The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art
Theaster Gates, a potter by training and a social activist by calling, wanted to do something about the sorry state of his neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. So he did, transforming abandoned buildings to create community hubs that connect and inspire those who still live there (and draw in those who don't). In this passionate talk, Gates describes his efforts to build a "miniature Versailles" in Chicago, and he shares his fervent belief that culture can be a catalyst for social transformation in any city, anywhere.
Transcript:
I'm a potter, which seems like a fairly humble vocation. I know a lot about pots. I've spent about 15 years making them. One of the things that really excites me in my artistic practice and being trained as a potter is that you very quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing; that I spent a lot of time at my wheel with mounds of clay trying stuff; and that the limitations of my capacity, my ability, was based on my hands and my imagination; that if I wanted to make a really nice bowl and I didn't know how to make a foot yet, I would have to learn how to make a foot; that that process of learning has been very, very helpful to my life. I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world.
There have been times in my artistic capacity that I wanted to reflect on other really important moments in the history of the U.S., the history of the world where tough things happened, but how do you talk about tough ideas without separating people from that content? Could I use art like these old, discontinued firehoses from Alabama, to talk about the complexities of a moment of civil rights in the '60s? Is it possible to talk about my father and I doing labor projects? My dad was a roofer, construction guy, he owned small businesses, and at 80, he was ready to retire and his tar kettle was my inheritance. Now, a tar kettle doesn't sound like much of an inheritance. It wasn't. It was stinky and it took up a lot of space in my studio, but I asked my dad if he would be willing to make some art with me, if we could reimagine this kind of nothing material as something very special. And by elevating the material and my dad's skill, could we start to think about tar just like clay, in a new way, shaping it differently, helping us to imagine what was possible?
After clay, I was then kind of turned on to lots of different kinds of materials, and my studio grew a lot because I thought, well, it's not really about the material, it's about our capacity to shape things. I became more and more interested in ideas and more and more things that were happening just outside my studio. Just to give you a little bit of context, I live in Chicago. I live on the South Side now. I'm a West Sider. For those of you who are not Chicagoans, that won't mean anything, but if I didn't mention that I was a West Sider, there would be a lot of people in the city that would be very upset.
The neighborhood that I live in is Grand Crossing. It's a neighborhood that has seen better days. It is not a gated community by far. There is lots of abandonment in my neighborhood, and while I was kind of busy making pots and busy making art and having a good art career, there was all of this stuff that was happening just outside my studio. All of us know about failing housing markets and the challenges of blight, and I feel like we talk about it with some of our cities more than others, but I think a lot of our U.S. cities and beyond have the challenge of blight, abandoned buildings that people no longer know what to do anything with. And so I thought, is there a way that I could start to think about these buildings as an extension or an expansion of my artistic practice? And that if I was thinking along with other creatives -- architects, engineers, real estate finance people -- that us together might be able to kind of think in more complicated ways about the reshaping of cities.
And so I bought a building. The building was really affordable. We tricked it out. We made it as beautiful as we could to try to just get some activity happening on my block. Once I bought the building for about 18,000 dollars, I didn't have any money left. So I started sweeping the building as a kind of performance. This is performance art, and people would come over, and I would start sweeping. Because the broom was free and sweeping was free. It worked out. (Laughter) But we would use the building, then, to stage exhibitions, small dinners, and we found that that building on my block, Dorchester -- we now referred to the block as Dorchester projects -- that in a way that building became a kind of gathering site for lots of different kinds of activity. We turned the building into what we called now the Archive House. The Archive House would do all of these amazing things. Very significant people in the city and beyond would find themselves in the middle of the hood. And that's when I felt like maybe there was a relationship between my history with clay and this new thing that was starting to develop, that we were slowly starting to reshape how people imagined the South Side of the city.
5:34
One house turned into a few houses, and we always tried to suggest that not only is creating a beautiful vessel important, but the contents of what happens in those buildings is also very important. So we were not only thinking about development, but we were thinking about the program, thinking about the kind of connections that could happen between one house and another, between one neighbor and another. This building became what we call the Listening House, and it has a collection of discarded books from the Johnson Publishing Corporation, and other books from an old bookstore that was going out of business. I was actually just wanting to activate these buildings as much as I could with whatever and whoever would join me.
In Chicago, there's amazing building stock. This building, which had been the former crack house on the block, and when the building became abandoned, it became a great opportunity to really imagine what else could happen there. So this space we converted into what we call Black Cinema House. Black Cinema House was an opportunity in the hood to screen films that were important and relevant to the folk who lived around me, that if we wanted to show an old Melvin Van Peebles film, we could. If we wanted to show "Car Wash," we could. That would be awesome. The building we soon outgrew, and we had to move to a larger space. Black Cinema House, which was made from just a small piece of clay, had to grow into a much larger piece of clay, which is now my studio.
What I realized was that for those of you who are zoning junkies, that some of the things that I was doing in these buildings that had been left behind, they were not the uses by which the buildings were built, and that there are city policies that say, "Hey, a house that is residential needs to stay residential." But what do you do in neighborhoods when ain't nobody interested in living there? That the people who have the means to leave have already left? What do we do with these abandoned buildings? And so I was trying to wake them up using culture.
We found that that was so exciting for folk, and people were so responsive to the work, that we had to then find bigger buildings. By the time we found bigger buildings, there was, in part, the resources necessary to think about those things. In this bank that we called the Arts Bank, it was in pretty bad shape. There was about six feet of standing water. It was a difficult project to finance, because banks weren't interested in the neighborhood because people weren't interested in the neighborhood because nothing had happened there. It was dirt. It was nothing. It was nowhere. And so we just started imagining, what else could happen in this building? (Applause)
And so now that the rumor of my block has spread, and lots of people are starting to visit, we've found that the bank can now be a center for exhibition, archives, music performance, and that there are people who are now interested in being adjacent to those buildings because we brought some heat, that we kind of made a fire.
One of the archives that we'll have there is this Johnson Publishing Corporation. We've also started to collect memorabilia from American history, from people who live or have lived in that neighborhood. Some of these images are degraded images of black people, kind of histories of very challenging content, and where better than a neighborhood with young people who are constantly asking themselves about their identity to talk about some of the complexities of race and class?
In some ways, the bank represents a hub, that we're trying to create a pretty hardcore node of cultural activity, and that if we could start to make multiple hubs and connect some cool green stuff around there, that the buildings that we've purchased and rehabbed, which is now around 60 or 70 units, that if we could land miniature Versailles on top of that, and connect these buildings by a beautiful greenbelt -- (Applause) -- that this place where people never wanted to be would become an important destination for folk from all over the country and world.
In some ways, it feels very much like I'm a potter, that we tackle the things that are at our wheel, we try with the skill that we have to think about this next bowl that I want to make. And it went from a bowl to a singular house to a block to a neighborhood to a cultural district to thinking about the city, and at every point, there were things that I didn't know that I had to learn. I've never learned so much about zoning law in my life. I never thought I'd have to. But as a result of that, I'm finding that there's not just room for my own artistic practice, there's room for a lot of other artistic practices.
So people started asking us, "Well, Theaster, how are you going to go to scale?" and, "What's your sustainability plan?"
(Laughter) (Applause)
And what I found was that I couldn't export myself, that what seems necessary in cities like Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, is that there are people in those places who already believe in those places, that are already dying to make those places beautiful, and that often, those people who are passionate about a place are disconnected from the resources necessary to make cool things happen, or disconnected from a contingency of people that could help make things happen. So now, we're starting to give advice around the country on how to start with what you got, how to start with the things that are in front of you, how to make something out of nothing, how to reshape your world at a wheel or at your block or at the scale of the city.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
June Cohen: Thank you. So I think many people watching this will be asking themselves the question you just raised at the end: How can they do this in their own city? You can't export yourself. Give us a few pages out of your playbook about what someone who is inspired about their city can do to take on projects like yours?
Theaster Gates: One of the things I've found that's really important is giving thought to not just the kind of individual project, like an old house, but what's the relationship between an old house, a local school, a small bodega, and is there some kind of synergy between those things? Can you get those folk talking? I've found that in cases where neighborhoods have failed, they still often have a pulse. How do you identify the pulse in that place, the passionate people, and then how do you get folk who have been fighting, slogging for 20 years, reenergized about the place that they live? And so someone has to do that work. If I were a traditional developer, I would be talking about buildings alone, and then putting a "For Lease" sign in the window. I think that you actually have to curate more than that, that there's a way in which you have to be mindful about, what are the businesses that I want to grow here? And then, are there people who live in this place who want to grow those businesses with me? Because I think it's not just a cultural space or housing; there has to be the recreation of an economic core. So thinking about those things together feels right.
JC: It's hard to get people to create the spark again when people have been slogging for 20 years. Are there any methods you've found that have helped break through?
TG: Yeah, I think that now there are lots of examples of folk who are doing amazing work, but those methods are sometimes like, when the media is constantly saying that only violent things happen in a place, then based on your skill set and the particular context, what are the things that you can do in your neighborhood to kind of fight some of that? So I've found that if you're a theater person, you have outdoor street theater festivals. In some cases, we don't have the resources in certain neighborhoods to do things that are a certain kind of splashy, but if we can then find ways of making sure that people who are local to a place, plus people who could be supportive of the things that are happening locally, when those people get together, I think really amazing things can happen.
JC: So interesting. And how can you make sure that the projects you're creating are actually for the disadvantaged and not just for the sort of vegetarian indie movie crowd that might move in to take advantage of them.
TG: Right on. So I think this is where it starts to get into the thick weeds.
JC: Let's go there. TG: Right now, Grand Crossing is 99 percent black, or at least living, and we know that maybe who owns property in a place is different from who walks the streets every day. So it's reasonable to say that Grand Crossing is already in the process of being something different than it is today. But are there ways to think about housing trusts or land trusts or a mission-based development that starts to protect some of the space that happens, because when you have 7,500 empty lots in a city, you want something to happen there, but you need entities that are not just interested in the development piece, but entities that are interested in the stabilization piece, and I feel like often the developer piece is really motivated, but the other work of a kind of neighborhood consciousness, that part doesn't live anymore. So how do you start to grow up important watchdogs that ensure that the resources that are made available to new folk that are coming in are also distributed to folk who have lived in a place for a long time
JC: That makes so much sense. One more question: You make such a compelling case for beauty and the importance of beauty and the arts. There would be others who would argue that funds would be better spent on basic services for the disadvantaged. How do you combat that viewpoint, or come against it?
TG: I believe that beauty is a basic service. (Applause) Often what I have found is that when there are resources that have not been made available to certain under-resourced cities or neighborhoods or communities, that sometimes culture is the thing that helps to ignite, and that I can't do everything, but I think that there's a way in which if you can start with culture and get people kind of reinvested in their place, other kinds of adjacent amenities start to grow, and then people can make a demand that's a poetic demand, and the political demands that are necessary to wake up our cities, they also become very poetic.
JC: It makes perfect sense to me. Theaster, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you. Theaster Gates.
(Applause)
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Monday, March 30, 2015
SUC/BUS/TECH/GralInt-TED Talks- Dame Stephanie Shirley: Why do ambitious women have flat heads?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Dame Stephanie Shirley: Why do ambitious women have flat heads?
Dame Stephanie Shirley is the most successful tech entrepreneur you never heard of. In the 1960s, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members. In this frank and often hilarious talk, she explains why she went by “Steve,” how she upended the expectations of the time, and shares some sure-fire ways to identify ambitious women …
Transcript:
When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. Was it about me as a child refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? Or was it as a mother of an autistic child? Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? Well, it turns out, I'm all of these. So let me tell you my story.
All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. I was five years old, clutching the hand of my nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to what was going on. "What is England and why am I going there?" I'm only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers. I was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. But, sadly, I never bonded with them again. But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. And I love England, my adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving. And then, I just got on with it. (Laughter)
Let me take you back to the early 1960s. To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. But it was also a company of women, a company for women, an early social business. And people laughed at the very idea because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. Nobody would buy software, certainly not from a woman. Although women were then coming out of the universities with decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often, and I wanted opportunities for women.
I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. We pioneered the concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. We pioneered all sorts of new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing, and eventually, co-ownership when I took a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. For years, I was the first woman this, or the only woman that. And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account without my husband's permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay.
Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society because all the expectations then were about home and family responsibilities. And I couldn't really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from "Stephanie" to "Steve" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone realized that he was a she. (Laughter)
My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have started smaller: on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in today's terms, and financed by my labor and by borrowing against the house. My interests were scientific, the market was commercial -- things such as payroll, which I found rather boring. So I had to compromise with operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge that interested me and the commercial value that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. And eventually, the work came in. We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed prices, one of the very first to do so. And who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch of women working in their own homes. (Applause)
All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach and a simple telephone. We even used to ask job applicants, "Do you have access to a telephone?"
An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. And software was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. We used the standards ourselves, we were even paid to update them over the years, and eventually, they were adopted by NATO. Our programmers -- remember, only women, including gay and transgender -- worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done. And they then wrote code, usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched, in order to verify it. All this, before it ever got near a computer. That was programming in the early 1960s.
In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation came in in Britain and that made it illegal to have our pro-female policies. And as an example of unintended consequences, my female company had to let the men in. (Laughter)
When I started my company of women, the men said, "How interesting, because it only works because it's small." And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, "Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest." And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!" (Laughter) (Applause)
You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being patted patronizingly. (Laughter) (Applause) And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink. (Laughter)
Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. Because the other day when I said, "My husband's an angel," a woman complained -- "You're lucky," she said, "mine's still alive." (Laughter)
If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires. But in my case, it came in the midst of family trauma and indeed, crisis. Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby. And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he had and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler. Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly autistic and he never spoke again. Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. And then there's been a groundbreaking Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism. Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. I like doing new things and making new things happen. And I've just started a three-year think tank for autism.
And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. The Oxford Internet Institute focuses not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet.
Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. And I have learned to live without him, and I have learned to live without his need of me. Philanthropy is all that I do now. I need never worry about getting lost because several charities would quickly come and find me. (Laughter)
It's one thing to have an idea for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know, making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24/7 commitment that borders on the obsessive. So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. I believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly and in humility. Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else.
We live our lives forward. So what has all that taught me? I learned that tomorrow's never going to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. And that made me able to cope with change, indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Dame Stephanie Shirley: Why do ambitious women have flat heads?
Dame Stephanie Shirley is the most successful tech entrepreneur you never heard of. In the 1960s, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members. In this frank and often hilarious talk, she explains why she went by “Steve,” how she upended the expectations of the time, and shares some sure-fire ways to identify ambitious women …
Transcript:
When I wrote my memoir, the publishers were really confused. Was it about me as a child refugee, or as a woman who set up a high-tech software company back in the 1960s, one that went public and eventually employed over 8,500 people? Or was it as a mother of an autistic child? Or as a philanthropist that's now given away serious money? Well, it turns out, I'm all of these. So let me tell you my story.
All that I am stems from when I got onto a train in Vienna, part of the Kindertransport that saved nearly 10,000 Jewish children from Nazi Europe. I was five years old, clutching the hand of my nine-year-old sister and had very little idea as to what was going on. "What is England and why am I going there?" I'm only alive because so long ago, I was helped by generous strangers. I was lucky, and doubly lucky to be later reunited with my birth parents. But, sadly, I never bonded with them again. But I've done more in the seven decades since that miserable day when my mother put me on the train than I would ever have dreamed possible. And I love England, my adopted country, with a passion that perhaps only someone who has lost their human rights can feel. I decided to make mine a life that was worth saving. And then, I just got on with it. (Laughter)
Let me take you back to the early 1960s. To get past the gender issues of the time, I set up my own software house at one of the first such startups in Britain. But it was also a company of women, a company for women, an early social business. And people laughed at the very idea because software, at that time, was given away free with hardware. Nobody would buy software, certainly not from a woman. Although women were then coming out of the universities with decent degrees, there was a glass ceiling to our progress. And I'd hit that glass ceiling too often, and I wanted opportunities for women.
I recruited professionally qualified women who'd left the industry on marriage, or when their first child was expected and structured them into a home-working organization. We pioneered the concept of women going back into the workforce after a career break. We pioneered all sorts of new, flexible work methods: job shares, profit-sharing, and eventually, co-ownership when I took a quarter of the company into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. For years, I was the first woman this, or the only woman that. And in those days, I couldn't work on the stock exchange, I couldn't drive a bus or fly an airplane. Indeed, I couldn't open a bank account without my husband's permission. My generation of women fought the battles for the right to work and the right for equal pay.
Nobody really expected much from people at work or in society because all the expectations then were about home and family responsibilities. And I couldn't really face that, so I started to challenge the conventions of the time, even to the extent of changing my name from "Stephanie" to "Steve" in my business development letters, so as to get through the door before anyone realized that he was a she. (Laughter)
My company, called Freelance Programmers, and that's precisely what it was, couldn't have started smaller: on the dining room table, and financed by the equivalent of 100 dollars in today's terms, and financed by my labor and by borrowing against the house. My interests were scientific, the market was commercial -- things such as payroll, which I found rather boring. So I had to compromise with operational research work, which had the intellectual challenge that interested me and the commercial value that was valued by the clients: things like scheduling freight trains, time-tabling buses, stock control, lots and lots of stock control. And eventually, the work came in. We disguised the domestic and part-time nature of the staff by offering fixed prices, one of the very first to do so. And who would have guessed that the programming of the black box flight recorder of Supersonic Concord would have been done by a bunch of women working in their own homes. (Applause)
All we used was a simple "trust the staff" approach and a simple telephone. We even used to ask job applicants, "Do you have access to a telephone?"
An early project was to develop software standards on management control protocols. And software was and still is a maddeningly hard-to-control activity, so that was enormously valuable. We used the standards ourselves, we were even paid to update them over the years, and eventually, they were adopted by NATO. Our programmers -- remember, only women, including gay and transgender -- worked with pencil and paper to develop flowcharts defining each task to be done. And they then wrote code, usually machine code, sometimes binary code, which was then sent by mail to a data center to be punched onto paper tape or card and then re-punched, in order to verify it. All this, before it ever got near a computer. That was programming in the early 1960s.
In 1975, 13 years from startup, equal opportunity legislation came in in Britain and that made it illegal to have our pro-female policies. And as an example of unintended consequences, my female company had to let the men in. (Laughter)
When I started my company of women, the men said, "How interesting, because it only works because it's small." And later, as it became sizable, they accepted, "Yes, it is sizable now, but of no strategic interest." And later, when it was a company valued at over three billion dollars, and I'd made 70 of the staff into millionaires, they sort of said, "Well done, Steve!" (Laughter) (Applause)
You can always tell ambitious women by the shape of our heads: They're flat on top for being patted patronizingly. (Laughter) (Applause) And we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink. (Laughter)
Let me share with you two secrets of success: Surround yourself with first-class people and people that you like; and choose your partner very, very carefully. Because the other day when I said, "My husband's an angel," a woman complained -- "You're lucky," she said, "mine's still alive." (Laughter)
If success were easy, we'd all be millionaires. But in my case, it came in the midst of family trauma and indeed, crisis. Our late son, Giles, was an only child, a beautiful, contented baby. And then, at two and a half, like a changeling in a fairy story, he lost the little speech that he had and turned into a wild, unmanageable toddler. Not the terrible twos; he was profoundly autistic and he never spoke again. Giles was the first resident in the first house of the first charity that I set up to pioneer services for autism. And then there's been a groundbreaking Prior's Court school for pupils with autism and a medical research charity, again, all for autism. Because whenever I found a gap in services, I tried to help. I like doing new things and making new things happen. And I've just started a three-year think tank for autism.
And so that some of my wealth does go back to the industry from which it stems, I've also founded the Oxford Internet Institute and other IT ventures. The Oxford Internet Institute focuses not on the technology, but on the social, economic, legal and ethical issues of the Internet.
Giles died unexpectedly 17 years ago now. And I have learned to live without him, and I have learned to live without his need of me. Philanthropy is all that I do now. I need never worry about getting lost because several charities would quickly come and find me. (Laughter)
It's one thing to have an idea for an enterprise, but as many people in this room will know, making it happen is a very difficult thing and it demands extraordinary energy, self-belief and determination, the courage to risk family and home, and a 24/7 commitment that borders on the obsessive. So it's just as well that I'm a workaholic. I believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly and in humility. Work is not just something I do when I'd rather be doing something else.
We live our lives forward. So what has all that taught me? I learned that tomorrow's never going to be like today, and certainly nothing like yesterday. And that made me able to cope with change, indeed, eventually to welcome change, though I'm told I'm still very difficult.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Sunday, March 29, 2015
FIN/GralInt-John Taft: The Path to Enlightened Finance-video
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
John Taft: The Path to Enlightened Finance
Source: www.slideshare.net
John Taft: The Path to Enlightened Finance
Source: www.slideshare.net
DSGN/GralInt-The Science of Happy Design - SXSW 2015-82slides
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Science of Happy Design - SXSW 2015
Source: www.slideshare.net
The Science of Happy Design - SXSW 2015
Source: www.slideshare.net
DESGN/GralInt-Greylock Partners: Prototyping Research-9slides
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Greylock Partners: Prototyping Research
Source: www.slideshare.net
Greylock Partners: Prototyping Research
Source: www.slideshare.net
PRODMANAG/GralInt-Lean Startup for Agile Product Management-78slides
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Lean Startup for Agile Product Management
Source: www.slideshare.net
Lean Startup for Agile Product Management
Source: www.slideshare.net
TECH/REPW/PRESENT/GralInt-John Maeda: The Playbook for Publishing a Research Report-39slides&more
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
John Maeda: The Playbook for Publishing a Research Report
By Guest Author on March 24, 2015
By John Maeda
John Maeda, former President of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently the Design Partner at venture capital firm Klein Perkins Caufield & Byers, recently got a lesson in presentation creation: He was tasked with publishing and presenting a report on design’s influence on technology today. Weeks of research, collaboration and design iterations resulted in his 39-page “Design in Tech” report, which he presented at this year’s South by Southwest and posted on SlideShare. Maeda shares with us the six lessons he learned from bringing this report to life:
I hear that the “listicle” is going out of fashion in the e-journalism world. Yet I am compelled to create a list – because that is what makes most sense for this post, and because it provides a little concrete ROI. So let me share with you the six things I learned in launching this deck.
Design in Tech Report 2015 from John Maeda
1) Have a vision
One thing I learned from being president of RISD – an experience that I discussed at length in “Redesigning Leadership” – was how important it is to lead into existence what others feel need to happen. This sounds a bit different than your having your own vision, and that is as it should be – because having your own vision doesn’t really achieve anything. It just sits inside your head. What’s better is to figure out what others are envisioning as a collective. Look for it. Find what most closely matches what’s inside your own vision so you can at least take it on credibly and with integrity.
The #DesignInTech Report is the result of thousands of personal interactions – eating dim sum brunches with designers, hosting events at places like FuseProject and Ammunition, and hanging out with all kinds of students at hackathons and office hours. Working with John Donahoe, CEO of eBay Inc., and the hundreds of designers, researchers, and writers across the company highlighted the challenges and possibilities for design even in a company of that scale. Each individual I met seemed to ask if there could be something out there to put the spotlight on how design in the tech industry was becoming truly impactful. Om Malik was a key Yoda along this journey, telling me over coffee one day, “Maybe you can make it happen.” I didn’t know what could happen – but I knew that if I could somehow share what had been shared with me, the vision imparted by everyone I’ve had the chance to meet might come true.
2) Recruit a great team
Searching the Web for information about the tech industry and design brought me to so many sources of information including Pew Research, Nielsen, Gartner, Forrester, IAB, the Cornell University Library, General Motors, IBM, Fortune, BusinessWeek, DesignerFund, Wired, the USPTO, Scientific American, the Processing Foundation, A List Apart, Emigre, Slideshare, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Millward Brown, Atomico, the New York Times, Wikipedia, and so many more. Sifting through all of the data and matching it to what I had observed sat at the core of the report. My goal was to find data that mirrored the vision I had heard from designers in the tech industry. When I could find a valid hit, I couldn’t stop going. I didn’t have a research team – but I will readily claim Google as an awesome member of my team!
I’ve given talks at TED, TED Global, and TEDMED that use a visual style of presentation that I’ve developed since the 1980s. Making the actual slides didn’t worry me as that’s something I know how to do. What I didn’t know how to do was to go deeper on the talent side of the equation, and I didn’t know how to get it out into the world at scale. Understanding how organizations have changed with the growing importance of design in the tech industry wasn’t obvious to me, but I knew it could be a vital aspect of the report. Ever since I heard Klaus Schwab say at Davos – “Capitalism is being replaced by “talentism’” – I knew he had put the finger on what truly matters to any endeavor in business, or in life. That the people matter, and who they are and how they work with one another is what ultimately determines the success or failure of a company.
So I was lucky that two partners at KPCB gave their full support to this project: Juliet de Baubigny on the Talent side, and Christina Lee on the Marketing and Communications side. Getting to work with members of their respective teams was pivotal for two key tasks: 1) Digging deep into expertise and know-how around design talent and teams inside the tech industry, and 2) Knowing exactly how to get the deck “to market” and send it out into the world at scale. Jackie Xu led the former, and Aviv Gilboa led the latter. Before coming to KPCB, Jackie led recruiting at Twitter and knows the ins and outs of “talentism” in Silicon Valley; Aviv launched Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report online last year and had the know-how of distribution. Justin Sayarath, who supports the KPCB Design Fellows program (among other things), came in during the last hours of deploying the #DesignInTech Report.
Our team was small, but somehow it all got out. That “somehow” attests to the quality of the team that came together. The fact that the New York Times, Marketplace, the Washington Post, WIRED, and Fast Company all got behind the #DesignInTech Report is testament to the great team I was fortunate to build for my first “deck.”
3) Recruit even more team members
Working anecdotally could only get the report so far, and even with tons of productive Google searches there wasn’t enough knowledge about #DesignInTech concentrated in one place to access that was less than a few years old. Christina Lee suggested that I interview a few friends to get some data. Before I knew it, together with Jackie Xu we invited 110 designers in tech to participate. That group’s participation was absolutely invaluable – with folks from Twitter, Etsy, Facebook, Flipboard, IBM, Google, Sonos, Netflix, and more – and the picture began to form around the designer-to-engineer ratio at various stages of company development as culled by Jackie. Another group was invited by my Twitter feed @johnmaeda, and 370 participants came aboard to provide more information for the study, including the finding that over 90% believe that designers should code. I fell out of my chair when I saw that statistic emerge.
The journey to create the report reminded me of Lord of the Rings, so I wanted to capture that spirit. I recruited Ge Wang, who is a professor at Stanford and also the co-founder of SMULE. Professor Wang is a renowned artist and technologist, and he kindly offered a performance to add to the report’s debut at SXSW. His contribution underscores what just one new team member can do when they bring their magic. Ge created an unforgettable experience for the entire SXSW audience just three days before the deck went live, and which will be visible on Slideshare shortly.
4) Don’t be afraid to start over again
The photo above is of the status of the #DesignInTech Report on paper roughly two weeks out from the actual report. I laid it out on the big conference table at KPCB, and was getting nervous because it was already the second time I had re-built the deck. Subsequently after using all that surface area, I re-did the report three times as the deadline neared. Each time I did it, I was terrified that I had broken it. It’s the funny thing about writing a book on simplicity: You can easily forget how to make things simpler.
But if I hadn’t redone the report multiple times, I am certain that it would not have been as good. I did so in response to previewing it to a new person – and I was fortunate to get good feedback each time. The problem with good (not to be confused with “positive”) feedback is that it can destroy your confidence. Either you can stand by your guns and feel that you are right, or you can listen all the way, don’t react immediately to everything suggested, let it all marinate, and then decide whether you need to start over or just lightly edit what you have. The quality of the feedback I received was so good that each time I had to do it over completely. Quentin Hardy and Benny Xian independently gave me invaluable feedback, and the impetus to start over again just days before the launch.
5) Keep promises, even if you’re too tired to want to
I had promised all the participants in the study that I would give them a sneak peek of the data or of the presentation. But I was getting super tired towards the end. There were moments like that prototypical Bugs Bunny (apologies to the Pixar generation) animated sequence where you have the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other – both are talking to you and trying to lobby you to do the right thing versus the wrong thing. From all of the kind notes that I’ve been fortunate to receive, I can see that it was important that I kept my promise. And in retrospect, I wish I had allocated more time to engage all the folks who contributed to this report.
6) Don’t stop what you’ve started
I once wrote on Twitter that incrementalism is a good strategy as long as you forget to stop. I realize that after the report’s birth, the angel and devil appeared on my shoulders again – one saying that it’s time to share how the report was made, and the other saying to go to the beach and forget about it. I guess I’ve listened to both, as I am very shortly about to take a nice break – but I am glad to have reflected on my experience and written this post first.
In Closing
Jackie Xu and I co-host a dim sum brunch for designers in the Bay Area, and we’ve been fortunate to create an electronic community together that’s resulted in a few “playbooks” for designers. If you’re hungry for more #DesignInTech information, read the playbooks: There’s a lot there on how to recruit designers, time management tips, the importance of user research, career ladders for design, and more. We hope these will serve as resources for a new generation of #DesignInTech leaders.
Source: blog.slideshare.net
John Maeda: The Playbook for Publishing a Research Report
By Guest Author on March 24, 2015
By John Maeda
John Maeda, former President of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently the Design Partner at venture capital firm Klein Perkins Caufield & Byers, recently got a lesson in presentation creation: He was tasked with publishing and presenting a report on design’s influence on technology today. Weeks of research, collaboration and design iterations resulted in his 39-page “Design in Tech” report, which he presented at this year’s South by Southwest and posted on SlideShare. Maeda shares with us the six lessons he learned from bringing this report to life:
I hear that the “listicle” is going out of fashion in the e-journalism world. Yet I am compelled to create a list – because that is what makes most sense for this post, and because it provides a little concrete ROI. So let me share with you the six things I learned in launching this deck.
Design in Tech Report 2015 from John Maeda
1) Have a vision
One thing I learned from being president of RISD – an experience that I discussed at length in “Redesigning Leadership” – was how important it is to lead into existence what others feel need to happen. This sounds a bit different than your having your own vision, and that is as it should be – because having your own vision doesn’t really achieve anything. It just sits inside your head. What’s better is to figure out what others are envisioning as a collective. Look for it. Find what most closely matches what’s inside your own vision so you can at least take it on credibly and with integrity.
The #DesignInTech Report is the result of thousands of personal interactions – eating dim sum brunches with designers, hosting events at places like FuseProject and Ammunition, and hanging out with all kinds of students at hackathons and office hours. Working with John Donahoe, CEO of eBay Inc., and the hundreds of designers, researchers, and writers across the company highlighted the challenges and possibilities for design even in a company of that scale. Each individual I met seemed to ask if there could be something out there to put the spotlight on how design in the tech industry was becoming truly impactful. Om Malik was a key Yoda along this journey, telling me over coffee one day, “Maybe you can make it happen.” I didn’t know what could happen – but I knew that if I could somehow share what had been shared with me, the vision imparted by everyone I’ve had the chance to meet might come true.
2) Recruit a great team
Searching the Web for information about the tech industry and design brought me to so many sources of information including Pew Research, Nielsen, Gartner, Forrester, IAB, the Cornell University Library, General Motors, IBM, Fortune, BusinessWeek, DesignerFund, Wired, the USPTO, Scientific American, the Processing Foundation, A List Apart, Emigre, Slideshare, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Millward Brown, Atomico, the New York Times, Wikipedia, and so many more. Sifting through all of the data and matching it to what I had observed sat at the core of the report. My goal was to find data that mirrored the vision I had heard from designers in the tech industry. When I could find a valid hit, I couldn’t stop going. I didn’t have a research team – but I will readily claim Google as an awesome member of my team!
I’ve given talks at TED, TED Global, and TEDMED that use a visual style of presentation that I’ve developed since the 1980s. Making the actual slides didn’t worry me as that’s something I know how to do. What I didn’t know how to do was to go deeper on the talent side of the equation, and I didn’t know how to get it out into the world at scale. Understanding how organizations have changed with the growing importance of design in the tech industry wasn’t obvious to me, but I knew it could be a vital aspect of the report. Ever since I heard Klaus Schwab say at Davos – “Capitalism is being replaced by “talentism’” – I knew he had put the finger on what truly matters to any endeavor in business, or in life. That the people matter, and who they are and how they work with one another is what ultimately determines the success or failure of a company.
So I was lucky that two partners at KPCB gave their full support to this project: Juliet de Baubigny on the Talent side, and Christina Lee on the Marketing and Communications side. Getting to work with members of their respective teams was pivotal for two key tasks: 1) Digging deep into expertise and know-how around design talent and teams inside the tech industry, and 2) Knowing exactly how to get the deck “to market” and send it out into the world at scale. Jackie Xu led the former, and Aviv Gilboa led the latter. Before coming to KPCB, Jackie led recruiting at Twitter and knows the ins and outs of “talentism” in Silicon Valley; Aviv launched Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report online last year and had the know-how of distribution. Justin Sayarath, who supports the KPCB Design Fellows program (among other things), came in during the last hours of deploying the #DesignInTech Report.
Our team was small, but somehow it all got out. That “somehow” attests to the quality of the team that came together. The fact that the New York Times, Marketplace, the Washington Post, WIRED, and Fast Company all got behind the #DesignInTech Report is testament to the great team I was fortunate to build for my first “deck.”
3) Recruit even more team members
Working anecdotally could only get the report so far, and even with tons of productive Google searches there wasn’t enough knowledge about #DesignInTech concentrated in one place to access that was less than a few years old. Christina Lee suggested that I interview a few friends to get some data. Before I knew it, together with Jackie Xu we invited 110 designers in tech to participate. That group’s participation was absolutely invaluable – with folks from Twitter, Etsy, Facebook, Flipboard, IBM, Google, Sonos, Netflix, and more – and the picture began to form around the designer-to-engineer ratio at various stages of company development as culled by Jackie. Another group was invited by my Twitter feed @johnmaeda, and 370 participants came aboard to provide more information for the study, including the finding that over 90% believe that designers should code. I fell out of my chair when I saw that statistic emerge.
The journey to create the report reminded me of Lord of the Rings, so I wanted to capture that spirit. I recruited Ge Wang, who is a professor at Stanford and also the co-founder of SMULE. Professor Wang is a renowned artist and technologist, and he kindly offered a performance to add to the report’s debut at SXSW. His contribution underscores what just one new team member can do when they bring their magic. Ge created an unforgettable experience for the entire SXSW audience just three days before the deck went live, and which will be visible on Slideshare shortly.
4) Don’t be afraid to start over again
The photo above is of the status of the #DesignInTech Report on paper roughly two weeks out from the actual report. I laid it out on the big conference table at KPCB, and was getting nervous because it was already the second time I had re-built the deck. Subsequently after using all that surface area, I re-did the report three times as the deadline neared. Each time I did it, I was terrified that I had broken it. It’s the funny thing about writing a book on simplicity: You can easily forget how to make things simpler.
But if I hadn’t redone the report multiple times, I am certain that it would not have been as good. I did so in response to previewing it to a new person – and I was fortunate to get good feedback each time. The problem with good (not to be confused with “positive”) feedback is that it can destroy your confidence. Either you can stand by your guns and feel that you are right, or you can listen all the way, don’t react immediately to everything suggested, let it all marinate, and then decide whether you need to start over or just lightly edit what you have. The quality of the feedback I received was so good that each time I had to do it over completely. Quentin Hardy and Benny Xian independently gave me invaluable feedback, and the impetus to start over again just days before the launch.
5) Keep promises, even if you’re too tired to want to
I had promised all the participants in the study that I would give them a sneak peek of the data or of the presentation. But I was getting super tired towards the end. There were moments like that prototypical Bugs Bunny (apologies to the Pixar generation) animated sequence where you have the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other – both are talking to you and trying to lobby you to do the right thing versus the wrong thing. From all of the kind notes that I’ve been fortunate to receive, I can see that it was important that I kept my promise. And in retrospect, I wish I had allocated more time to engage all the folks who contributed to this report.
6) Don’t stop what you’ve started
I once wrote on Twitter that incrementalism is a good strategy as long as you forget to stop. I realize that after the report’s birth, the angel and devil appeared on my shoulders again – one saying that it’s time to share how the report was made, and the other saying to go to the beach and forget about it. I guess I’ve listened to both, as I am very shortly about to take a nice break – but I am glad to have reflected on my experience and written this post first.
In Closing
Jackie Xu and I co-host a dim sum brunch for designers in the Bay Area, and we’ve been fortunate to create an electronic community together that’s resulted in a few “playbooks” for designers. If you’re hungry for more #DesignInTech information, read the playbooks: There’s a lot there on how to recruit designers, time management tips, the importance of user research, career ladders for design, and more. We hope these will serve as resources for a new generation of #DesignInTech leaders.
Source: blog.slideshare.net
Saturday, March 28, 2015
TECH/INT/GralInt-Sitios para descargar libros gratis y en forma legal
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Sitios para descargar libros gratis y en forma legal
Bibliotecas virtuales que ofrecen obras con derechos caducados, iniciativas de divulgación y recopilaciones que se valen de las licencias abiertas, con espacio para autores inéditos y también consagrados; son una opción para encontrar literatura digital
Por Uriel Bederman | Para LA NACION
En contramarcha a un estudio divulgado recientemente en The Washington Post, el cual sorpresivamente reveló que muchos nativos digitales prefieren los libros físicos antes que sus versiones electrónicas, la lectura en e-readers y tabletas ha crecido en forma exponencial durante la última década. Los usuarios de teléfonos inteligentes también participan en este movimiento, gracias a la llegada de smartphones con pantallas que ya superan las 5 pulgadas y se postulan como dignas plataformas para la lectura.
En México, funcionarios de cultura decidieron agregar la lectura digital como variable en una encuesta que se realizará este año entre los lectores, con el fin de aplicar una perspectiva más ajustada a los tiempos que corren. Encuestas anteriores se mantuvieron en un mismo promedio (2.9 libros al año por persona); según los responsables de la estadística, el nulo crecimiento se explica por no haber evaluado que las tecnologías digitales han perforado directamente en médula de los lectores.
GRATIS Y TAMBIÉN LEGAL
Que un contenido se gratis no es necesariamente sinónimo de piratería. Los amantes del cuento, la novela y la poesía pueden dar con un buen número de bibliotecas virtuales que ofrecen volúmenes que aunque son gratis no vulneran su copyright.
Proyecto Gutenberg es un ejemplo clásico. Creada en la década del '70, esta plataforma ostenta un amplio catálogo de libros para descargar (más de 45 mil), disponibles en diversos formatos, EPUB, Kidle, HTML, texto plano, etc. Las obras son de dominio público, por autorización de los autores o por derechos que caducaron. Si bien la mayor parte de los libros está en inglés, el certero buscador del sitio arroja unos cientos de resultados en español; el Martín Fierro de José Hernández entre ellos.
Los libros digitales, en general disponibles como ePub o PDF, sirven para leer en tabletas, teléfonos y lectores tipo Kindle.
Otra fuente es Wikisource, una iniciativa impulsada por la misma fundación que está detrás de la célebre enciclopedia online Wikipedia. También ofrece textos con derecho de copia libre, con cosas poco conocidas y otras más populares, con clásicos de la literatura argentina como Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte de Horacio Quiroga, El hombre mediocre de José Ingenieros, y los cuentos de Fray Mocho, entre otras. También la Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes tiene muchísimo material disponible de autores españoles e hispanoamericanos.
El Colectivo, una editorial con sede en Buenos Aires, afirma que los volúmenes de su catálogo son "libros libres" en la creencia que "el conocimiento debe poder circular y compartirse como patrimonio cultural de los pueblos". En su sitio web es posible acceder al catálogo que incluye ensayos, narrativa y poesía, entre otros géneros, e ir sin intermediarios a una versión gratis de cada una de las obras en formato PDF, y publicada bajo licencia Creative Commons (permite la libre distribución y uso no comercial, sin dejar de mencionar la fuente). Otras editoriales como Traficantes de Sueños y Bubok emprenden estrategias similares (y también tienen libros con precio de tapa).
Bajo esta misma modalidad funciona ManyBooks.net, con una librería de casi 30 mil títulos (unos 250 títulos en español) y formatos compatibles con Kindle, Nook y iPad, entre otros lectores. El sitio agrega recomendaciones y reseñas escritas por los visitantes.
En Libroteca.net también ofrecen libros en español, lo mismo que que The Internet Archive en su apartado de textos, LibroDot, Ganso y Pulpo y Libroteca son otros espacios en los cuales es posible dar con libros gratuitos y de descarga legal, en un terreno en el que también se anotan las grandes compañías. Con algo de destreza en la búsqueda, también es posible dar con obras sin costo en Amazon, Play Books y iTunes. De hecho, Hundred ceros monitorea los títulos gratis en Amazon. En El Club del ebook también hay una lista de alternativas para descargar libros sin cargo.
¿Y si buscamos títulos tradicionales (y pagos) pero en versión electrónica? Varias de las librerías locales ofrecen la opción de comprar un ebook, lo mismo que las tiendas de Amazon, Apple o Google; en esta nota listamos algunas de las alternativas disponibles en la Argentina.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Sitios para descargar libros gratis y en forma legal
Bibliotecas virtuales que ofrecen obras con derechos caducados, iniciativas de divulgación y recopilaciones que se valen de las licencias abiertas, con espacio para autores inéditos y también consagrados; son una opción para encontrar literatura digital
Por Uriel Bederman | Para LA NACION
En contramarcha a un estudio divulgado recientemente en The Washington Post, el cual sorpresivamente reveló que muchos nativos digitales prefieren los libros físicos antes que sus versiones electrónicas, la lectura en e-readers y tabletas ha crecido en forma exponencial durante la última década. Los usuarios de teléfonos inteligentes también participan en este movimiento, gracias a la llegada de smartphones con pantallas que ya superan las 5 pulgadas y se postulan como dignas plataformas para la lectura.
En México, funcionarios de cultura decidieron agregar la lectura digital como variable en una encuesta que se realizará este año entre los lectores, con el fin de aplicar una perspectiva más ajustada a los tiempos que corren. Encuestas anteriores se mantuvieron en un mismo promedio (2.9 libros al año por persona); según los responsables de la estadística, el nulo crecimiento se explica por no haber evaluado que las tecnologías digitales han perforado directamente en médula de los lectores.
GRATIS Y TAMBIÉN LEGAL
Que un contenido se gratis no es necesariamente sinónimo de piratería. Los amantes del cuento, la novela y la poesía pueden dar con un buen número de bibliotecas virtuales que ofrecen volúmenes que aunque son gratis no vulneran su copyright.
Proyecto Gutenberg es un ejemplo clásico. Creada en la década del '70, esta plataforma ostenta un amplio catálogo de libros para descargar (más de 45 mil), disponibles en diversos formatos, EPUB, Kidle, HTML, texto plano, etc. Las obras son de dominio público, por autorización de los autores o por derechos que caducaron. Si bien la mayor parte de los libros está en inglés, el certero buscador del sitio arroja unos cientos de resultados en español; el Martín Fierro de José Hernández entre ellos.
Los libros digitales, en general disponibles como ePub o PDF, sirven para leer en tabletas, teléfonos y lectores tipo Kindle.
Otra fuente es Wikisource, una iniciativa impulsada por la misma fundación que está detrás de la célebre enciclopedia online Wikipedia. También ofrece textos con derecho de copia libre, con cosas poco conocidas y otras más populares, con clásicos de la literatura argentina como Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte de Horacio Quiroga, El hombre mediocre de José Ingenieros, y los cuentos de Fray Mocho, entre otras. También la Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes tiene muchísimo material disponible de autores españoles e hispanoamericanos.
El Colectivo, una editorial con sede en Buenos Aires, afirma que los volúmenes de su catálogo son "libros libres" en la creencia que "el conocimiento debe poder circular y compartirse como patrimonio cultural de los pueblos". En su sitio web es posible acceder al catálogo que incluye ensayos, narrativa y poesía, entre otros géneros, e ir sin intermediarios a una versión gratis de cada una de las obras en formato PDF, y publicada bajo licencia Creative Commons (permite la libre distribución y uso no comercial, sin dejar de mencionar la fuente). Otras editoriales como Traficantes de Sueños y Bubok emprenden estrategias similares (y también tienen libros con precio de tapa).
Bajo esta misma modalidad funciona ManyBooks.net, con una librería de casi 30 mil títulos (unos 250 títulos en español) y formatos compatibles con Kindle, Nook y iPad, entre otros lectores. El sitio agrega recomendaciones y reseñas escritas por los visitantes.
En Libroteca.net también ofrecen libros en español, lo mismo que que The Internet Archive en su apartado de textos, LibroDot, Ganso y Pulpo y Libroteca son otros espacios en los cuales es posible dar con libros gratuitos y de descarga legal, en un terreno en el que también se anotan las grandes compañías. Con algo de destreza en la búsqueda, también es posible dar con obras sin costo en Amazon, Play Books y iTunes. De hecho, Hundred ceros monitorea los títulos gratis en Amazon. En El Club del ebook también hay una lista de alternativas para descargar libros sin cargo.
¿Y si buscamos títulos tradicionales (y pagos) pero en versión electrónica? Varias de las librerías locales ofrecen la opción de comprar un ebook, lo mismo que las tiendas de Amazon, Apple o Google; en esta nota listamos algunas de las alternativas disponibles en la Argentina.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
ENV/GralInt-Buses eléctricos: en 2020, en 20 ciudades latinoamericanas
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Medio ambiente
Buses eléctricos: en 2020, en 20 ciudades latinoamericanas
Cambiarán la actual flota para reducir gases de efecto invernadero
Por Laura Rocha | LA NACION
La selfie del Metrobus: Calderón, ex presidente de México, junto al alcalde de Quito y la de San José de Costa Rica. Foto: LA NACION / Hernán Zenteno
Trasladarse en buses híbridos o eléctricos será una realidad en América latina en el corto plazo. Ése es el compromiso que asumieron ayer 20 ciudades, incluida Buenos Aires, en el Primer Foro de Alcaldes Latinoamericanos C40 (líderes por el cambio climático). El acuerdo incluye el recambio de la flota de transporte automotor para 2020, uno de los principales generadores de gases de efecto invernadero (GEI), causantes del cambio climático. Y busca tener un impacto en la cumbre mundial del clima de París, en diciembre próximo.
Las 20 ciudades que firmaron el compromiso suman 120 millones de habitantes y cuentan con una flota de 114.655 colectivos. Si se sumaran todas las ciudades latinoamericanas, la reducción potencial de GEI para 2030 sería equivalente a sacar de circulación 526 millones de autos, según un estudio del C40.
Cada ciudad implementará la tecnología alternativa que mejor le convenga y Buenos Aires planea avanzar con metrobuses eléctricos en 2019. Este compromiso, además, requiere la participación de las compañías de colectivos.
También será necesario el aporte que pudieran hacer organismos multilaterales de crédito, presentes en el foro, que cuentan con fondos para la lucha contra el cambio climático. Cada urbe irá cambiando gradualmente la tecnología del transporte automotor, según esta carta de intención.
En Buenos Aires, se diseña para 2019 un corredor de un Metrobus totalmente eléctrico que atravesará el distrito. Aunque no se dio a conocer cuál será la arteria de circulación, LA NACION pudo saber que se trata de una vía con carriles exclusivos similar a la que une, por Juan B. Justo, Palermo con Liniers.
Los 60 buses que conformarán la nueva línea se cargarán en las estaciones que contarán con brazos mecánicos para inyectarles electricidad. La alimentación de la energía provendrá, en principio, de la red eléctrica de abastecimiento callejera, según indicaron fuentes de la Subsecretaría de Tránsito y Transporte porteña.
Cabe recordar que la ciudad de Buenos Aires no tiene jurisdicción sobre las líneas de colectivos urbanas. Puede sí cambiar o diseñar nuevos recorridos y acordar con las empresas de transporte, como ya lo hizo en varios corredores dando lugar a los metrobuses que existen. Hoy la jurisdicción la tiene el Ministerio del Interior y Transporte de la Nación.
"Este Foro se produce en un momento crítico en el desarrollo urbano de América latina", dijo el jefe de gobierno de Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, en el evento que se desarrolló en la Usina del Arte. "Los alcaldes aquí están reconociendo que pueden jugar un papel clave en la región a nivel internacional, pero debemos continuar estableciendo objetivos climáticos agresivos y cumplirlos. Si trabajamos juntos, las ciudades latinoamericanas estarán contribuyendo enormemente a la lucha climática global y al mismo tiempo mejorarán la vida de nuestros ciudadanos."
El Pacto de Alcaldes fue diseñado para identificar y estimular la acción climática a nivel local, y establecer un proceso de reporte público de emisiones contaminantes. El compromiso requiere el armado de un inventario GEI para luego usar esa evaluación como ayuda ante la preparación contra los efectos del cambio climático. Esto abarca la identificación de amenazas y vulnerabilidades específicas de cada ciudad y la creación de un plan de acción que incluya dentro de sus objetivos la reducción de emisiones o de adaptación.
"Las ciudades de toda América latina están haciendo un trabajo muy inteligente para mejorar la vida de las personas", dijo el enviado especial de la ONU para las Ciudades y el Cambio Climático, integrante del C40 y ex alcalde de Nueva York, Michael R. Bloomberg.
Por su parte, Eduardo Paes, presidente de C40 y alcalde de Río de Janeiro, sostuvo: "Al tomar estas medidas, las ciudades latinoamericanas están liderando la conducción de acciones urbanas que reduzcan las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y los riesgos climáticos, favoreciendo la salud, el bienestar y las oportunidades económicas de los ciudadanos".
"Las ciudades latinoamericanas son ampliamente reconocidas como líderes mundiales en el sector del transporte urbano", dijo el alcalde de México DF, Miguel Ángel Mancera. "La implementación y promoción de los sistemas de transporte público limpio en las ciudades no sólo reduce las emisiones y mejora la calidad del aire, sino que también conlleva el potencial de mejorar en gran medida la habitabilidad y la inclusión social, la conexión de las personas a las oportunidades económicas", agregó.
En el mismo sentido, Felipe Calderón, ex presidente de México y presidente de la Comisión Mundial sobre la Economía, indicó: "Con la firma del nuevo Pacto de Alcaldes de hoy, los alcaldes no sólo se comprometen a acelerar la transición a una baja en carbono, sino también a generar economías más resistentes que conviertan la reducción de las emisiones de las principales ciudades en una realidad".
La nómina de alcaldes presentes incluyó también a los jefes comunales de Asunción, Arnaldo Samaniego; de Quito, Mauricio Rodas; de Curitiba, Gustavo Fruet, y la alcaldesa de San José de Costa Rica, Sandra García.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Medio ambiente
Buses eléctricos: en 2020, en 20 ciudades latinoamericanas
Cambiarán la actual flota para reducir gases de efecto invernadero
Por Laura Rocha | LA NACION
La selfie del Metrobus: Calderón, ex presidente de México, junto al alcalde de Quito y la de San José de Costa Rica. Foto: LA NACION / Hernán Zenteno
Trasladarse en buses híbridos o eléctricos será una realidad en América latina en el corto plazo. Ése es el compromiso que asumieron ayer 20 ciudades, incluida Buenos Aires, en el Primer Foro de Alcaldes Latinoamericanos C40 (líderes por el cambio climático). El acuerdo incluye el recambio de la flota de transporte automotor para 2020, uno de los principales generadores de gases de efecto invernadero (GEI), causantes del cambio climático. Y busca tener un impacto en la cumbre mundial del clima de París, en diciembre próximo.
Las 20 ciudades que firmaron el compromiso suman 120 millones de habitantes y cuentan con una flota de 114.655 colectivos. Si se sumaran todas las ciudades latinoamericanas, la reducción potencial de GEI para 2030 sería equivalente a sacar de circulación 526 millones de autos, según un estudio del C40.
Cada ciudad implementará la tecnología alternativa que mejor le convenga y Buenos Aires planea avanzar con metrobuses eléctricos en 2019. Este compromiso, además, requiere la participación de las compañías de colectivos.
También será necesario el aporte que pudieran hacer organismos multilaterales de crédito, presentes en el foro, que cuentan con fondos para la lucha contra el cambio climático. Cada urbe irá cambiando gradualmente la tecnología del transporte automotor, según esta carta de intención.
En Buenos Aires, se diseña para 2019 un corredor de un Metrobus totalmente eléctrico que atravesará el distrito. Aunque no se dio a conocer cuál será la arteria de circulación, LA NACION pudo saber que se trata de una vía con carriles exclusivos similar a la que une, por Juan B. Justo, Palermo con Liniers.
Los 60 buses que conformarán la nueva línea se cargarán en las estaciones que contarán con brazos mecánicos para inyectarles electricidad. La alimentación de la energía provendrá, en principio, de la red eléctrica de abastecimiento callejera, según indicaron fuentes de la Subsecretaría de Tránsito y Transporte porteña.
Cabe recordar que la ciudad de Buenos Aires no tiene jurisdicción sobre las líneas de colectivos urbanas. Puede sí cambiar o diseñar nuevos recorridos y acordar con las empresas de transporte, como ya lo hizo en varios corredores dando lugar a los metrobuses que existen. Hoy la jurisdicción la tiene el Ministerio del Interior y Transporte de la Nación.
"Este Foro se produce en un momento crítico en el desarrollo urbano de América latina", dijo el jefe de gobierno de Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, en el evento que se desarrolló en la Usina del Arte. "Los alcaldes aquí están reconociendo que pueden jugar un papel clave en la región a nivel internacional, pero debemos continuar estableciendo objetivos climáticos agresivos y cumplirlos. Si trabajamos juntos, las ciudades latinoamericanas estarán contribuyendo enormemente a la lucha climática global y al mismo tiempo mejorarán la vida de nuestros ciudadanos."
El Pacto de Alcaldes fue diseñado para identificar y estimular la acción climática a nivel local, y establecer un proceso de reporte público de emisiones contaminantes. El compromiso requiere el armado de un inventario GEI para luego usar esa evaluación como ayuda ante la preparación contra los efectos del cambio climático. Esto abarca la identificación de amenazas y vulnerabilidades específicas de cada ciudad y la creación de un plan de acción que incluya dentro de sus objetivos la reducción de emisiones o de adaptación.
"Las ciudades de toda América latina están haciendo un trabajo muy inteligente para mejorar la vida de las personas", dijo el enviado especial de la ONU para las Ciudades y el Cambio Climático, integrante del C40 y ex alcalde de Nueva York, Michael R. Bloomberg.
Por su parte, Eduardo Paes, presidente de C40 y alcalde de Río de Janeiro, sostuvo: "Al tomar estas medidas, las ciudades latinoamericanas están liderando la conducción de acciones urbanas que reduzcan las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y los riesgos climáticos, favoreciendo la salud, el bienestar y las oportunidades económicas de los ciudadanos".
"Las ciudades latinoamericanas son ampliamente reconocidas como líderes mundiales en el sector del transporte urbano", dijo el alcalde de México DF, Miguel Ángel Mancera. "La implementación y promoción de los sistemas de transporte público limpio en las ciudades no sólo reduce las emisiones y mejora la calidad del aire, sino que también conlleva el potencial de mejorar en gran medida la habitabilidad y la inclusión social, la conexión de las personas a las oportunidades económicas", agregó.
En el mismo sentido, Felipe Calderón, ex presidente de México y presidente de la Comisión Mundial sobre la Economía, indicó: "Con la firma del nuevo Pacto de Alcaldes de hoy, los alcaldes no sólo se comprometen a acelerar la transición a una baja en carbono, sino también a generar economías más resistentes que conviertan la reducción de las emisiones de las principales ciudades en una realidad".
La nómina de alcaldes presentes incluyó también a los jefes comunales de Asunción, Arnaldo Samaniego; de Quito, Mauricio Rodas; de Curitiba, Gustavo Fruet, y la alcaldesa de San José de Costa Rica, Sandra García.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
ENV/GralInt-Convertite en superhéroe y sumate a La Hora del Planeta
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
GENERAL | Jueves, 26 de Marzo de 2015
Convertite en superhéroe y sumate a La Hora del Planeta
Vida Silvestre invita a apagar la luz hoy a las 20.30 hs para concientizar sobre el cambio climático y el impacto de nuestras conductas sobre el ambiente.
Hoy sábado 28 de marzo a las 20.30 hs tendrá lugar una nueva edición de La Hora del Planeta, la campaña global de WWF (la Organización Mundial de Conservación) coordinada por Vida Silvestre en la Argentina, que invita a apagar la luz para concientizar sobre el cambio climático. En 2014, más de 7.000 ciudades de 162 países, incluida la Argentina, apagaron las luces de sus principales monumentos y edificios emblemáticos para sumarse a este movimiento mundial.
Este año Vida Silvestre invita a todos los individuos, bajo el lema “Una hora para tomar conciencia. Toda una vida para ser héroe”, a convertirse en héroes y a usar su poder para ser los agentes del cambio que el planeta necesita. La campaña fomenta la posibilidad de que, a través de acciones cotidianas como apagar la luz cuando no es necesaria, andar en bicicleta en lugar de hacerlo en auto, o desconectar los dispositivos electrónicos cuando no se utilizan, todos podemos hacer algo para cuidar al planeta.
A través de La Hora del Planeta, Vida Silvestre busca impulsar un cambio en la sociedad para trabajar junto a gobiernos, empresas e individuos en la búsqueda de una solución al cambio climático. Asimismo, esta iniciativa mundial es un llamado a los gobiernos del mundo para alcanzar un acuerdo global que apoye el desarrollo de políticas que apunten a reducir las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y a pensar en un futuro en que la sociedad pueda desarrollarse en armonía con la naturaleza.
Por el momento, asumieron el compromiso de apagar las luces de sus edificios emblemáticos 31 municipios de 12 provincias distintas y toda la provincia de San Luis: Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires; Rafaela, Totoras, Rosario y Venado Tuerto (Santa Fe); San Isidro, Vicente López, Balcarce, Olavarría, Bahía Blanca, Adolfo Alsina, Hurlingham, Berazategui, Junin, Tandil, Tigre, Ituzaingo. (Buenos Aires); Simoca y San Miguel de Tucumán (Tucumán); Resistencia (Chaco); Malargüe y Godoy Cruz (Mendoza); Gualeguaychú y Paraná (Entre Ríos); Villa Carlos Paz y Río Cuarto (Córdoba); Santa Rosa (La Pampa); la ciudad de Neuquén (Neuquén); Rawson y Puerto Madryn (Chubut) y la ciudad de Salta.
Apoyan la campaña: HSBC, Sponsor de la campaña, y Allianz, Brother, Carrefour, Coca-Cola, Honda, LAN Argentina y Quilmes, como Auspiciantes, se sumarán apagando las luces de sus marquesinas y difundiendo la iniciativa entre sus clientes, proveedores y empleados.
¡Estelares en el Planetario!
Vida Silvestre celebra esta oportunidad para convertirse en héroes con la presentación especial de Estelares, el sábado 28 a partir de las 20 horas en el Planetario, con luces LED, que consumen un 10% de la energía que se utiliza normalmente en un evento de estas características. El evento es libre y gratuito y se suspende por lluvia.
¡Apagá la luz y vení al Planetario a celebrar La Hora del Planeta con Vida Silvestre!
Encontrá algunos tips para ser eficientes con la energía:
1. Apagá las luces que no estés usando.
Aunque sean lamparitas de bajo consumo, todo suma. Apagar la luz es el símbolo de la Hora del Planeta, para demostrar, siempre, que el cambio climático te importa.
2. Desenchufá los aparatos que no uses.
Aunque estén apagados, consumen energía igual. Esa energía que desperdiciás, genera más consumo.
3. Elegí artefactos eficientes.
Muchos artefactos, incluyendo heladeras, equipos de aire acondicionado y lavarropas, entre otros, vienen con un sistema de etiquetas de eficiencia que te ayudan a elegir la opción que consume mejor.
4. Se eficiente a la hora de viajar.
Si podés caminar o ir en bicicleta, además de usar menos combustible, es la opción más saludable. Si no queda otra, intentá usar transporte público. Si tenés auto, compartilo para que viajen la mayor cantidad de personas.
Sobre Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina
La Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina es una organización no gubernamental, de bien público y sin fines de lucro creada en 1977. Su misión es proponer e implementar soluciones para conservar la naturaleza, promover el uso sustentable de los recursos naturales y una conducta responsable en un contexto de cambio climático. Desde 1988, está asociada y representa en la Argentina WWF, una de las organizaciones independientes de conservación más grande del mundo, presente en 100 países.
Más información: www.vidasilvestre.org.ar
www.facebook.com/vidasilvestre
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar/www.hacercomunidad.org
GENERAL | Jueves, 26 de Marzo de 2015
Convertite en superhéroe y sumate a La Hora del Planeta
Vida Silvestre invita a apagar la luz hoy a las 20.30 hs para concientizar sobre el cambio climático y el impacto de nuestras conductas sobre el ambiente.
Hoy sábado 28 de marzo a las 20.30 hs tendrá lugar una nueva edición de La Hora del Planeta, la campaña global de WWF (la Organización Mundial de Conservación) coordinada por Vida Silvestre en la Argentina, que invita a apagar la luz para concientizar sobre el cambio climático. En 2014, más de 7.000 ciudades de 162 países, incluida la Argentina, apagaron las luces de sus principales monumentos y edificios emblemáticos para sumarse a este movimiento mundial.
Este año Vida Silvestre invita a todos los individuos, bajo el lema “Una hora para tomar conciencia. Toda una vida para ser héroe”, a convertirse en héroes y a usar su poder para ser los agentes del cambio que el planeta necesita. La campaña fomenta la posibilidad de que, a través de acciones cotidianas como apagar la luz cuando no es necesaria, andar en bicicleta en lugar de hacerlo en auto, o desconectar los dispositivos electrónicos cuando no se utilizan, todos podemos hacer algo para cuidar al planeta.
A través de La Hora del Planeta, Vida Silvestre busca impulsar un cambio en la sociedad para trabajar junto a gobiernos, empresas e individuos en la búsqueda de una solución al cambio climático. Asimismo, esta iniciativa mundial es un llamado a los gobiernos del mundo para alcanzar un acuerdo global que apoye el desarrollo de políticas que apunten a reducir las emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero y a pensar en un futuro en que la sociedad pueda desarrollarse en armonía con la naturaleza.
Por el momento, asumieron el compromiso de apagar las luces de sus edificios emblemáticos 31 municipios de 12 provincias distintas y toda la provincia de San Luis: Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires; Rafaela, Totoras, Rosario y Venado Tuerto (Santa Fe); San Isidro, Vicente López, Balcarce, Olavarría, Bahía Blanca, Adolfo Alsina, Hurlingham, Berazategui, Junin, Tandil, Tigre, Ituzaingo. (Buenos Aires); Simoca y San Miguel de Tucumán (Tucumán); Resistencia (Chaco); Malargüe y Godoy Cruz (Mendoza); Gualeguaychú y Paraná (Entre Ríos); Villa Carlos Paz y Río Cuarto (Córdoba); Santa Rosa (La Pampa); la ciudad de Neuquén (Neuquén); Rawson y Puerto Madryn (Chubut) y la ciudad de Salta.
Apoyan la campaña: HSBC, Sponsor de la campaña, y Allianz, Brother, Carrefour, Coca-Cola, Honda, LAN Argentina y Quilmes, como Auspiciantes, se sumarán apagando las luces de sus marquesinas y difundiendo la iniciativa entre sus clientes, proveedores y empleados.
¡Estelares en el Planetario!
Vida Silvestre celebra esta oportunidad para convertirse en héroes con la presentación especial de Estelares, el sábado 28 a partir de las 20 horas en el Planetario, con luces LED, que consumen un 10% de la energía que se utiliza normalmente en un evento de estas características. El evento es libre y gratuito y se suspende por lluvia.
¡Apagá la luz y vení al Planetario a celebrar La Hora del Planeta con Vida Silvestre!
Encontrá algunos tips para ser eficientes con la energía:
1. Apagá las luces que no estés usando.
Aunque sean lamparitas de bajo consumo, todo suma. Apagar la luz es el símbolo de la Hora del Planeta, para demostrar, siempre, que el cambio climático te importa.
2. Desenchufá los aparatos que no uses.
Aunque estén apagados, consumen energía igual. Esa energía que desperdiciás, genera más consumo.
3. Elegí artefactos eficientes.
Muchos artefactos, incluyendo heladeras, equipos de aire acondicionado y lavarropas, entre otros, vienen con un sistema de etiquetas de eficiencia que te ayudan a elegir la opción que consume mejor.
4. Se eficiente a la hora de viajar.
Si podés caminar o ir en bicicleta, además de usar menos combustible, es la opción más saludable. Si no queda otra, intentá usar transporte público. Si tenés auto, compartilo para que viajen la mayor cantidad de personas.
Sobre Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina
La Fundación Vida Silvestre Argentina es una organización no gubernamental, de bien público y sin fines de lucro creada en 1977. Su misión es proponer e implementar soluciones para conservar la naturaleza, promover el uso sustentable de los recursos naturales y una conducta responsable en un contexto de cambio climático. Desde 1988, está asociada y representa en la Argentina WWF, una de las organizaciones independientes de conservación más grande del mundo, presente en 100 países.
Más información: www.vidasilvestre.org.ar
www.facebook.com/vidasilvestre
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar/www.hacercomunidad.org
TECH/COMP/GralInt-9 trucos para que tu video se vuelva viral
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
9 trucos para que tu video se vuelva viral
Los expertos en videos ofrecen algunos consejos para lograr un video que sea muy popular
Cuando muchas personas ven y comparten un video por Internet, se dice que éste se vuelve viral , con una suerte de efecto de bola de nieve que alimenta su difusión sin que su autor haga nada más que publicarlo.
Pero, ¿cómo tiene que ser un video para que eso ocurra? La BBC habló con varios expertos del tema para que compartieran sus recetas mágicas.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
9 trucos para que tu video se vuelva viral
Los expertos en videos ofrecen algunos consejos para lograr un video que sea muy popular
Cuando muchas personas ven y comparten un video por Internet, se dice que éste se vuelve viral , con una suerte de efecto de bola de nieve que alimenta su difusión sin que su autor haga nada más que publicarlo.
Pero, ¿cómo tiene que ser un video para que eso ocurra? La BBC habló con varios expertos del tema para que compartieran sus recetas mágicas.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Monday, March 23, 2015
GralInt-TED Talks-Robyn Stein DeLuca: The good news about PMS
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed November 2014 at TEDxSBU
Robyn Stein DeLuca: The good news about PMS
Everybody knows that most women go a little crazy right before they get their period, that their reproductive hormones cause their emotions to fluctuate wildly. Except: There's very little scientific consensus about premenstrual syndrome. Says psychologist Robyn Stein DeLuca, science doesn't agree on the definition, cause, treatment or even existence of PMS. She explores what we know and don't know about it — and why the popular myth has persisted.
Transcript:
How many people here have heard of PMS? Everybody, right? Everyone knows that women go a little crazy right before they get their period, that the menstrual cycle throws them onto an inevitable hormonal roller coaster of irrationality and irritability. There's a general assumption that fluctuations in reproductive hormones cause extreme emotions and that the great majority of women are affected by this. Well, I am here to tell you that scientific evidence says neither of those assumptions is true. I'm here to give you the good news about PMS.
But first, let's take a look at how firmly the idea of PMS is entrenched in American culture. If you examine newspaper or magazine articles, you'll see how widely assumed it is that everyone gets PMS. In an article in the magazine Redbook titled "You: PMS Free," readers were informed that between 80 to 90 percent of women suffer from PMS. L.A. Muscle magazine warned its readers that 40 to 50 percent of women suffer from PMS, and that it plays a major role in women's mental and physical health, and a couple of years ago, even the Wall Street Journal ran an article on calcium as a treatment for PMS, asking its female readers, "Do you turn into a witch every month?"
From all these articles, you would think there must be a mountain of research verifying the widespread nature of PMS. However, after five decades of research, there's no strong consensus on the definition, the cause, the treatment, or even the existence of PMS. As most commonly defined by psychologists, PMS involves negative behavioral, cognitive and physical symptoms from the time of ovulation to menstruation. But here's where it gets tricky. Over 150 different symptoms have been used to diagnose PMS, and here are just a few of those.
Now, I want to be clear here. I'm not saying women don't get some of these symptoms. What I'm saying is that getting some of these symptoms doesn't amount to a mental disorder, and when psychologists come up with a disorder that's so vaguely defined, the label eventually becomes meaningless. With a list of symptoms this long and wide, I could have PMS, you could have PMS, the guy in the third row here could have PMS, my dog could have PMS. (Laughter) Some researchers said you had to have five symptoms. Some said three. Other researchers said that symptoms were only meaningful if they were highly disturbing to you, but others said minor symptoms were just as important. For many years, because there was no standardization in the definition of PMS, when psychologists tried to report prevalence rates, their estimates ranged from five percent of women to 97 percent of women, so at the same time almost no one and almost everyone had PMS.
Overall, the weaknesses in the methods of research on PMS have been considerable. First, many studies asked women to report their symptoms retrospectively, looking to the past and relying on memory, which is known to inflate reporting of PMS compared to what's called prospective reporting, which involves keeping a daily log of symptoms for at least two months in a row. Many studies also exclusively focused on white, middle-class women, which makes it problematic to apply study findings to all women. We know there's a strong cultural component to the belief in PMS because it's nearly unheard of outside of Western nations. Third, many studies failed to use control groups. If we want to understand the specific characteristics of women who have PMS, we need to be able to compare them to women who don't have PMS. And finally, many different types of questionnaires were used to diagnose PMS, focusing on different symptoms, symptom duration and severity. To do reliable research on any condition, scientists must agree on the specific characteristics that make up that condition so they're all talking about the same thing, and with PMS, this has not been the case.
However, in 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, thankfully -- it's also the manual for mental health professionals -- they redefined PMS as PMDD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. And dysphoria refers to a feeling of agitation or unease. And according to these new DSM guidelines, in most menstrual cycles in the last year, at least five of 11 possible symptoms must appear in the week before menstruation starts; the symptoms must improve once menstruation has begun; and the symptoms must be absent the week after menstruation has ended. One of these symptoms must come from this list of four: marked mood swings, irritability, anxiety, or depression. The other symptoms could come from the first slide or from those on the second slide, including symptoms like feeling out of control and changes in sleep or appetite. The DSM also required now that the symptoms should be associated with clinically significant distress -- there should be some kind of disturbance in work or school or social relationships -- and that symptoms and symptom severity should now be documented by keeping a daily log for at least two cycles in a row. And finally, the DSM required that the emotional disturbance should be more than simply an exacerbation of an already existing disorder. So scientifically speaking, this is an improvement. We now have a limited number of symptoms, and a high impact on functioning that's required, and the reporting and timing of symptoms have both become very specific. Well, using this criteria and looking at most recent studies, we see that on average, three to eight percent of women suffer from PMDD. Not all women, not most women, not the majority of women, not even a lot of women: three to eight percent. For everyone else, variables like stressful events or happy occasions or even day of the week are more powerful predictors of mood than time of the month, and this is the information the scientific community has had since the 1990s. In 2002, my colleagues and I published an article describing the PMS and PMDD research, and several similar articles have appeared in psychology journals. The questions is, why hasn't this information trickled down to the public? Why do these myths persist?
Well, certainly the onslaught of messages that women receive from books, TV, movies, the Internet, that everyone gets PMS go a long way in convincing them it must be true. Research tells us that the more a woman believes that everyone gets PMS, the more likely she is to erroneously report that she has it. Let me tell you what I mean by "erroneously." You might ask her, "Do you have PMS?" and she says yes, but then, when you have her keep a daily log of psychological symptoms for two months, no correlation is found between her symptoms and time of the month.
Another reason for the persistence of the PMS myth has to do with the narrow boundaries of the feminine role. Feminist psychologists like Joan Chrisler have suggested that taking on the label of PMS allows women to express emotions that would otherwise be considered unladylike. The near universal definition of a good woman is one who is happy, loving, caring for others, and taking great satisfaction from that role. Well, PMS has become a permission slip to be angry, complain, be irritated, without losing the title of good woman. We know that the variables in a woman's environment are much more likely to cause her to be angry than her hormones, but when she attributes anger to hormones, she's absolved of responsibility or criticism. "Oh, that's not who she is. It's out of her control." And while this can be a useful tool, it serves to invalidate women's emotions. When people respond to a woman's anger with the thought, "Oh, it's just that time of the month," her ability to be taken seriously or effect change is severely limited.
So who else benefits from the myth of PMS? Well, I can tell you that treating PMS has become a profitable, thriving industry. Amazon.com currently offers over 1,900 books on PMS treatment. A quick Google search will bring up a cornucopia of clinics, workshops and seminars. Reputable Internet sources of medical information like WebMD or the Mayo Clinic list PMS as a known disorder. It's not a known disorder, but they list it. And they also list the medications that physicians have prescribed to treat it, like anti-depressants or hormones. Interestingly, though, both websites say that the success of medication in treating PMS symptoms vary from woman to woman. Well, that doesn't make sense. If you've got a distinct disorder with a distinct cause, which PMS is supposed to be, then the treatment should bring improvement for a great number of women. This has not been the case with these treatments, and FDA regulations say that for a drug to be deemed effective, a large portion of the target population should see clinically significant improvement. So we have not had that at all with these so-called treatments. However, the financial gain of perpetuating the myth that PMS is a common mental disorder and is treatable is quite substantial. When women are prescribed drugs like anti-depressants or hormones, medical protocol requires that they have physician follow-up every three months. That's a lot of doctor visits. Pharmaceutical companies reap untold profits when women are convinced they should take a prescribed medication for all of their child-bearing lives. Over-the-counter drugs like Midol even claim to treat PMS symptoms like tension and irritability, even though they only contain a diarrhetic, a pain reliever and caffeine. Now, far be it from me to argue with the magical powers of caffeine, but I don't think reducing tension is one of them. Since 2002, Midol has marketed a Teen Midol to adolescents. They are aiming at young girls early, to convince them that everyone gets PMS and that it will make you a monster, but wait, there's something you can do about it: Take Midol and you will be a human being again. In 2013, Midol took in 48 million dollars in sales revenue.
So while perpetuating the myth of PMS has been lucrative for some, it comes with some serious adverse consequences for women. First, it contributes to the medicalization of women's reproductive health. The medical field has a long history of conceptualizing women's reproductive processes as illnesses that require treatment, and this has come at many costs, including excessive Cesarean deliveries, hysterectomies and prescribed hormone treatments that have harmed rather than enhanced women's health. Second, the PMS myth also contributes to the stereotype of women as irrational and overemotional. When the menstrual cycle is described as a hormonal roller coaster that turns women into angry beasts, it becomes easy to question the competence of all women. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce, but still there's a minuscule number of women at the highest echelons of fields like government or business, and when we think about who makes for a good CEO or senator, someone who has qualities like rationality, steadiness, competence come to mind, and in our culture, that sounds more like a man than a woman, and the PMS myth contributes to that.
Psychologists know that the moods of men and women are more similar than different. One study followed men and women for four to six months and found that the number of mood swings they experienced and the severity of those mood swings were no different. And finally, the PMS myth keeps women from dealing with the actual issues causing them emotional upset. Individual issues like quality of relationship or work conditions or societal issues like racism or sexism or the daily grind of poverty are all strongly related to daily mood. Sweeping emotions under the rug of PMS keeps women from understanding the source of their negative emotions, but it also takes away the opportunity to take any action to change them.
So the good news about PMS is that while some women get some symptoms because of the menstrual cycle, the great majority don't get a mental disorder. They go to work or school, take care of their families, and function at a normal level. We know the emotions and moods of men and women are more similar than different, so let's walk away from the tired old PMS myth of women as witches and embrace the reality of high emotional and professional functioning the great majority of women live every day.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed November 2014 at TEDxSBU
Robyn Stein DeLuca: The good news about PMS
Everybody knows that most women go a little crazy right before they get their period, that their reproductive hormones cause their emotions to fluctuate wildly. Except: There's very little scientific consensus about premenstrual syndrome. Says psychologist Robyn Stein DeLuca, science doesn't agree on the definition, cause, treatment or even existence of PMS. She explores what we know and don't know about it — and why the popular myth has persisted.
Transcript:
How many people here have heard of PMS? Everybody, right? Everyone knows that women go a little crazy right before they get their period, that the menstrual cycle throws them onto an inevitable hormonal roller coaster of irrationality and irritability. There's a general assumption that fluctuations in reproductive hormones cause extreme emotions and that the great majority of women are affected by this. Well, I am here to tell you that scientific evidence says neither of those assumptions is true. I'm here to give you the good news about PMS.
But first, let's take a look at how firmly the idea of PMS is entrenched in American culture. If you examine newspaper or magazine articles, you'll see how widely assumed it is that everyone gets PMS. In an article in the magazine Redbook titled "You: PMS Free," readers were informed that between 80 to 90 percent of women suffer from PMS. L.A. Muscle magazine warned its readers that 40 to 50 percent of women suffer from PMS, and that it plays a major role in women's mental and physical health, and a couple of years ago, even the Wall Street Journal ran an article on calcium as a treatment for PMS, asking its female readers, "Do you turn into a witch every month?"
From all these articles, you would think there must be a mountain of research verifying the widespread nature of PMS. However, after five decades of research, there's no strong consensus on the definition, the cause, the treatment, or even the existence of PMS. As most commonly defined by psychologists, PMS involves negative behavioral, cognitive and physical symptoms from the time of ovulation to menstruation. But here's where it gets tricky. Over 150 different symptoms have been used to diagnose PMS, and here are just a few of those.
Now, I want to be clear here. I'm not saying women don't get some of these symptoms. What I'm saying is that getting some of these symptoms doesn't amount to a mental disorder, and when psychologists come up with a disorder that's so vaguely defined, the label eventually becomes meaningless. With a list of symptoms this long and wide, I could have PMS, you could have PMS, the guy in the third row here could have PMS, my dog could have PMS. (Laughter) Some researchers said you had to have five symptoms. Some said three. Other researchers said that symptoms were only meaningful if they were highly disturbing to you, but others said minor symptoms were just as important. For many years, because there was no standardization in the definition of PMS, when psychologists tried to report prevalence rates, their estimates ranged from five percent of women to 97 percent of women, so at the same time almost no one and almost everyone had PMS.
Overall, the weaknesses in the methods of research on PMS have been considerable. First, many studies asked women to report their symptoms retrospectively, looking to the past and relying on memory, which is known to inflate reporting of PMS compared to what's called prospective reporting, which involves keeping a daily log of symptoms for at least two months in a row. Many studies also exclusively focused on white, middle-class women, which makes it problematic to apply study findings to all women. We know there's a strong cultural component to the belief in PMS because it's nearly unheard of outside of Western nations. Third, many studies failed to use control groups. If we want to understand the specific characteristics of women who have PMS, we need to be able to compare them to women who don't have PMS. And finally, many different types of questionnaires were used to diagnose PMS, focusing on different symptoms, symptom duration and severity. To do reliable research on any condition, scientists must agree on the specific characteristics that make up that condition so they're all talking about the same thing, and with PMS, this has not been the case.
However, in 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, thankfully -- it's also the manual for mental health professionals -- they redefined PMS as PMDD, Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. And dysphoria refers to a feeling of agitation or unease. And according to these new DSM guidelines, in most menstrual cycles in the last year, at least five of 11 possible symptoms must appear in the week before menstruation starts; the symptoms must improve once menstruation has begun; and the symptoms must be absent the week after menstruation has ended. One of these symptoms must come from this list of four: marked mood swings, irritability, anxiety, or depression. The other symptoms could come from the first slide or from those on the second slide, including symptoms like feeling out of control and changes in sleep or appetite. The DSM also required now that the symptoms should be associated with clinically significant distress -- there should be some kind of disturbance in work or school or social relationships -- and that symptoms and symptom severity should now be documented by keeping a daily log for at least two cycles in a row. And finally, the DSM required that the emotional disturbance should be more than simply an exacerbation of an already existing disorder. So scientifically speaking, this is an improvement. We now have a limited number of symptoms, and a high impact on functioning that's required, and the reporting and timing of symptoms have both become very specific. Well, using this criteria and looking at most recent studies, we see that on average, three to eight percent of women suffer from PMDD. Not all women, not most women, not the majority of women, not even a lot of women: three to eight percent. For everyone else, variables like stressful events or happy occasions or even day of the week are more powerful predictors of mood than time of the month, and this is the information the scientific community has had since the 1990s. In 2002, my colleagues and I published an article describing the PMS and PMDD research, and several similar articles have appeared in psychology journals. The questions is, why hasn't this information trickled down to the public? Why do these myths persist?
Well, certainly the onslaught of messages that women receive from books, TV, movies, the Internet, that everyone gets PMS go a long way in convincing them it must be true. Research tells us that the more a woman believes that everyone gets PMS, the more likely she is to erroneously report that she has it. Let me tell you what I mean by "erroneously." You might ask her, "Do you have PMS?" and she says yes, but then, when you have her keep a daily log of psychological symptoms for two months, no correlation is found between her symptoms and time of the month.
Another reason for the persistence of the PMS myth has to do with the narrow boundaries of the feminine role. Feminist psychologists like Joan Chrisler have suggested that taking on the label of PMS allows women to express emotions that would otherwise be considered unladylike. The near universal definition of a good woman is one who is happy, loving, caring for others, and taking great satisfaction from that role. Well, PMS has become a permission slip to be angry, complain, be irritated, without losing the title of good woman. We know that the variables in a woman's environment are much more likely to cause her to be angry than her hormones, but when she attributes anger to hormones, she's absolved of responsibility or criticism. "Oh, that's not who she is. It's out of her control." And while this can be a useful tool, it serves to invalidate women's emotions. When people respond to a woman's anger with the thought, "Oh, it's just that time of the month," her ability to be taken seriously or effect change is severely limited.
So who else benefits from the myth of PMS? Well, I can tell you that treating PMS has become a profitable, thriving industry. Amazon.com currently offers over 1,900 books on PMS treatment. A quick Google search will bring up a cornucopia of clinics, workshops and seminars. Reputable Internet sources of medical information like WebMD or the Mayo Clinic list PMS as a known disorder. It's not a known disorder, but they list it. And they also list the medications that physicians have prescribed to treat it, like anti-depressants or hormones. Interestingly, though, both websites say that the success of medication in treating PMS symptoms vary from woman to woman. Well, that doesn't make sense. If you've got a distinct disorder with a distinct cause, which PMS is supposed to be, then the treatment should bring improvement for a great number of women. This has not been the case with these treatments, and FDA regulations say that for a drug to be deemed effective, a large portion of the target population should see clinically significant improvement. So we have not had that at all with these so-called treatments. However, the financial gain of perpetuating the myth that PMS is a common mental disorder and is treatable is quite substantial. When women are prescribed drugs like anti-depressants or hormones, medical protocol requires that they have physician follow-up every three months. That's a lot of doctor visits. Pharmaceutical companies reap untold profits when women are convinced they should take a prescribed medication for all of their child-bearing lives. Over-the-counter drugs like Midol even claim to treat PMS symptoms like tension and irritability, even though they only contain a diarrhetic, a pain reliever and caffeine. Now, far be it from me to argue with the magical powers of caffeine, but I don't think reducing tension is one of them. Since 2002, Midol has marketed a Teen Midol to adolescents. They are aiming at young girls early, to convince them that everyone gets PMS and that it will make you a monster, but wait, there's something you can do about it: Take Midol and you will be a human being again. In 2013, Midol took in 48 million dollars in sales revenue.
So while perpetuating the myth of PMS has been lucrative for some, it comes with some serious adverse consequences for women. First, it contributes to the medicalization of women's reproductive health. The medical field has a long history of conceptualizing women's reproductive processes as illnesses that require treatment, and this has come at many costs, including excessive Cesarean deliveries, hysterectomies and prescribed hormone treatments that have harmed rather than enhanced women's health. Second, the PMS myth also contributes to the stereotype of women as irrational and overemotional. When the menstrual cycle is described as a hormonal roller coaster that turns women into angry beasts, it becomes easy to question the competence of all women. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce, but still there's a minuscule number of women at the highest echelons of fields like government or business, and when we think about who makes for a good CEO or senator, someone who has qualities like rationality, steadiness, competence come to mind, and in our culture, that sounds more like a man than a woman, and the PMS myth contributes to that.
Psychologists know that the moods of men and women are more similar than different. One study followed men and women for four to six months and found that the number of mood swings they experienced and the severity of those mood swings were no different. And finally, the PMS myth keeps women from dealing with the actual issues causing them emotional upset. Individual issues like quality of relationship or work conditions or societal issues like racism or sexism or the daily grind of poverty are all strongly related to daily mood. Sweeping emotions under the rug of PMS keeps women from understanding the source of their negative emotions, but it also takes away the opportunity to take any action to change them.
So the good news about PMS is that while some women get some symptoms because of the menstrual cycle, the great majority don't get a mental disorder. They go to work or school, take care of their families, and function at a normal level. We know the emotions and moods of men and women are more similar than different, so let's walk away from the tired old PMS myth of women as witches and embrace the reality of high emotional and professional functioning the great majority of women live every day.
Thank you.
(Applause)
TECH/GralInt-TED Talks-Joseph DeSimone: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Joseph DeSimone: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?
What we think of as 3D printing, says Joseph DeSimone, is really just 2D printing over and over ... slowly. Onstage at TED2015, he unveils a bold new technique — inspired, yes, by Terminator 2 — that's 25 to 100 times faster, and creates smooth, strong parts. Could it finally help to fulfill the tremendous promise of 3D printing?
Transcript:
I'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years, and it's in the area of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing.
You see this object here. It looks fairly simple, but it's quite complex at the same time. It's a set of concentric geodesic structures with linkages between each one. In its context, it is not manufacturable by traditional manufacturing techniques. It has a symmetry such that you can't injection mold it. You can't even manufacture it through milling. This is a job for a 3D printer, but most 3D printers would take between three and 10 hours to fabricate it, and we're going to take the risk tonight to try to fabricate it onstage during this 10-minute talk. Wish us luck.
Now, 3D printing is actually a misnomer. It's actually 2D printing over and over again, and it in fact uses the technologies associated with 2D printing. Think about inkjet printing where you lay down ink on a page to make letters, and then do that over and over again to build up a three-dimensional object. In microelectronics, they use something called lithography to do the same sort of thing, to make the transistors and integrated circuits and build up a structure several times. These are all 2D printing technologies.
Now, I'm a chemist, a material scientist too, and my co-inventors are also material scientists, one a chemist, one a physicist, and we began to be interested in 3D printing. And very often, as you know, new ideas are often simple connections between people with different experiences in different communities, and that's our story.
Now, we were inspired by the "Terminator 2" scene for T-1000, and we thought, why couldn't a 3D printer operate in this fashion, where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object? Okay, just like the movies. And could we be inspired by Hollywood and come up with ways to actually try to get this to work? And that was our challenge. And our approach would be, if we could do this, then we could fundamentally address the three issues holding back 3D printing from being a manufacturing process.
One, 3D printing takes forever. There are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed parts. (Laughter) The layer by layer process leads to defects in mechanical properties, and if we could grow continuously, we could eliminate those defects. And in fact, if we could grow really fast, we could also start using materials that are self-curing, and we could have amazing properties. So if we could pull this off, imitate Hollywood, we could in fact address 3D manufacturing.
Our approach is to use some standard knowledge in polymer chemistry to harness light and oxygen to grow parts continuously. Light and oxygen work in different ways. Light can take a resin and convert it to a solid, can convert a liquid to a solid. Oxygen inhibits that process. So light and oxygen are polar opposites from one another from a chemical point of view, and if we can control spatially the light and oxygen, we could control this process. And we refer to this as CLIP. [Continuous Liquid Interface Production.] It has three functional components. One, it has a reservoir that holds the puddle, just like the T-1000. At the bottom of the reservoir is a special window. I'll come back to that. In addition, it has a stage that will lower into the puddle and pull the object out of the liquid. The third component is a digital light projection system underneath the reservoir, illuminating with light in the ultraviolet region.
Now, the key is that this window in the bottom of this reservoir, it's a composite, it's a very special window. It's not only transparent to light but it's permeable to oxygen. It's got characteristics like a contact lens. So we can see how the process works. You can start to see that as you lower a stage in there, in a traditional process, with an oxygen-impermeable window, you make a two-dimensional pattern and you end up gluing that onto the window with a traditional window, and so in order to introduce the next layer, you have to separate it, introduce new resin, reposition it, and do this process over and over again. But with our very special window, what we're able to do is, with oxygen coming through the bottom as light hits it, that oxygen inhibits the reaction, and we form a dead zone. This dead zone is on the order of tens of microns thick, so that's two or three diameters of a red blood cell, right at the window interface that remains a liquid, and we pull this object up, and as we talked about in a Science paper, as we change the oxygen content, we can change the dead zone thickness. And so we have a number of key variables that we control: oxygen content, the light, the light intensity, the dose to cure, the viscosity, the geometry, and we use very sophisticated software to control this process.
The result is pretty staggering. It's 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3D printers, which is game-changing. In addition, as our ability to deliver liquid to that interface, we can go 1,000 times faster I believe, and that in fact opens up the opportunity for generating a lot of heat, and as a chemical engineer, I get very excited at heat transfer and the idea that we might one day have water-cooled 3D printers, because they're going so fast. In addition, because we're growing things, we eliminate the layers, and the parts are monolithic. You don't see the surface structure. You have molecularly smooth surfaces. And the mechanical properties of most parts made in a 3D printer are notorious for having properties that depend on the orientation with which how you printed it, because of the layer-like structure. But when you grow objects like this, the properties are invariant with the print direction. These look like injection-molded parts, which is very different than traditional 3D manufacturing. In addition, we're able to throw the entire polymer chemistry textbook at this, and we're able to design chemistries that can give rise to the properties you really want in a 3D-printed object.
(Applause)
There it is. That's great. You always take the risk that something like this won't work onstage, right?
But we can have materials with great mechanical properties. For the first time, we can have elastomers that are high elasticity or high dampening. Think about vibration control or great sneakers, for example. We can make materials that have incredible strength, high strength-to-weight ratio, really strong materials, really great elastomers, so throw that in the audience there. So great material properties.
And so the opportunity now, if you actually make a part that has the properties to be a final part, and you do it in game-changing speeds, you can actually transform manufacturing. Right now, in manufacturing, what happens is, the so-called digital thread in digital manufacturing. We go from a CAD drawing, a design, to a prototype to manufacturing. Often, the digital thread is broken right at prototype, because you can't go all the way to manufacturing because most parts don't have the properties to be a final part. We now can connect the digital thread all the way from design to prototyping to manufacturing, and that opportunity really opens up all sorts of things, from better fuel-efficient cars dealing with great lattice properties with high strength-to-weight ratio, new turbine blades, all sorts of wonderful things.
Think about if you need a stent in an emergency situation, instead of the doctor pulling off a stent out of the shelf that was just standard sizes, having a stent that's designed for you, for your own anatomy with your own tributaries, printed in an emergency situation in real time out of the properties such that the stent could go away after 18 months: really-game changing. Or digital dentistry, and making these kinds of structures even while you're in the dentist chair. And look at the structures that my students are making at the University of North Carolina. These are amazing microscale structures.
You know, the world is really good at nano-fabrication. Moore's Law has driven things from 10 microns and below. We're really good at that, but it's actually very hard to make things from 10 microns to 1,000 microns, the mesoscale. And subtractive techniques from the silicon industry can't do that very well. They can't etch wafers that well. But this process is so gentle, we can grow these objects up from the bottom using additive manufacturing and make amazing things in tens of seconds, opening up new sensor technologies, new drug delivery techniques, new lab-on-a-chip applications, really game-changing stuff.
So the opportunity of making a part in real time that has the properties to be a final part really opens up 3D manufacturing, and for us, this is very exciting, because this really is owning the intersection between hardware, software and molecular science, and I can't wait to see what designers and engineers around the world are going to be able to do with this great tool.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Joseph DeSimone: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?
What we think of as 3D printing, says Joseph DeSimone, is really just 2D printing over and over ... slowly. Onstage at TED2015, he unveils a bold new technique — inspired, yes, by Terminator 2 — that's 25 to 100 times faster, and creates smooth, strong parts. Could it finally help to fulfill the tremendous promise of 3D printing?
Transcript:
I'm thrilled to be here tonight to share with you something we've been working on for over two years, and it's in the area of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing.
You see this object here. It looks fairly simple, but it's quite complex at the same time. It's a set of concentric geodesic structures with linkages between each one. In its context, it is not manufacturable by traditional manufacturing techniques. It has a symmetry such that you can't injection mold it. You can't even manufacture it through milling. This is a job for a 3D printer, but most 3D printers would take between three and 10 hours to fabricate it, and we're going to take the risk tonight to try to fabricate it onstage during this 10-minute talk. Wish us luck.
Now, 3D printing is actually a misnomer. It's actually 2D printing over and over again, and it in fact uses the technologies associated with 2D printing. Think about inkjet printing where you lay down ink on a page to make letters, and then do that over and over again to build up a three-dimensional object. In microelectronics, they use something called lithography to do the same sort of thing, to make the transistors and integrated circuits and build up a structure several times. These are all 2D printing technologies.
Now, I'm a chemist, a material scientist too, and my co-inventors are also material scientists, one a chemist, one a physicist, and we began to be interested in 3D printing. And very often, as you know, new ideas are often simple connections between people with different experiences in different communities, and that's our story.
Now, we were inspired by the "Terminator 2" scene for T-1000, and we thought, why couldn't a 3D printer operate in this fashion, where you have an object arise out of a puddle in essentially real time with essentially no waste to make a great object? Okay, just like the movies. And could we be inspired by Hollywood and come up with ways to actually try to get this to work? And that was our challenge. And our approach would be, if we could do this, then we could fundamentally address the three issues holding back 3D printing from being a manufacturing process.
One, 3D printing takes forever. There are mushrooms that grow faster than 3D printed parts. (Laughter) The layer by layer process leads to defects in mechanical properties, and if we could grow continuously, we could eliminate those defects. And in fact, if we could grow really fast, we could also start using materials that are self-curing, and we could have amazing properties. So if we could pull this off, imitate Hollywood, we could in fact address 3D manufacturing.
Our approach is to use some standard knowledge in polymer chemistry to harness light and oxygen to grow parts continuously. Light and oxygen work in different ways. Light can take a resin and convert it to a solid, can convert a liquid to a solid. Oxygen inhibits that process. So light and oxygen are polar opposites from one another from a chemical point of view, and if we can control spatially the light and oxygen, we could control this process. And we refer to this as CLIP. [Continuous Liquid Interface Production.] It has three functional components. One, it has a reservoir that holds the puddle, just like the T-1000. At the bottom of the reservoir is a special window. I'll come back to that. In addition, it has a stage that will lower into the puddle and pull the object out of the liquid. The third component is a digital light projection system underneath the reservoir, illuminating with light in the ultraviolet region.
Now, the key is that this window in the bottom of this reservoir, it's a composite, it's a very special window. It's not only transparent to light but it's permeable to oxygen. It's got characteristics like a contact lens. So we can see how the process works. You can start to see that as you lower a stage in there, in a traditional process, with an oxygen-impermeable window, you make a two-dimensional pattern and you end up gluing that onto the window with a traditional window, and so in order to introduce the next layer, you have to separate it, introduce new resin, reposition it, and do this process over and over again. But with our very special window, what we're able to do is, with oxygen coming through the bottom as light hits it, that oxygen inhibits the reaction, and we form a dead zone. This dead zone is on the order of tens of microns thick, so that's two or three diameters of a red blood cell, right at the window interface that remains a liquid, and we pull this object up, and as we talked about in a Science paper, as we change the oxygen content, we can change the dead zone thickness. And so we have a number of key variables that we control: oxygen content, the light, the light intensity, the dose to cure, the viscosity, the geometry, and we use very sophisticated software to control this process.
The result is pretty staggering. It's 25 to 100 times faster than traditional 3D printers, which is game-changing. In addition, as our ability to deliver liquid to that interface, we can go 1,000 times faster I believe, and that in fact opens up the opportunity for generating a lot of heat, and as a chemical engineer, I get very excited at heat transfer and the idea that we might one day have water-cooled 3D printers, because they're going so fast. In addition, because we're growing things, we eliminate the layers, and the parts are monolithic. You don't see the surface structure. You have molecularly smooth surfaces. And the mechanical properties of most parts made in a 3D printer are notorious for having properties that depend on the orientation with which how you printed it, because of the layer-like structure. But when you grow objects like this, the properties are invariant with the print direction. These look like injection-molded parts, which is very different than traditional 3D manufacturing. In addition, we're able to throw the entire polymer chemistry textbook at this, and we're able to design chemistries that can give rise to the properties you really want in a 3D-printed object.
(Applause)
There it is. That's great. You always take the risk that something like this won't work onstage, right?
But we can have materials with great mechanical properties. For the first time, we can have elastomers that are high elasticity or high dampening. Think about vibration control or great sneakers, for example. We can make materials that have incredible strength, high strength-to-weight ratio, really strong materials, really great elastomers, so throw that in the audience there. So great material properties.
And so the opportunity now, if you actually make a part that has the properties to be a final part, and you do it in game-changing speeds, you can actually transform manufacturing. Right now, in manufacturing, what happens is, the so-called digital thread in digital manufacturing. We go from a CAD drawing, a design, to a prototype to manufacturing. Often, the digital thread is broken right at prototype, because you can't go all the way to manufacturing because most parts don't have the properties to be a final part. We now can connect the digital thread all the way from design to prototyping to manufacturing, and that opportunity really opens up all sorts of things, from better fuel-efficient cars dealing with great lattice properties with high strength-to-weight ratio, new turbine blades, all sorts of wonderful things.
Think about if you need a stent in an emergency situation, instead of the doctor pulling off a stent out of the shelf that was just standard sizes, having a stent that's designed for you, for your own anatomy with your own tributaries, printed in an emergency situation in real time out of the properties such that the stent could go away after 18 months: really-game changing. Or digital dentistry, and making these kinds of structures even while you're in the dentist chair. And look at the structures that my students are making at the University of North Carolina. These are amazing microscale structures.
You know, the world is really good at nano-fabrication. Moore's Law has driven things from 10 microns and below. We're really good at that, but it's actually very hard to make things from 10 microns to 1,000 microns, the mesoscale. And subtractive techniques from the silicon industry can't do that very well. They can't etch wafers that well. But this process is so gentle, we can grow these objects up from the bottom using additive manufacturing and make amazing things in tens of seconds, opening up new sensor technologies, new drug delivery techniques, new lab-on-a-chip applications, really game-changing stuff.
So the opportunity of making a part in real time that has the properties to be a final part really opens up 3D manufacturing, and for us, this is very exciting, because this really is owning the intersection between hardware, software and molecular science, and I can't wait to see what designers and engineers around the world are going to be able to do with this great tool.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)
BIOL/SC/GralInt-TED Talks-David Eagleman: Can we create new senses for humans?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
David Eagleman: Can we create new senses for humans?
As humans, we can perceive less than a ten-trillionth of all light waves. “Our experience of reality,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman, “is constrained by our biology.” He wants to change that. His research into our brain processes has led him to create new interfaces — such as a sensory vest — to take in previously unseen information about the world around us.
Transcript:
We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand the world at that scale.
Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. But it gets strange, because even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. So take the colors of our world. This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. But we're not seeing all the waves out there. In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it.
Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors.
Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world.
Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us.
Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. Your whole world is about smelling. You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. Everything is about smell for you. So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. You look at your human owner and you think, "What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? (Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago?" (Laughter)
So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human.
So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine.
Now, how do we understand that? Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world.
But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And this is a very efficient kind of machine. It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels.
So I call this the P.H. model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals.
Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it.
8:34
Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "Bzz, bzz, bzz." It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else.
The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them.
So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. So here's the concept. So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. So as I'm speaking -- (Applause) -- the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. I'm feeling the sonic world around me.
So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest.
So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day.
Scott Novich: You.
David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board.
SN: Where. Where.
DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said.
SN: Touch. Touch.
DE: Now, he's not doing this -- (Applause) -- Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries.
Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience?
So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. He doesn't know what's going on. He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. (Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. (Laughter)
15:21
Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have.
We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away.
And that's just the beginning. What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it.
So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet.
So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah.
Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter)
CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. So that stock market experiment. This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful?
DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore.
CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily that sensory addition works? I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it?
DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. The general story, though, is that it's extraordinarily flexible. So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. So I don't thing we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of.
CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. There are so many possible applications for this. Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away.
CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much.
DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
David Eagleman: Can we create new senses for humans?
As humans, we can perceive less than a ten-trillionth of all light waves. “Our experience of reality,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman, “is constrained by our biology.” He wants to change that. His research into our brain processes has led him to create new interfaces — such as a sensory vest — to take in previously unseen information about the world around us.
Transcript:
We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand the world at that scale.
Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. But it gets strange, because even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. So take the colors of our world. This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. But we're not seeing all the waves out there. In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it.
Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors.
Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world.
Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us.
Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. Your whole world is about smelling. You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. Everything is about smell for you. So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. You look at your human owner and you think, "What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? (Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago?" (Laughter)
So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human.
So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine.
Now, how do we understand that? Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world.
But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And this is a very efficient kind of machine. It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels.
So I call this the P.H. model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals.
Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it.
8:34
Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "Bzz, bzz, bzz." It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else.
The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them.
So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. So here's the concept. So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. So as I'm speaking -- (Applause) -- the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. I'm feeling the sonic world around me.
So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest.
So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day.
Scott Novich: You.
David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board.
SN: Where. Where.
DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said.
SN: Touch. Touch.
DE: Now, he's not doing this -- (Applause) -- Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries.
Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience?
So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. He doesn't know what's going on. He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. (Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. (Laughter)
15:21
Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have.
We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away.
And that's just the beginning. What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it.
So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet.
So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah.
Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter)
CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. So that stock market experiment. This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful?
DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore.
CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily that sensory addition works? I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it?
DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. The general story, though, is that it's extraordinarily flexible. So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. So I don't thing we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of.
CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. There are so many possible applications for this. Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away.
CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much.
DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)
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