various national opponents, and tensions between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. In addition, these international peacebuilders view local conflicts as simply the result of national and international tensions, insufficient state authority, and what they call the Congolese people's so-called inherent penchant for violence.
The dominant culture also constructs intervention at the national and international levels as the only natural and legitimate task for United Nations staffers and diplomats. And it elevates the organization of general elections, which is now a sort of cure-all, as the most crucial state reconstruction mechanism over more effective state-building approaches. And that happens not only in Congo but also in many other conflict zones.
But let's dig deeper, into the other main sources of violence. In Congo, continuing violence is motivated not only by the national and international causes but also by longstanding bottom-up agendas whose main instigators are villagers, traditional chiefs, community chiefs or ethnic leaders. Many conflicts revolve around political, social and economic stakes that are distinctively local. For instance, there is a lot of competition at the village or district level over who can be chief of village or chief of territory according to traditional law, and who can control the distribution of land and the exploitation of local mining sites. This competition often results in localized fighting, for instance in one village or territory, and quite frequently, it escalates into generalized fighting, so across a whole province, and even at times into neighboring countries.
Take the conflict between Congolese of Rwandan descent and the so-called indigenous communities of the Kivus. This conflict started in the 1930s during Belgian colonization, when both communities competed over access to land and to local power. Then, in 1960, after Congolese independence, it escalated because each camp tried to align with national politicians, but still to advance their local agendas. And then, at the time of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, these local actors allied with Congolese and Rwandan armed groups, but still to advance their local agendas in the provinces of the Kivus. And since then, these local disputes over land and local power have fueled violence, and they have regularly jeopardized the national and international settlements.
So we can wonder why in these circumstances the international peacebuilders have failed to help implement local peacebuilding programs. And the answer is that international interveners deem the resolution of grassroots conflict an unimportant, unfamiliar, and illegitimate task. The very idea of becoming involved at the local level clashes fundamentally with existing cultural norms, and it threatens key organizational interests. For instance, the very identity of the United Nations as this macro-level diplomatic organization would be upended if it were to refocus on local conflicts. And the result is that neither the internal resistance to the dominant ways of working nor the external shocks have managed to convince international actors that they should reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention. And so far, there have been only very few exceptions. There have been exceptions, but only very few exceptions, to this broad pattern.
So to wrap up, the story I just told you is a story about how a dominant peacebuilding culture shapes the intervener's understanding of what the causes of violence are, how peace is made, and what interventions should accomplish. These understandings enable international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level foundations that are so necessary for sustainable peace. The resulting inattention to local conflicts leads to inadequate peacebuilding in the short term and potential war resumption in the long term. And what's fascinating is that this analysis helps us to better understand many cases of lasting conflict and international intervention failures, in Africa and elsewhere. Local conflicts fuel violence in most war and post-war environments, from Afghanistan to Sudan to Timor-Leste, and in the rare cases where there have been comprehensive, bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives, these attempts have been successful at making peace sustainable. One of the best examples is the contrast between the relatively peaceful situation in Somaliland, which benefited from sustained grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, and the violence prevalent in the rest of Somalia, where peacebuilding has been mostly top-down. And there are several other cases in which local, grassroots conflict resolution has made a crucial difference.
So if we want international peacebuilding to work, in addition to any top-down intervention, conflicts must be resolved from the bottom up. And again, it's not that national and international tensions don't matter. They do. And it's not that national and international peacebuilding isn't necessary. It is. Instead, it is that both macro-level and micro-level peacebuilding are needed to make peace sustainable, and local nongovernmental organizations, local authorities and civil society representatives should be the main actors in the bottom-up process.
So of course, there are obstacles. Local actors often lack the funding and sometimes the logistical means and the technical capacity to implement effective, local peacebuilding programs. So international actors should expand their funding and support for local conflict resolution.
As for Congo, what can be done? After two decades of conflict and the deaths of millions, it's clear that we need to change our approach. Based on my field research, I believe that international and Congolese actors should pay more attention to the resolution of land conflict and the promotion of inter-community reconciliation. So for instance, in the province of the Kivus, the Life and Peace Institute and its Congolese partners have set up inter-community forums to discuss the specifics of local conflicts over land, and these forums have found solutions to help manage the violence. That's the kind of program that is sorely needed throughout eastern Congo. It's with programs like this that we can help people like Isabelle and her husband.
So these will not be magic wands, but because they take into account deeply rooted causes of the violence, they could definitely be game-changers.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Severine Autesserre:
To solve mass violence, look to locals
TEDGlobal 2014 · Filmed Oct 2014
Severine Autesserre studies the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is in the middle of the deadliest conflict since World War II; it's been called "the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world.” The conflict seems hopelessly, unsolvably large. But her insight from decades of listening and engaging: The conflicts are often locally based. And instead of focusing on solutions that scale to a national level, leaders and aid groups might be better served solving local crises before they ignite.
Transcript:
I want to speak about a forgotten conflict. It's a conflict that rarely hits the headlines. It happens right here, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now, most people outside of Africa don't know much about the war in Congo, so let me give you a couple of key facts. The Congolese conflict is the deadliest conflict since World War II. It has caused almost four million deaths. It has destabilized most of Central Africa for the past 18 years. It is the largest ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world.
That's why I first went to Congo in 2001. I was a young humanitarian aid worker, and I met this woman who was my age. She was called Isabelle. Local militias had attacked Isabelle's village. They had killed many men, raped many women. They had looted everything. And then they wanted to take Isabelle, but her husband stepped in, and he said, "No, please don't take Isabelle. Take me instead." So he had gone to the forest with the militias, and Isabelle had never seen him again.
Well, it's because of people like Isabelle and her husband that I have devoted my career to studying this war that we know so little about.
Although there is one story about Congo that you may have heard. It's a story about minerals and rape. Policy statements and media reports both usually focus on a primary cause of violence in Congo -- the illegal exploitation and trafficking of natural resources -- and on a main consequence -- sexual abuse of women and girls as a weapon of war.
So, not that these two issues aren't important and tragic. They are. But today I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you a story that emphasizes a core cause of the ongoing conflict. Violence in Congo is in large part driven by local bottom-up conflicts that international peace efforts have failed to help address.
The story starts from the fact that not only is Congo notable for being the world's worst ongoing humanitarian crisis, but it is also home to some of the largest international peacebuilding efforts in the world. Congo hosts the largest and most expensive United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. It was also the site of the first European-led peacekeeping mission, and for its first cases ever, the International Criminal Court chose to prosecute Congolese warlords. In 2006, when Congo held the first free national elections in its history, many observers thought that an end to violence in the region had finally come. The international community lauded the successful organization of these elections as finally an example of successful international intervention in a failed state.
But the eastern provinces have continued to face massive population displacements and horrific human rights violations. Shortly before I went back there last summer, there was a horrible massacre in the province of South Kivu. Thirty-three people were killed. They were mostly women and children, and many of them were hacked to death. During the past eight years, fighting in the eastern provinces has regularly reignited full-scale civil and international war. So basically, every time we feel that we are on the brink of peace, the conflict explodes again.
Why? Why have the massive international efforts failed to help Congo achieve lasting peace and security? Well, my answer to this question revolves around two central observations. First, one of the main reasons for the continuation of violence in Congo is fundamentally local -- and when I say local, I really mean at the level of the individual, the family, the clan, the municipality, the community, the district, sometimes the ethnic group. For instance, you remember the story of Isabelle that I told you. Well, the reason why militias had attacked Isabelle's village was because they wanted to take the land that the villagers needed to cultivate food and to survive.
The second central observation is that international peace efforts have failed to help address local conflicts because of the presence of a dominant peacebuilding culture. So what I mean is that Western and African diplomats, United Nations peacekeepers, donors, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations that work with the resolution of conflict, they all share a specific way of seeing the world. And I was one of these people, and I shared this culture, so I know all too well how powerful it is. Throughout the world, and throughout conflict zones, this common culture shapes the intervener's understanding of the causes of violence as something that is primarily located in the national and international spheres. It shapes our understanding of the path toward peace as something again that requires top-down intervention to address national and international tensions. And it shapes our understanding of the roles of foreign actors as engaging in national and international peace processes. Even more importantly, this common culture enables international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level tensions that often jeopardize the macro-level settlements.
So for instance, in Congo, because of how they are socialized and trained, United Nations officials, donors, diplomats, the staff of most nongovernmental organizations, they interpret continued fighting and massacres as a top-down problem. To them, the violence they see is the consequence of tensions between President Kabila and various national opponents, and tensions between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. In addition, these international peacebuilders view local conflicts as simply the result of national and international tensions, insufficient state authority, and what they call the Congolese people's so-called inherent penchant for violence.
The dominant culture also constructs intervention at the national and international levels as the only natural and legitimate task for United Nations staffers and diplomats. And it elevates the organization of general elections, which is now a sort of cure-all, as the most crucial state reconstruction mechanism over more effective state-building approaches. And that happens not only in Congo but also in many other conflict zones.
But let's dig deeper, into the other main sources of violence. In Congo, continuing violence is motivated not only by the national and international causes but also by longstanding bottom-up agendas whose main instigators are villagers, traditional chiefs, community chiefs or ethnic leaders. Many conflicts revolve around political, social and economic stakes that are distinctively local. For instance, there is a lot of competition at the village or district level over who can be chief of village or chief of territory according to traditional law, and who can control the distribution of land and the exploitation of local mining sites. This competition often results in localized fighting, for instance in one village or territory, and quite frequently, it escalates into generalized fighting, so across a whole province, and even at times into neighboring countries.
Take the conflict between Congolese of Rwandan descent and the so-called indigenous communities of the Kivus. This conflict started in the 1930s during Belgian colonization, when both communities competed over access to land and to local power. Then, in 1960, after Congolese independence, it escalated because each camp tried to align with national politicians, but still to advance their local agendas. And then, at the time of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, these local actors allied with Congolese and Rwandan armed groups, but still to advance their local agendas in the provinces of the Kivus. And since then, these local disputes over land and local power have fueled violence, and they have regularly jeopardized the national and international settlements.
So we can wonder why in these circumstances the international peacebuilders have failed to help implement local peacebuilding programs. And the answer is that international interveners deem the resolution of grassroots conflict an unimportant, unfamiliar, and illegitimate task. The very idea of becoming involved at the local level clashes fundamentally with existing cultural norms, and it threatens key organizational interests. For instance, the very identity of the United Nations as this macro-level diplomatic organization would be upended if it were to refocus on local conflicts. And the result is that neither the internal resistance to the dominant ways of working nor the external shocks have managed to convince international actors that they should reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention. And so far, there have been only very few exceptions. There have been exceptions, but only very few exceptions, to this broad pattern.
So to wrap up, the story I just told you is a story about how a dominant peacebuilding culture shapes the intervener's understanding of what the causes of violence are, how peace is made, and what interventions should accomplish. These understandings enable international peacebuilders to ignore the micro-level foundations that are so necessary for sustainable peace. The resulting inattention to local conflicts leads to inadequate peacebuilding in the short term and potential war resumption in the long term. And what's fascinating is that this analysis helps us to better understand many cases of lasting conflict and international intervention failures, in Africa and elsewhere. Local conflicts fuel violence in most war and post-war environments, from Afghanistan to Sudan to Timor-Leste, and in the rare cases where there have been comprehensive, bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives, these attempts have been successful at making peace sustainable. One of the best examples is the contrast between the relatively peaceful situation in Somaliland, which benefited from sustained grassroots peacebuilding initiatives, and the violence prevalent in the rest of Somalia, where peacebuilding has been mostly top-down. And there are several other cases in which local, grassroots conflict resolution has made a crucial difference.
So if we want international peacebuilding to work, in addition to any top-down intervention, conflicts must be resolved from the bottom up. And again, it's not that national and international tensions don't matter. They do. And it's not that national and international peacebuilding isn't necessary. It is. Instead, it is that both macro-level and micro-level peacebuilding are needed to make peace sustainable, and local nongovernmental organizations, local authorities and civil society representatives should be the main actors in the bottom-up process.
So of course, there are obstacles. Local actors often lack the funding and sometimes the logistical means and the technical capacity to implement effective, local peacebuilding programs. So international actors should expand their funding and support for local conflict resolution.
As for Congo, what can be done? After two decades of conflict and the deaths of millions, it's clear that we need to change our approach. Based on my field research, I believe that international and Congolese actors should pay more attention to the resolution of land conflict and the promotion of inter-community reconciliation. So for instance, in the province of the Kivus, the Life and Peace Institute and its Congolese partners have set up inter-community forums to discuss the specifics of local conflicts over land, and these forums have found solutions to help manage the violence. That's the kind of program that is sorely needed throughout eastern Congo. It's with programs like this that we can help people like Isabelle and her husband.
So these will not be magic wands, but because they take into account deeply rooted causes of the violence, they could definitely be game-changers.
Thank you.
(Applause)
TECH/SC/GralInt-TED Talks-Miguel Nicolelis: Brain-to-brain communication has arrived. How we did it
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed October 2014 at TEDGlobal 2014
Miguel Nicolelis: Brain-to-brain communication has arrived. How we did it
You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and monkeys, for now) to send messages brain to brain. Watch to the end for an experiment that, as he says, will go to "the limit of your imagination."
Transcript:
On June 12, 2014, precisely at 3:33 in a balmy winter afternoon in São Paulo, Brazil, a typical South American winter afternoon, this kid, this young man that you see celebrating here like he had scored a goal, Juliano Pinto, 29 years old, accomplished a magnificent deed. Despite being paralyzed and not having any sensation from mid-chest to the tip of his toes as the result of a car crash six years ago that killed his brother and produced a complete spinal cord lesion that left Juliano in a wheelchair, Juliano rose to the occasion, and on this day did something that pretty much everybody that saw him in the six years deemed impossible. Juliano Pinto delivered the opening kick of the 2014 Brazilian World Soccer Cup here just by thinking. He could not move his body, but he could imagine the movements needed to kick a ball. He was an athlete before the lesion. He's a para-athlete right now. He's going to be in the Paralympic Games, I hope, in a couple years. But what the spinal cord lesion did not rob from Juliano was his ability to dream. And dream he did that afternoon, for a stadium of about 75,000 people and an audience of close to a billion watching on TV.
And that kick crowned, basically, 30 years of basic research studying how the brain, how this amazing universe that we have between our ears that is only comparable to universe that we have above our head because it has about 100 billion elements talking to each other through electrical brainstorms, what Juliano accomplished took 30 years to imagine in laboratories and about 15 years to plan.
When John Chapin and I, 15 years ago, proposed in a paper that we would build something that we called a brain-machine interface, meaning connecting a brain to devices so that animals and humans could just move these devices, no matter how far they are from their own bodies, just by imagining what they want to do, our colleagues told us that we actually needed professional help, of the psychiatry variety. And despite that, a Scot and a Brazilian persevered, because that's how we were raised in our respective countries, and for 12, 15 years, we made demonstration after demonstration suggesting that this was possible.
And a brain-machine interface is not rocket science, it's just brain research. It's nothing but using sensors to read the electrical brainstorms that a brain is producing to generate the motor commands that have to be downloaded to the spinal cord, so we projected sensors that can read hundreds and now thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating to actually make us move into space. And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command. By sensorizing these devices with lots of different types of sensors, as you are going to see in a moment, we actually sent messages back to the brain to confirm that that voluntary motor will was being enacted, no matter where -- next to the subject, next door, or across the planet. And as this message gave feedback back to the brain, the brain realized its goal: to make us move. So this is just one experiment that we published a few years ago, where a monkey, without moving its body, learned to control the movements of an avatar arm, a virtual arm that doesn't exist. What you're listening to is the sound of the brain of this monkey as it explores three different visually identical spheres in virtual space. And to get a reward, a drop of orange juice that monkeys love, this animal has to detect, select one of these objects by touching, not by seeing it, by touching it, because every time this virtual hand touches one of the objects, an electrical pulse goes back to the brain of the animal describing the fine texture of the surface of this object, so the animal can judge what is the correct object that he has to grab, and if he does that, he gets a reward without moving a muscle. The perfect Brazilian lunch: not moving a muscle and getting your orange juice.
So as we saw this happening, we actually came and proposed the idea that we had published 15 years ago. We reenacted this paper. We got it out of the drawers, and we proposed that perhaps we could get a human being that is paralyzed to actually use the brain-machine interface to regain mobility. The idea was that if you suffered -- and that can happen to any one of us. Let me tell you, it's very sudden. It's a millisecond of a collision, a car accident that transforms your life completely. If you have a complete lesion of the spinal cord, you cannot move because your brainstorms cannot reach your muscles. However, your brainstorms continue to be generated in your head. Paraplegic, quadriplegic patients dream about moving every night. They have that inside their head. The problem is how to get that code out of it and make the movement be created again.
So what we proposed was, let's create a new body. Let's create a robotic vest. And that's exactly why Juliano could kick that ball just by thinking, because he was wearing the first brain-controlled robotic vest that can be used by paraplegic, quadriplegic patients to move and to regain feedback.
That was the original idea, 15 years ago. What I'm going to show you is how 156 people from 25 countries all over the five continents of this beautiful Earth, dropped their lives, dropped their patents, dropped their dogs, wives, kids, school, jobs, and congregated to come to Brazil for 18 months to actually get this done. Because a couple years after Brazil was awarded the World Cup, we heard that the Brazilian government wanted to do something meaningful in the opening ceremony in the country that reinvented and perfected soccer until we met the Germans, of course. (Laughter) But that's a different talk, and a different neuroscientist needs to talk about that. But what Brazil wanted to do is to showcase a completely different country, a country that values science and technology, and can give a gift to millions, 25 million people around the world that cannot move any longer because of a spinal cord injury. Well, we went to the Brazilian government and to FIFA and proposed, well, let's have the kickoff of the 2014 World Cup be given by a Brazilian paraplegic using a brain-controlled exoskeleton that allows him to kick the ball and to feel the contact of the ball. They looked at us, thought that we were completely nuts, and said, "Okay, let's try." We had 18 months to do everything from zero, from scratch. We had no exoskeleton, we had no patients, we had nothing done. These people came all together and in 18 months, we got eight patients in a routine of training and basically built from nothing this guy, that we call Bra-Santos Dumont 1. The first brain-controlled exoskeleton to be built was named after the most famous Brazilian scientist ever, Alberto Santos Dumont, who, on October 19, 1901, created and flew himself the first controlled airship on air in Paris for a million people to see. Sorry, my American friends, I live in North Carolina, but it was two years before the Wright Brothers flew on the coast of North Carolina. (Applause) Flight control is Brazilian. (Laughter)
So we went together with these guys and we basically put this exoskeleton together, 15 degrees of freedom, hydraulic machine that can be commanded by brain signals recorded by a non-invasive technology called electroencephalography that can basically allow the patient to imagine the movements and send his commands to the controls, the motors, and get it done. This exoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, one of my greatest friends, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt. It is a smart shirt with micro-vibrating elements that basically delivers the feedback and fools the patient's brain by creating a sensation that it is not a machine that is carrying him, but it is he who is walking again.
So we got this going, and what you'll see here is the first time one of our patients, Bruno, actually walked. And he takes a few seconds because we are setting everything, and you are going to see a blue light cutting in front of the helmet because Bruno is going to imagine the movement that needs to be performed, the computer is going to analyze it, Bruno is going to certify it, and when it is certified, the device starts moving under the command of Bruno's brain. And he just got it right, and now he starts walking. After nine years without being able to move, he is walking by himself. And more than that -- (Applause) -- more than just walking, he is feeling the ground, and if the speed of the exo goes up, he tells us that he is walking again on the sand of Santos, the beach resort where he used to go before he had the accident. That's why the brain is creating a new sensation in Bruno's head.
So he walks, and at the end of the walk -- I am running out of time already -- he says, "You know, guys, I need to borrow this thing from you when I get married, because I wanted to walk to the priest and see my bride and actually be there by myself. Of course, he will have it whenever he wants.
And this is what we wanted to show during the World Cup, and couldn't, because for some mysterious reason, FIFA cut its broadcast in half. What you are going to see very quickly is Juliano Pinto in the exo doing the kick a few minutes before we went to the pitch and did the real thing in front of the entire crowd, and the lights you are going to see just describe the operation. Basically, the blue lights pulsating indicate that the exo is ready to go. It can receive thoughts and it can deliver feedback, and when Juliano makes the decision to kick the ball, you are going to see two streams of green and yellow light coming from the helmet and going to the legs, representing the mental commands that were taken by the exo to actually make that happen. And in basically 13 seconds, Juliano actually did. You can see the commands. He gets ready, the ball is set, and he kicks. And the most amazing thing is, 10 seconds after he did that, and looked at us on the pitch, he told us, celebrating as you saw, "I felt the ball." And that's priceless. (Applause)
So where is this going to go? I have two minutes to tell you that it's going to the limits of your imagination. Brain-actuating technology is here. This is the latest: We just published this a year ago, the first brain-to-brain interface that allows two animals to exchange mental messages so that one animal that sees something coming from the environment can send a mental SMS, a torpedo, a neurophysiological torpedo, to the second animal, and the second animal performs the act that he needed to perform without ever knowing what the environment was sending as a message, because the message came from the first animal's brain.
So this is the first demo. I'm going to be very quick because I want to show you the latest. But what you see here is the first rat getting informed by a light that is going to show up on the left of the cage that he has to press the left cage to basically get a reward. He goes there and does it. And the same time, he is sending a mental message to the second rat that didn't see any light, and the second rat, in 70 percent of the times is going to press the left lever and get a reward without ever experiencing the light in the retina.
Well, we took this to a little higher limit by getting monkeys to collaborate mentally in a brain net, basically to donate their brain activity and combine them to move the virtual arm that I showed you before, and what you see here is the first time the two monkeys combine their brains, synchronize their brains perfectly to get this virtual arm to move. One monkey is controlling the x dimension, the other monkey is controlling the y dimension. But it gets a little more interesting when you get three monkeys in there and you ask one monkey to control x and y, the other monkey to control y and z, and the third one to control x and z, and you make them all play the game together, moving the arm in 3D into a target to get the famous Brazilian orange juice. And they actually do. The black dot is the average of all these brains working in parallel, in real time. That is the definition of a biological computer, interacting by brain activity and achieving a motor goal.
Where is this going? We have no idea. We're just scientists. (Laughter) We are paid to be children, to basically go to the edge and discover what is out there. But one thing I know: One day, in a few decades, when our grandchildren surf the Net just by thinking, or a mother donates her eyesight to an autistic kid who cannot see, or somebody speaks because of a brain-to-brain bypass, some of you will remember that it all started on a winter afternoon in a Brazilian soccer field with an impossible kick.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Bruno Giussani: Miguel, thank you for sticking to your time. I actually would have given you a couple more minutes, because there are a couple of points we want to develop, and, of course, clearly it seems that we need connected brains to figure out where this is going. So let's connect all this together. So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the monkeys is actually getting a signal and the other monkey is reacting to that signal just because the first one is receiving it and transmitting the neurological impulse.
Miguel Nicolelis: No, it's a little different. No monkey knows of the existence of the other two monkeys. They are getting a visual feedback in 2D, but the task they have to accomplish is 3D. They have to move an arm in three dimensions. But each monkey is only getting the two dimensions on the video screen that the monkey controls. And to get that thing done, you need at least two monkeys to synchronize their brains, but the ideal is three. So what we found out is that when one monkey starts slacking down, the other two monkeys enhance their performance to get the guy to come back, so this adjusts dynamically, but the global synchrony remains the same. Now, if you flip without telling the monkey the dimensions that each brain has to control, like this guy is controlling x and y, but he should be controlling now y and z, instantaneously, that animal's brain forgets about the old dimensions and it starts concentrating on the new dimensions. So what I need to say is that no Turing machine, no computer can predict what a brain net will do. So we will absorb technology as part of us. Technology will never absorb us. It's simply impossible.
BG: How many times have you tested this? And how many times have you succeeded versus failed?
MN: Oh, tens of times. With the three monkeys? Oh, several times. I wouldn't be able to talk about this here unless I had done it a few times. And I forgot to mention, because of time, that just three weeks ago, a European group just demonstrated the first man-to-man brain-to-brain connection. BG: And how does that play? MN: There was one bit of information -- big ideas start in a humble way -- but basically the brain activity of one subject was transmitted to a second object, all non-invasive technology. So the first subject got a message, like our rats, a visual message, and transmitted it to the second subject. The second subject received a magnetic pulse in the visual cortex, or a different pulse, two different pulses. In one pulse, the subject saw something. On the other pulse, he saw something different. And he was able to verbally indicate what was the message the first subject was sending through the Internet across continents.
Moderator: Wow. Okay, that's where we are going. That's the next TED Talk at the next conference. Miguel Nicolelis, thank you. MN: Thank you, Bruno. Thank you.
Filmed October 2014 at TEDGlobal 2014
Miguel Nicolelis: Brain-to-brain communication has arrived. How we did it
You may remember neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis — he built the brain-controlled exoskeleton that allowed a paralyzed man to kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup. What’s he working on now? Building ways for two minds (rats and monkeys, for now) to send messages brain to brain. Watch to the end for an experiment that, as he says, will go to "the limit of your imagination."
Transcript:
On June 12, 2014, precisely at 3:33 in a balmy winter afternoon in São Paulo, Brazil, a typical South American winter afternoon, this kid, this young man that you see celebrating here like he had scored a goal, Juliano Pinto, 29 years old, accomplished a magnificent deed. Despite being paralyzed and not having any sensation from mid-chest to the tip of his toes as the result of a car crash six years ago that killed his brother and produced a complete spinal cord lesion that left Juliano in a wheelchair, Juliano rose to the occasion, and on this day did something that pretty much everybody that saw him in the six years deemed impossible. Juliano Pinto delivered the opening kick of the 2014 Brazilian World Soccer Cup here just by thinking. He could not move his body, but he could imagine the movements needed to kick a ball. He was an athlete before the lesion. He's a para-athlete right now. He's going to be in the Paralympic Games, I hope, in a couple years. But what the spinal cord lesion did not rob from Juliano was his ability to dream. And dream he did that afternoon, for a stadium of about 75,000 people and an audience of close to a billion watching on TV.
And that kick crowned, basically, 30 years of basic research studying how the brain, how this amazing universe that we have between our ears that is only comparable to universe that we have above our head because it has about 100 billion elements talking to each other through electrical brainstorms, what Juliano accomplished took 30 years to imagine in laboratories and about 15 years to plan.
When John Chapin and I, 15 years ago, proposed in a paper that we would build something that we called a brain-machine interface, meaning connecting a brain to devices so that animals and humans could just move these devices, no matter how far they are from their own bodies, just by imagining what they want to do, our colleagues told us that we actually needed professional help, of the psychiatry variety. And despite that, a Scot and a Brazilian persevered, because that's how we were raised in our respective countries, and for 12, 15 years, we made demonstration after demonstration suggesting that this was possible.
And a brain-machine interface is not rocket science, it's just brain research. It's nothing but using sensors to read the electrical brainstorms that a brain is producing to generate the motor commands that have to be downloaded to the spinal cord, so we projected sensors that can read hundreds and now thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating to actually make us move into space. And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command. By sensorizing these devices with lots of different types of sensors, as you are going to see in a moment, we actually sent messages back to the brain to confirm that that voluntary motor will was being enacted, no matter where -- next to the subject, next door, or across the planet. And as this message gave feedback back to the brain, the brain realized its goal: to make us move. So this is just one experiment that we published a few years ago, where a monkey, without moving its body, learned to control the movements of an avatar arm, a virtual arm that doesn't exist. What you're listening to is the sound of the brain of this monkey as it explores three different visually identical spheres in virtual space. And to get a reward, a drop of orange juice that monkeys love, this animal has to detect, select one of these objects by touching, not by seeing it, by touching it, because every time this virtual hand touches one of the objects, an electrical pulse goes back to the brain of the animal describing the fine texture of the surface of this object, so the animal can judge what is the correct object that he has to grab, and if he does that, he gets a reward without moving a muscle. The perfect Brazilian lunch: not moving a muscle and getting your orange juice.
So as we saw this happening, we actually came and proposed the idea that we had published 15 years ago. We reenacted this paper. We got it out of the drawers, and we proposed that perhaps we could get a human being that is paralyzed to actually use the brain-machine interface to regain mobility. The idea was that if you suffered -- and that can happen to any one of us. Let me tell you, it's very sudden. It's a millisecond of a collision, a car accident that transforms your life completely. If you have a complete lesion of the spinal cord, you cannot move because your brainstorms cannot reach your muscles. However, your brainstorms continue to be generated in your head. Paraplegic, quadriplegic patients dream about moving every night. They have that inside their head. The problem is how to get that code out of it and make the movement be created again.
So what we proposed was, let's create a new body. Let's create a robotic vest. And that's exactly why Juliano could kick that ball just by thinking, because he was wearing the first brain-controlled robotic vest that can be used by paraplegic, quadriplegic patients to move and to regain feedback.
That was the original idea, 15 years ago. What I'm going to show you is how 156 people from 25 countries all over the five continents of this beautiful Earth, dropped their lives, dropped their patents, dropped their dogs, wives, kids, school, jobs, and congregated to come to Brazil for 18 months to actually get this done. Because a couple years after Brazil was awarded the World Cup, we heard that the Brazilian government wanted to do something meaningful in the opening ceremony in the country that reinvented and perfected soccer until we met the Germans, of course. (Laughter) But that's a different talk, and a different neuroscientist needs to talk about that. But what Brazil wanted to do is to showcase a completely different country, a country that values science and technology, and can give a gift to millions, 25 million people around the world that cannot move any longer because of a spinal cord injury. Well, we went to the Brazilian government and to FIFA and proposed, well, let's have the kickoff of the 2014 World Cup be given by a Brazilian paraplegic using a brain-controlled exoskeleton that allows him to kick the ball and to feel the contact of the ball. They looked at us, thought that we were completely nuts, and said, "Okay, let's try." We had 18 months to do everything from zero, from scratch. We had no exoskeleton, we had no patients, we had nothing done. These people came all together and in 18 months, we got eight patients in a routine of training and basically built from nothing this guy, that we call Bra-Santos Dumont 1. The first brain-controlled exoskeleton to be built was named after the most famous Brazilian scientist ever, Alberto Santos Dumont, who, on October 19, 1901, created and flew himself the first controlled airship on air in Paris for a million people to see. Sorry, my American friends, I live in North Carolina, but it was two years before the Wright Brothers flew on the coast of North Carolina. (Applause) Flight control is Brazilian. (Laughter)
So we went together with these guys and we basically put this exoskeleton together, 15 degrees of freedom, hydraulic machine that can be commanded by brain signals recorded by a non-invasive technology called electroencephalography that can basically allow the patient to imagine the movements and send his commands to the controls, the motors, and get it done. This exoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, one of my greatest friends, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt. It is a smart shirt with micro-vibrating elements that basically delivers the feedback and fools the patient's brain by creating a sensation that it is not a machine that is carrying him, but it is he who is walking again.
So we got this going, and what you'll see here is the first time one of our patients, Bruno, actually walked. And he takes a few seconds because we are setting everything, and you are going to see a blue light cutting in front of the helmet because Bruno is going to imagine the movement that needs to be performed, the computer is going to analyze it, Bruno is going to certify it, and when it is certified, the device starts moving under the command of Bruno's brain. And he just got it right, and now he starts walking. After nine years without being able to move, he is walking by himself. And more than that -- (Applause) -- more than just walking, he is feeling the ground, and if the speed of the exo goes up, he tells us that he is walking again on the sand of Santos, the beach resort where he used to go before he had the accident. That's why the brain is creating a new sensation in Bruno's head.
So he walks, and at the end of the walk -- I am running out of time already -- he says, "You know, guys, I need to borrow this thing from you when I get married, because I wanted to walk to the priest and see my bride and actually be there by myself. Of course, he will have it whenever he wants.
And this is what we wanted to show during the World Cup, and couldn't, because for some mysterious reason, FIFA cut its broadcast in half. What you are going to see very quickly is Juliano Pinto in the exo doing the kick a few minutes before we went to the pitch and did the real thing in front of the entire crowd, and the lights you are going to see just describe the operation. Basically, the blue lights pulsating indicate that the exo is ready to go. It can receive thoughts and it can deliver feedback, and when Juliano makes the decision to kick the ball, you are going to see two streams of green and yellow light coming from the helmet and going to the legs, representing the mental commands that were taken by the exo to actually make that happen. And in basically 13 seconds, Juliano actually did. You can see the commands. He gets ready, the ball is set, and he kicks. And the most amazing thing is, 10 seconds after he did that, and looked at us on the pitch, he told us, celebrating as you saw, "I felt the ball." And that's priceless. (Applause)
So where is this going to go? I have two minutes to tell you that it's going to the limits of your imagination. Brain-actuating technology is here. This is the latest: We just published this a year ago, the first brain-to-brain interface that allows two animals to exchange mental messages so that one animal that sees something coming from the environment can send a mental SMS, a torpedo, a neurophysiological torpedo, to the second animal, and the second animal performs the act that he needed to perform without ever knowing what the environment was sending as a message, because the message came from the first animal's brain.
So this is the first demo. I'm going to be very quick because I want to show you the latest. But what you see here is the first rat getting informed by a light that is going to show up on the left of the cage that he has to press the left cage to basically get a reward. He goes there and does it. And the same time, he is sending a mental message to the second rat that didn't see any light, and the second rat, in 70 percent of the times is going to press the left lever and get a reward without ever experiencing the light in the retina.
Well, we took this to a little higher limit by getting monkeys to collaborate mentally in a brain net, basically to donate their brain activity and combine them to move the virtual arm that I showed you before, and what you see here is the first time the two monkeys combine their brains, synchronize their brains perfectly to get this virtual arm to move. One monkey is controlling the x dimension, the other monkey is controlling the y dimension. But it gets a little more interesting when you get three monkeys in there and you ask one monkey to control x and y, the other monkey to control y and z, and the third one to control x and z, and you make them all play the game together, moving the arm in 3D into a target to get the famous Brazilian orange juice. And they actually do. The black dot is the average of all these brains working in parallel, in real time. That is the definition of a biological computer, interacting by brain activity and achieving a motor goal.
Where is this going? We have no idea. We're just scientists. (Laughter) We are paid to be children, to basically go to the edge and discover what is out there. But one thing I know: One day, in a few decades, when our grandchildren surf the Net just by thinking, or a mother donates her eyesight to an autistic kid who cannot see, or somebody speaks because of a brain-to-brain bypass, some of you will remember that it all started on a winter afternoon in a Brazilian soccer field with an impossible kick.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Bruno Giussani: Miguel, thank you for sticking to your time. I actually would have given you a couple more minutes, because there are a couple of points we want to develop, and, of course, clearly it seems that we need connected brains to figure out where this is going. So let's connect all this together. So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the monkeys is actually getting a signal and the other monkey is reacting to that signal just because the first one is receiving it and transmitting the neurological impulse.
Miguel Nicolelis: No, it's a little different. No monkey knows of the existence of the other two monkeys. They are getting a visual feedback in 2D, but the task they have to accomplish is 3D. They have to move an arm in three dimensions. But each monkey is only getting the two dimensions on the video screen that the monkey controls. And to get that thing done, you need at least two monkeys to synchronize their brains, but the ideal is three. So what we found out is that when one monkey starts slacking down, the other two monkeys enhance their performance to get the guy to come back, so this adjusts dynamically, but the global synchrony remains the same. Now, if you flip without telling the monkey the dimensions that each brain has to control, like this guy is controlling x and y, but he should be controlling now y and z, instantaneously, that animal's brain forgets about the old dimensions and it starts concentrating on the new dimensions. So what I need to say is that no Turing machine, no computer can predict what a brain net will do. So we will absorb technology as part of us. Technology will never absorb us. It's simply impossible.
BG: How many times have you tested this? And how many times have you succeeded versus failed?
MN: Oh, tens of times. With the three monkeys? Oh, several times. I wouldn't be able to talk about this here unless I had done it a few times. And I forgot to mention, because of time, that just three weeks ago, a European group just demonstrated the first man-to-man brain-to-brain connection. BG: And how does that play? MN: There was one bit of information -- big ideas start in a humble way -- but basically the brain activity of one subject was transmitted to a second object, all non-invasive technology. So the first subject got a message, like our rats, a visual message, and transmitted it to the second subject. The second subject received a magnetic pulse in the visual cortex, or a different pulse, two different pulses. In one pulse, the subject saw something. On the other pulse, he saw something different. And he was able to verbally indicate what was the message the first subject was sending through the Internet across continents.
Moderator: Wow. Okay, that's where we are going. That's the next TED Talk at the next conference. Miguel Nicolelis, thank you. MN: Thank you, Bruno. Thank you.
EDUC/SOC/GralInt-Finlandia:La formación docente, clave del suceso
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Finlandia
La formación docente, clave del suceso
Una investigación del Cippec indaga sobre la preparación y las condiciones de trabajo de los docentes argentinos, y propone estrategias inspiradas en el modelo educativo finlandés, considerado uno de los mejores del mundo
Por María Gabriela Ensinck | Para LA NACION
Niños finlandeses, a la cabeza de las pruebas de calidad educativa. Foto: EFE
Desde el año 2000, Finlandia encabeza sistemáticamente los resultados de las pruebas de calidad educativa PISA ( Program for International Student Assessment ) y su sistema de enseñanza se ha convertido en un modelo a seguir. No son el rigor ni la competencia, sino la inclusión, la creatividad y la cooperación las bases de su éxito, en el que la formación de los docentes juega un rol fundamental.
"Los docentes finlandeses deben tener 4 años de estudios universitarios más una maestría", señala Florencia Mezzadra, directora del Programa de Educación del Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (Cippec) y co- autora del libro publicado por esta entidad Apostar a la Docencia, junto a la investigadora Cecilia Veleda y con la colaboración de Belén Sánchez.
En aquel país del norte de Europa, ser maestro "es una profesión muy prestigiosa. Las universidades tienen cupos para seguir esta carrera, a la que entra el 10% de los candidatos, generalmente los mejores alumnos de los secundiarios", detalla Mezzadra.
En el libro, que fue presentado en la embajada de Finlandia en Buenos Aires, las autoras detallan algunos aspectos de la formación y las condiciones de trabajo de los docentes argentinos, y enumeran una serie de propuestas para mejorar ambos aspectos, inspiradas en la experiencia escandinava.
Uno de los problemas que señalan es "el sobredimensionamiento y la fragmentación del sistema de formación docente, constituído por más de 1200 Institutos Superiores (ISFD) a cargo de los ministerios de Educación provinciales, y 61 universidades que responden a la cartera educativa nacional.
En cuanto a las horas de formación, el promedio en la Argentina para un docente de nivel inicial o secundario es de 3600 durante 4 años (de acuerdo a una investigación de Juan Llach para la Fundación Red de Acción Política), mientras que en Finlandia se requieren 8000 horas durante 5 años.
Las comparaciones son odiosas, pero resultan ilustrativas. Los maestros finlandeses tienen una dedicación exclusiva de 25 horas semanales, con las que cubren un salario digno aunque no alto. En tanto, el promedio de horas trabajadas por sus pares argentinos para redondear un magro ingreso casi duplica ese valor, y un 33% de ellos son considerados "docentes taxi", ya que cumplen funciones en tres o más establecimientos, según revela el trabajo de Cippec.
PISTAS PARA MEJORAR
Convencidas de que más allá de las mejoras edilicias, en la infraestructura educativa y en el salario de los docentes, el factor de más impacto en la calidad de la enseñanza es la mejora en la formación de los maestros y maestras, las especialistas del Cippec enumeraron en su investigación una serie de propuestas en este sentido:
"Lo primero es prestigiar a la profesión docente, que vuelva a ser un aspiracional entre los jóvenes", destaca Mezzadra. Con este objetivo, el libro detalla algunas iniciativas como: campañas comunicacionales y concursos para visibilizar y premiar a docentes destacados.
Otra de las propuestas es crear un sistema integral de información educativa, incluyendo las trayectorias y resultados de aprendizaje de los alumnos, la oferta de equipamiento, estado edilicio, alumnos por curso, cargos y horas de clase. Si bien esta información existe, no está centralizada ni digitalizada, y en muchos casos tampoco actualizada.
La creación de un Instituto Federal de Formación Docente para unificar criterios pedagógicos y ofrecer posgrados y cursos anuales de actualización que sean tenidos en cuenta a la hora de concursar los cargos.
Disminuir el ausentismo y la rotación docente. Según el trabajo del Cippec, "el ausentismo no es una problemática generalizada en la docencia sino que parece focalizarse en algunos docentes y algunas escuelas. El uso de la información para detectar las escuelas con mayor ausentismo servirá para intervenir según las circunstancias"
Reformular el sistema de acceso a los cargos docentes, para hacerlo mediante evaluaciones, entrevistas, planificación de unidades didácticas y demostraciones de clases. Esto implicaría una reforma a los estatutos docentes y requeriría un acuerdo con los sindicatos.
Mejorar las condiciones de vida y de trabajo de los docentes, garantizando un salario digno y equitativo, con una mayor ingerencia del gobierno nacional en la política salarial.
Agilizar los trámites burocráticos como pedido de licencias, autorizaciones para salidas didácticas, que consumen tiempo productivo de los docentes.
Garantizarles el acceso a atención médica de calidad, e incentivar los docentes para que concentren horas en una misma escuela.
Apoyar a las escuelas más débiles, aquellas donde se concentra el fracaso escolar, las dificultades de aprendizaje, el ausentismo y la violencia. Y al mismo tiempo, identificar, reconocer y difundir las prácticas de las escuelas que logran buenos aprendizajes.
Por último, las investigadoras del Cippec reconocen a la incorporación de la tecnología y la educación de los nativos digitales como un gran desafío en el mediano plazo.
"Las experiencias de conectividad e inclusión digital que se llevaron a cabo tanto desde el gobierno nacional como el de la ciudad de Buenos Aires y algunas provincias como San Luis y La Rioja son muy positivas", destaca Mezzadra. "Pero aún resta trabajar mucho en la formación digital de los docentes. Porque la tecnología por sí sola no impacta en el aprendizaje, pero un maestro bien formado y actualizado sí".
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Finlandia
La formación docente, clave del suceso
Una investigación del Cippec indaga sobre la preparación y las condiciones de trabajo de los docentes argentinos, y propone estrategias inspiradas en el modelo educativo finlandés, considerado uno de los mejores del mundo
Por María Gabriela Ensinck | Para LA NACION
Niños finlandeses, a la cabeza de las pruebas de calidad educativa. Foto: EFE
Desde el año 2000, Finlandia encabeza sistemáticamente los resultados de las pruebas de calidad educativa PISA ( Program for International Student Assessment ) y su sistema de enseñanza se ha convertido en un modelo a seguir. No son el rigor ni la competencia, sino la inclusión, la creatividad y la cooperación las bases de su éxito, en el que la formación de los docentes juega un rol fundamental.
"Los docentes finlandeses deben tener 4 años de estudios universitarios más una maestría", señala Florencia Mezzadra, directora del Programa de Educación del Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento (Cippec) y co- autora del libro publicado por esta entidad Apostar a la Docencia, junto a la investigadora Cecilia Veleda y con la colaboración de Belén Sánchez.
En aquel país del norte de Europa, ser maestro "es una profesión muy prestigiosa. Las universidades tienen cupos para seguir esta carrera, a la que entra el 10% de los candidatos, generalmente los mejores alumnos de los secundiarios", detalla Mezzadra.
En el libro, que fue presentado en la embajada de Finlandia en Buenos Aires, las autoras detallan algunos aspectos de la formación y las condiciones de trabajo de los docentes argentinos, y enumeran una serie de propuestas para mejorar ambos aspectos, inspiradas en la experiencia escandinava.
Uno de los problemas que señalan es "el sobredimensionamiento y la fragmentación del sistema de formación docente, constituído por más de 1200 Institutos Superiores (ISFD) a cargo de los ministerios de Educación provinciales, y 61 universidades que responden a la cartera educativa nacional.
En cuanto a las horas de formación, el promedio en la Argentina para un docente de nivel inicial o secundario es de 3600 durante 4 años (de acuerdo a una investigación de Juan Llach para la Fundación Red de Acción Política), mientras que en Finlandia se requieren 8000 horas durante 5 años.
Las comparaciones son odiosas, pero resultan ilustrativas. Los maestros finlandeses tienen una dedicación exclusiva de 25 horas semanales, con las que cubren un salario digno aunque no alto. En tanto, el promedio de horas trabajadas por sus pares argentinos para redondear un magro ingreso casi duplica ese valor, y un 33% de ellos son considerados "docentes taxi", ya que cumplen funciones en tres o más establecimientos, según revela el trabajo de Cippec.
PISTAS PARA MEJORAR
Convencidas de que más allá de las mejoras edilicias, en la infraestructura educativa y en el salario de los docentes, el factor de más impacto en la calidad de la enseñanza es la mejora en la formación de los maestros y maestras, las especialistas del Cippec enumeraron en su investigación una serie de propuestas en este sentido:
"Lo primero es prestigiar a la profesión docente, que vuelva a ser un aspiracional entre los jóvenes", destaca Mezzadra. Con este objetivo, el libro detalla algunas iniciativas como: campañas comunicacionales y concursos para visibilizar y premiar a docentes destacados.
Otra de las propuestas es crear un sistema integral de información educativa, incluyendo las trayectorias y resultados de aprendizaje de los alumnos, la oferta de equipamiento, estado edilicio, alumnos por curso, cargos y horas de clase. Si bien esta información existe, no está centralizada ni digitalizada, y en muchos casos tampoco actualizada.
La creación de un Instituto Federal de Formación Docente para unificar criterios pedagógicos y ofrecer posgrados y cursos anuales de actualización que sean tenidos en cuenta a la hora de concursar los cargos.
Disminuir el ausentismo y la rotación docente. Según el trabajo del Cippec, "el ausentismo no es una problemática generalizada en la docencia sino que parece focalizarse en algunos docentes y algunas escuelas. El uso de la información para detectar las escuelas con mayor ausentismo servirá para intervenir según las circunstancias"
Reformular el sistema de acceso a los cargos docentes, para hacerlo mediante evaluaciones, entrevistas, planificación de unidades didácticas y demostraciones de clases. Esto implicaría una reforma a los estatutos docentes y requeriría un acuerdo con los sindicatos.
Mejorar las condiciones de vida y de trabajo de los docentes, garantizando un salario digno y equitativo, con una mayor ingerencia del gobierno nacional en la política salarial.
Agilizar los trámites burocráticos como pedido de licencias, autorizaciones para salidas didácticas, que consumen tiempo productivo de los docentes.
Garantizarles el acceso a atención médica de calidad, e incentivar los docentes para que concentren horas en una misma escuela.
Apoyar a las escuelas más débiles, aquellas donde se concentra el fracaso escolar, las dificultades de aprendizaje, el ausentismo y la violencia. Y al mismo tiempo, identificar, reconocer y difundir las prácticas de las escuelas que logran buenos aprendizajes.
Por último, las investigadoras del Cippec reconocen a la incorporación de la tecnología y la educación de los nativos digitales como un gran desafío en el mediano plazo.
"Las experiencias de conectividad e inclusión digital que se llevaron a cabo tanto desde el gobierno nacional como el de la ciudad de Buenos Aires y algunas provincias como San Luis y La Rioja son muy positivas", destaca Mezzadra. "Pero aún resta trabajar mucho en la formación digital de los docentes. Porque la tecnología por sí sola no impacta en el aprendizaje, pero un maestro bien formado y actualizado sí".
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Friday, February 6, 2015
GENEQ/BUS/GralInt-Championing gender equality in Australia
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Championing gender equality in Australia
A group of business leaders is redefining the role of men in the promotion of gender equality—and improving the environment for women leaders in their own organizations.
February 2015 | by Elizabeth Broderick, Elmer Funke Küpper, Ian Narev, and David Thodey
Introduction
Elizabeth Broderick, sex discrimination commissioner, Australian Human Rights Commission
For a long time I was firmly of the view that increasing the number of women leaders was a matter of women’s activism, and women working together. Yet while women’s activism remains critical to making progress, if you look at the levers of power in nations and in organizations, they rest in the hands of men. And to continue to rely on women alone to disrupt the status quo is really an illogical approach. I realized that unless we worked with the men in power—and helped them move from being merely interested in this subject to taking action—we wouldn’t see the transformative change we need.
This is not about men speaking for women or “saving” them. This is about men standing up beside women and saying, “The promotion of gender equality in Australia, and the world, is everyone’s business.” It should not sit on the shoulders of women alone. It’s about men accepting responsibility to create change.
So we started the group, the Male Champions of Change, by identifying a dozen powerful men in some of Australia’s most prominent organizations. I picked up the phone and rang them. The group formed from there, ultimately reaching 25, its current size.1 From the beginning, we were quite strict about participation in meetings and told the men they couldn’t send delegates. My rule was: “This is you I’m inviting, not your organization.”
The first couple of meetings were a bit awkward, as the tendency—human nature, really—was for people to talk about all the good things they were doing. Relatively quickly, though, the tone of the discussion became much more authentic and honest. “This is hard,” several admitted. “In fact, it’s the hardest thing I do as a CEO. I don’t know what the answers are; I’m trying everything but nothing seems to be working.” They all recognized that no one had the answers, but at the same time everyone agreed these were leadership issues that started with them, and that collectively, we could change things.
Actions, not talk
The group meets in person once a quarter (more often in smaller, topic-focused, “action groups”), and is a source of rich discussion, particularly at the intersection of disciplines or sectors. Putting the Chief of Army beside the head of a bank, for example, results in thought-provoking conversations about job flexibility and leadership. The fact that these men would not ordinarily come together is part of the group’s appeal, and I’ve seen a great openness to learning and curiosity there.
Besides allowing for the sharing of stories, the face-to-face meetings are critical, I think, in empowering the Male Champions to be bolder.2 Disrupting the status quo requires courageous leadership. For example, David Thodey’s initiative to make all roles flexible at Telstra is very bold. By treating flexibility as the starting point, and not the exception, he’s changing the whole nature of the conversation at his company and others. Similarly, the group took the lead on gender reporting, and because of the efforts of Elmer Funke Küpper, head of the Australian Securities Exchange and one of our Male Champions, a new reporting regime was adopted for publicly listed companies in Australia.
Recently, we’ve started looking further down the supply chain—at the idea that the group could ensure that its supply-chain partners also care about gender equality. This effort has huge potential because of the massive collective buying power of the group.
The Male Champions also demonstrate strong and visible leadership outside their organizations. They speak at more than 1,000 events a year, and they recognize that women’s voices are often poorly represented. The practical action they have all taken is a “panel pledge” to ask a simple question of conference organizers: “What are you doing to ensure gender balance at your event?” Some have declined events if women speakers aren’t well represented. Sometimes, they can make a lesson of it. For example, one of our members, Martin Parkinson, former secretary to the Treasury, was listed as a speaker at a large conference on global growth opportunities. He realized beforehand that there were very few women speakers on the agenda, and prompted the organizers to do something about it. When little was done, he opened his talk that day by identifying himself as a Male Champion of Change, highlighting his disappointment at the lack of gender balance, and spoke to the importance of the visibility of women in important national discussions. Then he delivered his speech. He received huge applause.
An arrow in the quiver
As part of my role, I have the opportunity to speak to many people about gender equality, and I’ve learned there are a lot of well-intentioned men out there who just don’t know what to do. Not only that, many are scared that if they stand up and speak out on these issues they’ll be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution.
Initially, some were. I remember the first conference I went to with one of the Male Champions—a panel discussion—where a woman got up at the end and said, “Look, it’s all very well for you to say that, but the fact is you’ve got a full-time wife at home. You can gallivant around the world and you know that everything’s OK at home. So don’t try to talk to me about gender equality.”
He was deeply hurt, as you’d expect—she knew nothing about his life—and I asked if I could speak first. He agreed, and I said: “I know where you’re at. I’ve been where you’re at—deeply angry about where we are and the lack of progress, and knowing that men are part of the problem. But can I say to you, don’t dump on the good men who are prepared to stand up and take action, because there’s another 10 million doing very little.”
We hear much less of that now. Today, if anything, there’s a tendency to expect the Male Champions of Change to do too much—I think it’s a sign that we have changed the nature of the conversation around how to progress gender equality in Australia.
Another way I know we’re making progress is that the model is spreading. We’re seeing similar groups in most Australian states and territories, and even at the sector level in some cases. Shinzō Abe, prime minister of Japan, has started a group that we’re in contact with. We applaud these efforts, and we are also creating a guide and other support materials to share what we’ve learned and help other groups get started. In this way, I see the Male Champions as an open-source model and one that has real potential to form a global coalition, a social movement for men actively promoting change on gender equality within their spheres of influence.
With that said, we certainly don’t view ourselves as the solution—just an arrow in the quiver. It’s not about the Male Champions doing everything. It’s about them leading by example, and it’s about every one of us reaching out to the men in our lives, helping them understand where the areas of inequality continue to exist, and giving them some practical examples about what they can do to move this agenda forward.
Each of the Male Champions has a unique and powerful story to tell. Here are just three of them:
Make it personal
David Thodey, CEO, Telstra
I didn’t need to think too much when Liz rang and asked me to join the group. I’ve known and respected her for years, and it was a great opportunity to talk about the challenges we all face in trying to create gender equity in large organizations. And I’ve learned a lot—and adopted a lot—from my colleagues. For example, we now have a “Plus One” initiative at Telstra that asks every manager to increase their female direct reports by one over an 18-month period, and that’s been really good. We also adopted the “50-50: If not, why not?” approach to graduate recruiting and leadership development, meaning that we want half of these roles filled by women and if they aren’t, we expect to know why. Both of these efforts came out of working with the group.
All roles flex
One endeavor I worked on with Ian Narev, CEO of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, was about job flexibility. I strongly believe that to get true gender balance in a large company, or a society, you need the right culture. And job flexibility has always been a cultural challenge for many companies, because as you go through your life as an employee, your needs change but the company’s response doesn’t. You go to your manager and see if you can work out a different arrangement and typically the answer is, “You’re a key member of the team and I really like you a lot, but gee, I really need you here for these hours.”
So at Telstra we said: “No, this isn’t a manager’s decision. Every role can be done flexibly and that’s the starting point.” In fact, a manager has to be able to demonstrate that a job can’t be done flexibly, not the other way round. In 2013 we piloted the approach, “All Roles Flex,” in one of our larger business units with about 9,000 people. After it was successful there, we brought the other business units onboard earlier this year. We wanted to stop tinkering around the edges of this issue and do something disruptive that would send a clear message.
We’ve been delighted at how people have stepped up, and how creative they are in making this work. While it’s still early on, our engagement scores have increased four percentage points in relation to flexibility, with 84 percent of our people saying they have the flexibility they need in their roles. That still leaves 16 percent, but it’s heading in the right direction. We have also seen a strong increase in our ability to bring women into Telstra at mid-to-senior levels, just by inviting applicants to talk to us about flexible work. And the stories we hear about the policy are encouraging. For example, we have a talented employee with a disability that gives her trouble in crowded environments. Coming into work each day at the regular time on a full tram was very stressful. Now, she’s moved her day slightly and her whole world has changed.
Crack the code
While the meetings with the Male Champions are always open and honest, I think that more recently there’s been an even greater degree of candor about confronting the challenges. The reality is that for most companies out there, including ours, the needle hasn’t moved enormously. At Telstra, we’re running around the 25 percent mark of women at the executive-management level, a little higher than our industry average but also pretty flat for the last couple of years. It’s frustrating because we’re doing well in our female graduate intake—41 percent are now women—but they’re 10 years away from meeting our targets at the executive level. We’re taking direct interventions, we’re prioritizing the need to push women through the ranks, but it’s very slow going.
I know I haven’t got the magic formula, and the level of progress is very frustrating. Yet we cannot become despondent. Solving this requires perseverance and optimism. About 18 months ago, we had a senior-team dinner where we discussed gender representation and each of the executives spoke about why this was important to them personally. It was probably one of the more meaningful moments we’ve had. I think it proved to me the power of making this personal. It gives me hope that we can crack the code.
Relentless execution
Ian Narev, CEO, Commonwealth Bank of Australia
I wasn’t a founding member of the group—my predecessor was—but when I became CEO in late 2011 it was an easy decision to join. I thought Elizabeth’s vision was right—to move this forward we’ve got to engage men—and the business benefits of diversity are obviously strong. I was also motivated by the moral reason: I want my company to stand for the principle that no matter who you are, you will not only be tolerated (a word I hate) but celebrated. At the same time, the group had interesting people within it doing interesting things. It was a huge opportunity to learn.
A benefit of the meetings, for me, is that I think about diversity as part of my day-to-day job. We meet four times a year and hold other meetings and panels—and it takes time—but there are economies of scope in this, and I’d argue that it’s making me more efficient. We’re in there talking about things like mainstreaming flexibility, the promotion of talented women, supplier management, and these are all part of my job anyway.
Recognizing unconscious bias
One area we’ve discussed is unconscious bias—a topic we’ve thought a lot about at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). In general, companies have gotten to the point, luckily, where it’s rare to find outright misogynists, homophobes, and racists. But that’s not a very high bar! The problem we struggled with at CBA was more subtle: If a manager wasn’t getting good outcomes on gender targets—but like most people, wasn’t a misogynist—then the message we were effectively sending was, “You’re probably OK.” And that’s not OK.
The bias training we gave to our top 2,000 people gave them permission to say: “I can be a good human being but recognize that I still unconsciously make judgments that may favor certain groups in promotions.” It was a big first step and has helped us improve our hiring processes, particularly when it comes to the classic “just like me” bias in hiring decisions.
I like focusing on processes because it helps us get past any “warm and fuzzy” elements of diversity and into action levers. For example, we discovered we had an anachronistic process that classified women on maternity leave as “over quota, unattached,” which, among other things, essentially meant they couldn’t keep their cell phones or laptops. This policy may not have been initiated by anyone still at the bank, but it had gone unexamined and was preventing us from staying in contact with parents on leave, and therefore allowing us to work with them to create more flexible return options. Fixing it was easy; spotting it was harder.
The numbers are the numbers
All the Male Champions would agree our numbers are moving too slowly, even though we see progress. At CBA, I’m pleased that three of our seven big P&L jobs are run by women. And we have set a target of 35 percent women in leadership roles by 2015; currently we are at 33 percent, up from 26 percent in 2010. At each level we face challenges: Among our top team, we went from 18 to 27 percent women last year; one level below, from 22 to 28; two levels below, from 23 to 24. But further down—where the number of people is larger and the averages harder to move—we’ve only moved from 33 to 34. It’s not enough, and is a long way from our ambitions of having 50 percent women in leadership.
In part, I see the challenge as an issue of basic line management and relentless execution. The numbers are the numbers and when we miss a diversity target, it’s no different than if we missed a customer-satisfaction target or any other target. We ask, “What more can we be doing? What are the reasons? How can we make sure we get there as quickly as we can?” To me, it’s about the visibility and transparency of the goal and the trust we create internally by showing our accountability for meeting it.
Irreversible change
Elmer Funke Küpper, CEO, Australian Securities Exchange
What I like about the Male Champions of Change is that it’s a highly practical approach to diversity. If this change was easy, it would have been done. It turns out it’s hard. By sharing ideas, each of us can learn things that we take back to our companies and try. For my part, I freely beg, borrow, and steal from my colleagues in order to make changes at the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) that will make a difference. I think we all do: our goal is to learn how to change, get results, and then spread the word.
One idea we took from Telstra’s David Thodey was rethinking flexible work. We recently announced that all jobs at ASX can be made flexible in some way—no excuses. This way of thinking forced us to invest in the infrastructure and technology that will allow our staff to work flexible hours and from home.
My conversations with other Male Champions have been valuable in helping me think through how to implement change. The conversations can seem like a form of personal coaching by your peers.
Governance guidelines
Once a year we look at our forward agenda to see what we should work on. The work then progresses in smaller groups. For example, we did some work on target setting with Martin Parkinson, former secretary to the Treasury. We wanted to see where the number of women dropped off in our organizations and what could be done to shine a light on this.
What we saw will be familiar to many companies: the numbers are usually strong at the lower levels of the organization and in the talent pipeline, and they’re OK or improving at the board level because you can recruit for that. It is in the senior-management layers in-between where there are challenges. At these levels, the numbers drop sharply, which suggests the career-progression processes are not working the way they should. So we proposed to the Male Champions that we should publicly report, and set targets, down to four layers in our organizations to put real focus on career progression. The feedback from the group led us to modify the proposal so that companies could differentiate by the type of job and not just by layers. Several of the Champions took the lead and adopted the new way of reporting and target setting.
From there, we approached the ASX Corporate Governance Council, which sets the governance principles for the 2,000 public companies in Australia. We asked the Council to adopt the reporting approach from the Male Champions. The governance principles work on an “if not, why not?” basis—companies do not have to follow the guidelines but they have to explain why they don’t. In our experience, large companies tend to comply. After about 12 months, the Council decided to update its guidelines based on our suggestions. They came into effect on July 1 this year.
Walk the talk
From our work, it was clear that we struggle with the flow-through of women to more senior levels of the organization. We know that our overall numbers for female leaders are somewhere between 40 and 45 percent at lower levels, and 40 to 50 percent amongst our top talent pool—but our promotion rates into senior management run well below this level.
I’ve recently started to change my view on how we might address this. When we started out, I felt that gender targets for managers were more about potential than performance—in other words, if a manager repeatedly misses the staff engagement and diversity objectives we set, it should affect our assessment of his or her potential to lead larger numbers of people. I’m now coming to the view that these goals should be part of management’s short-term objectives and incentives as well. I think it has to have more bite—the same way we treat other business objectives.
I guess my attitude is that I don’t want to take no for an answer. We want to create an organization that makes automatic use of 100 percent of the available talent pool without having to rely on the CEO, the Male Champions, the governance principles, or McKinsey Quarterly articles to drive this. To me, success is irreversible change. Nothing less will do.
About the authors
This commentary is adapted from interviews conducted by Natalie Davis, a principal in McKinsey’s Sydney office; Angus Dawson, a director in the Sydney office; and Thomas Fleming, a former member of McKinsey Publishing.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
Championing gender equality in Australia
A group of business leaders is redefining the role of men in the promotion of gender equality—and improving the environment for women leaders in their own organizations.
February 2015 | by Elizabeth Broderick, Elmer Funke Küpper, Ian Narev, and David Thodey
Introduction
Elizabeth Broderick, sex discrimination commissioner, Australian Human Rights Commission
For a long time I was firmly of the view that increasing the number of women leaders was a matter of women’s activism, and women working together. Yet while women’s activism remains critical to making progress, if you look at the levers of power in nations and in organizations, they rest in the hands of men. And to continue to rely on women alone to disrupt the status quo is really an illogical approach. I realized that unless we worked with the men in power—and helped them move from being merely interested in this subject to taking action—we wouldn’t see the transformative change we need.
This is not about men speaking for women or “saving” them. This is about men standing up beside women and saying, “The promotion of gender equality in Australia, and the world, is everyone’s business.” It should not sit on the shoulders of women alone. It’s about men accepting responsibility to create change.
So we started the group, the Male Champions of Change, by identifying a dozen powerful men in some of Australia’s most prominent organizations. I picked up the phone and rang them. The group formed from there, ultimately reaching 25, its current size.1 From the beginning, we were quite strict about participation in meetings and told the men they couldn’t send delegates. My rule was: “This is you I’m inviting, not your organization.”
The first couple of meetings were a bit awkward, as the tendency—human nature, really—was for people to talk about all the good things they were doing. Relatively quickly, though, the tone of the discussion became much more authentic and honest. “This is hard,” several admitted. “In fact, it’s the hardest thing I do as a CEO. I don’t know what the answers are; I’m trying everything but nothing seems to be working.” They all recognized that no one had the answers, but at the same time everyone agreed these were leadership issues that started with them, and that collectively, we could change things.
Actions, not talk
The group meets in person once a quarter (more often in smaller, topic-focused, “action groups”), and is a source of rich discussion, particularly at the intersection of disciplines or sectors. Putting the Chief of Army beside the head of a bank, for example, results in thought-provoking conversations about job flexibility and leadership. The fact that these men would not ordinarily come together is part of the group’s appeal, and I’ve seen a great openness to learning and curiosity there.
Besides allowing for the sharing of stories, the face-to-face meetings are critical, I think, in empowering the Male Champions to be bolder.2 Disrupting the status quo requires courageous leadership. For example, David Thodey’s initiative to make all roles flexible at Telstra is very bold. By treating flexibility as the starting point, and not the exception, he’s changing the whole nature of the conversation at his company and others. Similarly, the group took the lead on gender reporting, and because of the efforts of Elmer Funke Küpper, head of the Australian Securities Exchange and one of our Male Champions, a new reporting regime was adopted for publicly listed companies in Australia.
Recently, we’ve started looking further down the supply chain—at the idea that the group could ensure that its supply-chain partners also care about gender equality. This effort has huge potential because of the massive collective buying power of the group.
The Male Champions also demonstrate strong and visible leadership outside their organizations. They speak at more than 1,000 events a year, and they recognize that women’s voices are often poorly represented. The practical action they have all taken is a “panel pledge” to ask a simple question of conference organizers: “What are you doing to ensure gender balance at your event?” Some have declined events if women speakers aren’t well represented. Sometimes, they can make a lesson of it. For example, one of our members, Martin Parkinson, former secretary to the Treasury, was listed as a speaker at a large conference on global growth opportunities. He realized beforehand that there were very few women speakers on the agenda, and prompted the organizers to do something about it. When little was done, he opened his talk that day by identifying himself as a Male Champion of Change, highlighting his disappointment at the lack of gender balance, and spoke to the importance of the visibility of women in important national discussions. Then he delivered his speech. He received huge applause.
An arrow in the quiver
As part of my role, I have the opportunity to speak to many people about gender equality, and I’ve learned there are a lot of well-intentioned men out there who just don’t know what to do. Not only that, many are scared that if they stand up and speak out on these issues they’ll be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution.
Initially, some were. I remember the first conference I went to with one of the Male Champions—a panel discussion—where a woman got up at the end and said, “Look, it’s all very well for you to say that, but the fact is you’ve got a full-time wife at home. You can gallivant around the world and you know that everything’s OK at home. So don’t try to talk to me about gender equality.”
He was deeply hurt, as you’d expect—she knew nothing about his life—and I asked if I could speak first. He agreed, and I said: “I know where you’re at. I’ve been where you’re at—deeply angry about where we are and the lack of progress, and knowing that men are part of the problem. But can I say to you, don’t dump on the good men who are prepared to stand up and take action, because there’s another 10 million doing very little.”
We hear much less of that now. Today, if anything, there’s a tendency to expect the Male Champions of Change to do too much—I think it’s a sign that we have changed the nature of the conversation around how to progress gender equality in Australia.
Another way I know we’re making progress is that the model is spreading. We’re seeing similar groups in most Australian states and territories, and even at the sector level in some cases. Shinzō Abe, prime minister of Japan, has started a group that we’re in contact with. We applaud these efforts, and we are also creating a guide and other support materials to share what we’ve learned and help other groups get started. In this way, I see the Male Champions as an open-source model and one that has real potential to form a global coalition, a social movement for men actively promoting change on gender equality within their spheres of influence.
With that said, we certainly don’t view ourselves as the solution—just an arrow in the quiver. It’s not about the Male Champions doing everything. It’s about them leading by example, and it’s about every one of us reaching out to the men in our lives, helping them understand where the areas of inequality continue to exist, and giving them some practical examples about what they can do to move this agenda forward.
Each of the Male Champions has a unique and powerful story to tell. Here are just three of them:
Make it personal
David Thodey, CEO, Telstra
I didn’t need to think too much when Liz rang and asked me to join the group. I’ve known and respected her for years, and it was a great opportunity to talk about the challenges we all face in trying to create gender equity in large organizations. And I’ve learned a lot—and adopted a lot—from my colleagues. For example, we now have a “Plus One” initiative at Telstra that asks every manager to increase their female direct reports by one over an 18-month period, and that’s been really good. We also adopted the “50-50: If not, why not?” approach to graduate recruiting and leadership development, meaning that we want half of these roles filled by women and if they aren’t, we expect to know why. Both of these efforts came out of working with the group.
All roles flex
One endeavor I worked on with Ian Narev, CEO of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, was about job flexibility. I strongly believe that to get true gender balance in a large company, or a society, you need the right culture. And job flexibility has always been a cultural challenge for many companies, because as you go through your life as an employee, your needs change but the company’s response doesn’t. You go to your manager and see if you can work out a different arrangement and typically the answer is, “You’re a key member of the team and I really like you a lot, but gee, I really need you here for these hours.”
So at Telstra we said: “No, this isn’t a manager’s decision. Every role can be done flexibly and that’s the starting point.” In fact, a manager has to be able to demonstrate that a job can’t be done flexibly, not the other way round. In 2013 we piloted the approach, “All Roles Flex,” in one of our larger business units with about 9,000 people. After it was successful there, we brought the other business units onboard earlier this year. We wanted to stop tinkering around the edges of this issue and do something disruptive that would send a clear message.
We’ve been delighted at how people have stepped up, and how creative they are in making this work. While it’s still early on, our engagement scores have increased four percentage points in relation to flexibility, with 84 percent of our people saying they have the flexibility they need in their roles. That still leaves 16 percent, but it’s heading in the right direction. We have also seen a strong increase in our ability to bring women into Telstra at mid-to-senior levels, just by inviting applicants to talk to us about flexible work. And the stories we hear about the policy are encouraging. For example, we have a talented employee with a disability that gives her trouble in crowded environments. Coming into work each day at the regular time on a full tram was very stressful. Now, she’s moved her day slightly and her whole world has changed.
Crack the code
While the meetings with the Male Champions are always open and honest, I think that more recently there’s been an even greater degree of candor about confronting the challenges. The reality is that for most companies out there, including ours, the needle hasn’t moved enormously. At Telstra, we’re running around the 25 percent mark of women at the executive-management level, a little higher than our industry average but also pretty flat for the last couple of years. It’s frustrating because we’re doing well in our female graduate intake—41 percent are now women—but they’re 10 years away from meeting our targets at the executive level. We’re taking direct interventions, we’re prioritizing the need to push women through the ranks, but it’s very slow going.
I know I haven’t got the magic formula, and the level of progress is very frustrating. Yet we cannot become despondent. Solving this requires perseverance and optimism. About 18 months ago, we had a senior-team dinner where we discussed gender representation and each of the executives spoke about why this was important to them personally. It was probably one of the more meaningful moments we’ve had. I think it proved to me the power of making this personal. It gives me hope that we can crack the code.
Relentless execution
Ian Narev, CEO, Commonwealth Bank of Australia
I wasn’t a founding member of the group—my predecessor was—but when I became CEO in late 2011 it was an easy decision to join. I thought Elizabeth’s vision was right—to move this forward we’ve got to engage men—and the business benefits of diversity are obviously strong. I was also motivated by the moral reason: I want my company to stand for the principle that no matter who you are, you will not only be tolerated (a word I hate) but celebrated. At the same time, the group had interesting people within it doing interesting things. It was a huge opportunity to learn.
A benefit of the meetings, for me, is that I think about diversity as part of my day-to-day job. We meet four times a year and hold other meetings and panels—and it takes time—but there are economies of scope in this, and I’d argue that it’s making me more efficient. We’re in there talking about things like mainstreaming flexibility, the promotion of talented women, supplier management, and these are all part of my job anyway.
Recognizing unconscious bias
One area we’ve discussed is unconscious bias—a topic we’ve thought a lot about at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). In general, companies have gotten to the point, luckily, where it’s rare to find outright misogynists, homophobes, and racists. But that’s not a very high bar! The problem we struggled with at CBA was more subtle: If a manager wasn’t getting good outcomes on gender targets—but like most people, wasn’t a misogynist—then the message we were effectively sending was, “You’re probably OK.” And that’s not OK.
The bias training we gave to our top 2,000 people gave them permission to say: “I can be a good human being but recognize that I still unconsciously make judgments that may favor certain groups in promotions.” It was a big first step and has helped us improve our hiring processes, particularly when it comes to the classic “just like me” bias in hiring decisions.
I like focusing on processes because it helps us get past any “warm and fuzzy” elements of diversity and into action levers. For example, we discovered we had an anachronistic process that classified women on maternity leave as “over quota, unattached,” which, among other things, essentially meant they couldn’t keep their cell phones or laptops. This policy may not have been initiated by anyone still at the bank, but it had gone unexamined and was preventing us from staying in contact with parents on leave, and therefore allowing us to work with them to create more flexible return options. Fixing it was easy; spotting it was harder.
The numbers are the numbers
All the Male Champions would agree our numbers are moving too slowly, even though we see progress. At CBA, I’m pleased that three of our seven big P&L jobs are run by women. And we have set a target of 35 percent women in leadership roles by 2015; currently we are at 33 percent, up from 26 percent in 2010. At each level we face challenges: Among our top team, we went from 18 to 27 percent women last year; one level below, from 22 to 28; two levels below, from 23 to 24. But further down—where the number of people is larger and the averages harder to move—we’ve only moved from 33 to 34. It’s not enough, and is a long way from our ambitions of having 50 percent women in leadership.
In part, I see the challenge as an issue of basic line management and relentless execution. The numbers are the numbers and when we miss a diversity target, it’s no different than if we missed a customer-satisfaction target or any other target. We ask, “What more can we be doing? What are the reasons? How can we make sure we get there as quickly as we can?” To me, it’s about the visibility and transparency of the goal and the trust we create internally by showing our accountability for meeting it.
Irreversible change
Elmer Funke Küpper, CEO, Australian Securities Exchange
What I like about the Male Champions of Change is that it’s a highly practical approach to diversity. If this change was easy, it would have been done. It turns out it’s hard. By sharing ideas, each of us can learn things that we take back to our companies and try. For my part, I freely beg, borrow, and steal from my colleagues in order to make changes at the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) that will make a difference. I think we all do: our goal is to learn how to change, get results, and then spread the word.
One idea we took from Telstra’s David Thodey was rethinking flexible work. We recently announced that all jobs at ASX can be made flexible in some way—no excuses. This way of thinking forced us to invest in the infrastructure and technology that will allow our staff to work flexible hours and from home.
My conversations with other Male Champions have been valuable in helping me think through how to implement change. The conversations can seem like a form of personal coaching by your peers.
Governance guidelines
Once a year we look at our forward agenda to see what we should work on. The work then progresses in smaller groups. For example, we did some work on target setting with Martin Parkinson, former secretary to the Treasury. We wanted to see where the number of women dropped off in our organizations and what could be done to shine a light on this.
What we saw will be familiar to many companies: the numbers are usually strong at the lower levels of the organization and in the talent pipeline, and they’re OK or improving at the board level because you can recruit for that. It is in the senior-management layers in-between where there are challenges. At these levels, the numbers drop sharply, which suggests the career-progression processes are not working the way they should. So we proposed to the Male Champions that we should publicly report, and set targets, down to four layers in our organizations to put real focus on career progression. The feedback from the group led us to modify the proposal so that companies could differentiate by the type of job and not just by layers. Several of the Champions took the lead and adopted the new way of reporting and target setting.
From there, we approached the ASX Corporate Governance Council, which sets the governance principles for the 2,000 public companies in Australia. We asked the Council to adopt the reporting approach from the Male Champions. The governance principles work on an “if not, why not?” basis—companies do not have to follow the guidelines but they have to explain why they don’t. In our experience, large companies tend to comply. After about 12 months, the Council decided to update its guidelines based on our suggestions. They came into effect on July 1 this year.
Walk the talk
From our work, it was clear that we struggle with the flow-through of women to more senior levels of the organization. We know that our overall numbers for female leaders are somewhere between 40 and 45 percent at lower levels, and 40 to 50 percent amongst our top talent pool—but our promotion rates into senior management run well below this level.
I’ve recently started to change my view on how we might address this. When we started out, I felt that gender targets for managers were more about potential than performance—in other words, if a manager repeatedly misses the staff engagement and diversity objectives we set, it should affect our assessment of his or her potential to lead larger numbers of people. I’m now coming to the view that these goals should be part of management’s short-term objectives and incentives as well. I think it has to have more bite—the same way we treat other business objectives.
I guess my attitude is that I don’t want to take no for an answer. We want to create an organization that makes automatic use of 100 percent of the available talent pool without having to rely on the CEO, the Male Champions, the governance principles, or McKinsey Quarterly articles to drive this. To me, success is irreversible change. Nothing less will do.
About the authors
This commentary is adapted from interviews conducted by Natalie Davis, a principal in McKinsey’s Sydney office; Angus Dawson, a director in the Sydney office; and Thomas Fleming, a former member of McKinsey Publishing.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
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