The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2016 at TEDxSydney
Gill Hicks: I survived a terrorist attack. Here's what I learned
Gill Hicks's story is one of compassion and humanity, emerging from the ashes of chaos and hate. A survivor of the London terrorist bombings on July 7, 2005, she shares her story of the events of that day — and the profound lessons that came as she learned how to live on.
Transcript:
I could never have imagined that a 19-year-old suicide bomber would actually teach me a valuable lesson. But he did. He taught me to never presume anything about anyone you don't know.
On a Thursday morning in July 2005, the bomber and I, unknowingly, boarded the same train carriage at the same time, standing, apparently, just feet apart. I didn't see him. Actually, I didn't see anyone. You know not to look at anyone on the Tube, but I guess he saw me. I guess he looked at all of us, as his hand hovered over the detonation switch. I've often wondered: What was he thinking? Especially in those final seconds.
I know it wasn't personal. He didn't set out to kill or maim me, Gill Hicks. I mean -- he didn't know me. No. Instead, he gave me an unwarranted and an unwanted label. I had become the enemy. To him, I was the "other," the "them," as opposed to "us." The label "enemy" allowed him to dehumanize us. It allowed him to push that button. And he wasn't selective. Twenty-six precious lives were taken in my carriage alone, and I was almost one of them.
In the time it takes to draw a breath, we were plunged into a darkness so immense that it was almost tangible; what I imagine wading through tar might be like. We didn't know we were the enemy. We were just a bunch of commuters who, minutes earlier, had followed the Tube etiquette: no direct eye contact, no talking and absolutely no conversation.
But in the lifting of the darkness, we were reaching out. We were helping each other. We were calling out our names, a little bit like a roll call, waiting for responses.
"I'm Gill. I'm here. I'm alive. OK."
"I'm Gill. Here. Alive. OK."
I didn't know Alison. But I listened for her check-ins every few minutes. I didn't know Richard. But it mattered to me that he survived.
All I shared with them was my first name. They didn't know that I was a head of a department at the Design Council. And here is my beloved briefcase, also rescued from that morning. They didn't know that I published architecture and design journals, that I was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, that I wore black -- still do -- that I smoked cigarillos. I don't smoke cigarillos anymore. I drank gin and I watched TED Talks, of course, never dreaming that one day I would be standing, balancing on prosthetic legs, giving a talk.
I was a young Australian woman doing extraordinary things in London. And I wasn't ready for that all to end. I was so determined to survive that I used my scarf to tie tourniquets around the tops of my legs, and I just shut everything and everyone out, to focus, to listen to myself, to be guided by instinct alone. I lowered my breathing rate. I elevated my thighs. I held myself upright and I fought the urge to close my eyes.
I held on for almost an hour, an hour to contemplate the whole of my life up until this point. Perhaps I should have done more. Perhaps I could have lived more, seen more. Maybe I should have gone running, dancing, taken up yoga. But my priority and my focus was always my work. I lived to work. Who I was on my business card mattered to me. But it didn't matter down in that tunnel.
By the time I felt that first touch from one of my rescuers, I was unable to speak, unable to say even a small word, like "Gill." I surrendered my body to them. I had done all I possibly could, and now I was in their hands.
I understood just who and what humanity really is, when I first saw the ID tag that was given to me when I was admitted to hospital. And it read: "One unknown estimated female." One unknown estimated female. Those four words were my gift. What they told me very clearly was that my life was saved, purely because I was a human being. Difference of any kind made no difference to the extraordinary lengths that the rescuers were prepared to go to save my life, to save as many unknowns as they could, and putting their own lives at risk. To them, it didn't matter if I was rich or poor, the color of my skin, whether I was male or female, my sexual orientation, who I voted for, whether I was educated, if I had a faith or no faith at all. Nothing mattered other than I was a precious human life.
I see myself as a living fact. I am proof that unconditional love and respect can not only save, but it can transform lives. Here is a wonderful image of one of my rescuers, Andy, and I taken just last year. Ten years after the event, and here we are, arm in arm.
Throughout all the chaos, my hand was held tightly. My face was stroked gently. What did I feel? I felt loved. What's shielded me from hatred and wanting retribution, what's given me the courage to say: this ends with me is love. I was loved.
I believe the potential for widespread positive change is absolutely enormous because I know what we're capable of. I know the brilliance of humanity. So this leaves me with some pretty big things to ponder and some questions for us all to consider: Is what unites us not far greater than what can ever divide? Does it have to take a tragedy or a disaster for us to feel deeply connected as one species, as human beings? And when will we embrace the wisdom of our era to rise above mere tolerance and move to an acceptance for all who are only a label until we know them?
Thank you.
(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.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
GralInt-TED Talks-Tom Hulme: What can we learn from shortcuts?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Tom Hulme: What can we learn from shortcuts?
How do you build a product people really want? Allow consumers to be a part of the process. "Empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success," says designer Tom Hulme. In this short talk, Hulme lays out three insightful examples of the intersection of design and user experience, where people have developed their own desire paths out of necessity. Once you know how to spot them, you'll start noticing them everywhere.
Transcript:
When we're designing new products, services or businesses, the only time you'll know if they're any good, if the designs are good, is to see how they're used in the real world, in context.
I'm reminded of that every time I walk past Highbury Fields in north London. It's absolutely beautiful. There's a big open green space. There's Georgian buildings around the side. But then there's this mud trap that cuts across the middle. People clearly don't want to walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is self-reinforcing.
Now, this shortcut is called a desire path, and it's often the path of least resistance. I find them fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge.
Now at this point, I should apologize, because you guys are going to start seeing these everywhere. But today, I'm going to pick three I find interesting and share what actually it reminds me about launching new products and services. The first is in the capital city of Brazil -- Brasilia. And it reminds me that sometimes, you have to just focus on designing for a real need at low friction. Now, Brasilia is fascinating. It was designed by Niemeyer in the '50s. It was the golden age of flying, so he laid it out like a plane, as you can see there. Slightly worryingly, he put most of the important government buildings in the cockpit. But if you zoom in, in the very center of Brasilia, just where the point is there, you see it's littered with desire paths. They're absolutely everywhere.
Now, they thought that they had future-proofed this design. They thought in the future we wouldn't need to walk anywhere -- we'd be able to drive -- so there was little need for walkways or pavements. But as you can see, there's a real need. These are very dangerous desire paths. If we just pick one, in the middle, you can see it crosses 15 lanes of traffic. It won't surprise you guys that Brasilia has five times the pedestrian accident rate of your average US city. People are resourceful. They'll always find the low-friction route to save money, save time.
Not all these desire paths are dangerous, I was reminded flying here when I was in Heathrow. Many of us get frustrated when we're confronted with the obligatory walk through duty-free. It was amazing to me how many people refused to take the long, meandering path to the left, and just cut through to the right, cut through the desire path.
The question that's interesting is: What do designers think when they see our behavior here? Do they think we're stupid? Do they think we're lazy? Or do they accept that this is the only truth? This is their product. We're effectively co-designing their product. So our job is to design for real needs at low friction, because if you don't, the customer will, anyway.
The second desire path I wanted to share is at the University of California. And it reminds me that sometimes the best way to come up with a great design is just to launch it. Now, university campuses are fantastic for spotting desire paths. I think it's because students are always late and they're pretty smart. So they're dashing to lectures. They'll always find the shortcut. And the designers here knew that. So they built the buildings and then they waited a few months for the paths to form. They then paved them. (Laughter) Incredibly smart approach. In fact, often, just launching the straw man of a service can teach you what people really want.
For example, Ayr Muir in Boston knew he wanted to open a restaurant. But where should it be? What should the menu be? He launched a service, in this case a food truck, and he changed the location each day. He'd write a different menu on the side in a whiteboard marker to figure out what people wanted. He now has a chain of restaurants. So it can be incredibly efficient to launch something to spot the desire paths.
The third and final desire path I wanted to share with you is the UNIH. It reminds me that the world's in flux, and we have to respond to those changes. So as you'll guess, this is a hospital. I've marked for you on the left the Oncology Department. The patients would usually stay in the hotels down on the bottom right. This was a patient-centered organization, so they laid on cars for their patients. But what they realized when they started offering chemotherapy is the patients rarely wanted to get in cars. They were too nauseous, so they'd walk back to their hotels. This desire path that you see diagonally, formed. The patients even called it "The Chemo Trail." Now, when the hospital saw this originally, they tried to lay turf back over it, ignore it. But after a while, they realized it was an important need they were meeting for their patients, so they paved it.
And I think our job is often to pave these emerging desire paths. If we look back at the one in North London again, that desire path hasn't always been there. The reason it sprung up is people were traveling to the mighty Arsenal Football Club stadium on game days, from the Underground station you see on the bottom right. So you see the desire path. If we just wind the clock back a few years, when the stadium was being constructed, there is no desire path.
So our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging, and, where appropriate, pave them, as someone did here. Someone installed a barrier, people started walking across and round the bottom as you see, and they paved it.
(Laughter)
But I think this is a wonderful reminder as well, that, actually, the world is in flux. It's constantly changing, because if you look at the top of this image, there's another desire path forming.
So these three desire paths remind me we need to design for real human needs. I think empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success. Design for real needs and design them in low friction, because if you don't offer them in low friction, someone else will, often the customer.
Secondly, often the best way to learn what people really want is to launch your service. The answer is rarely inside the building. Get out there and see what people really want.
And finally, in part because of technology, the world is incredibly flux at the moment. It's changing constantly. These desire paths are going to spring up faster than ever. Our job is to pick the appropriate ones and pave over them.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Tom Hulme: What can we learn from shortcuts?
How do you build a product people really want? Allow consumers to be a part of the process. "Empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success," says designer Tom Hulme. In this short talk, Hulme lays out three insightful examples of the intersection of design and user experience, where people have developed their own desire paths out of necessity. Once you know how to spot them, you'll start noticing them everywhere.
Transcript:
When we're designing new products, services or businesses, the only time you'll know if they're any good, if the designs are good, is to see how they're used in the real world, in context.
I'm reminded of that every time I walk past Highbury Fields in north London. It's absolutely beautiful. There's a big open green space. There's Georgian buildings around the side. But then there's this mud trap that cuts across the middle. People clearly don't want to walk all the way around the edge. Instead, they want to take the shortcut, and that shortcut is self-reinforcing.
Now, this shortcut is called a desire path, and it's often the path of least resistance. I find them fascinating, because they're often the point where design and user experience diverge.
Now at this point, I should apologize, because you guys are going to start seeing these everywhere. But today, I'm going to pick three I find interesting and share what actually it reminds me about launching new products and services. The first is in the capital city of Brazil -- Brasilia. And it reminds me that sometimes, you have to just focus on designing for a real need at low friction. Now, Brasilia is fascinating. It was designed by Niemeyer in the '50s. It was the golden age of flying, so he laid it out like a plane, as you can see there. Slightly worryingly, he put most of the important government buildings in the cockpit. But if you zoom in, in the very center of Brasilia, just where the point is there, you see it's littered with desire paths. They're absolutely everywhere.
Now, they thought that they had future-proofed this design. They thought in the future we wouldn't need to walk anywhere -- we'd be able to drive -- so there was little need for walkways or pavements. But as you can see, there's a real need. These are very dangerous desire paths. If we just pick one, in the middle, you can see it crosses 15 lanes of traffic. It won't surprise you guys that Brasilia has five times the pedestrian accident rate of your average US city. People are resourceful. They'll always find the low-friction route to save money, save time.
Not all these desire paths are dangerous, I was reminded flying here when I was in Heathrow. Many of us get frustrated when we're confronted with the obligatory walk through duty-free. It was amazing to me how many people refused to take the long, meandering path to the left, and just cut through to the right, cut through the desire path.
The question that's interesting is: What do designers think when they see our behavior here? Do they think we're stupid? Do they think we're lazy? Or do they accept that this is the only truth? This is their product. We're effectively co-designing their product. So our job is to design for real needs at low friction, because if you don't, the customer will, anyway.
The second desire path I wanted to share is at the University of California. And it reminds me that sometimes the best way to come up with a great design is just to launch it. Now, university campuses are fantastic for spotting desire paths. I think it's because students are always late and they're pretty smart. So they're dashing to lectures. They'll always find the shortcut. And the designers here knew that. So they built the buildings and then they waited a few months for the paths to form. They then paved them. (Laughter) Incredibly smart approach. In fact, often, just launching the straw man of a service can teach you what people really want.
For example, Ayr Muir in Boston knew he wanted to open a restaurant. But where should it be? What should the menu be? He launched a service, in this case a food truck, and he changed the location each day. He'd write a different menu on the side in a whiteboard marker to figure out what people wanted. He now has a chain of restaurants. So it can be incredibly efficient to launch something to spot the desire paths.
The third and final desire path I wanted to share with you is the UNIH. It reminds me that the world's in flux, and we have to respond to those changes. So as you'll guess, this is a hospital. I've marked for you on the left the Oncology Department. The patients would usually stay in the hotels down on the bottom right. This was a patient-centered organization, so they laid on cars for their patients. But what they realized when they started offering chemotherapy is the patients rarely wanted to get in cars. They were too nauseous, so they'd walk back to their hotels. This desire path that you see diagonally, formed. The patients even called it "The Chemo Trail." Now, when the hospital saw this originally, they tried to lay turf back over it, ignore it. But after a while, they realized it was an important need they were meeting for their patients, so they paved it.
And I think our job is often to pave these emerging desire paths. If we look back at the one in North London again, that desire path hasn't always been there. The reason it sprung up is people were traveling to the mighty Arsenal Football Club stadium on game days, from the Underground station you see on the bottom right. So you see the desire path. If we just wind the clock back a few years, when the stadium was being constructed, there is no desire path.
So our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging, and, where appropriate, pave them, as someone did here. Someone installed a barrier, people started walking across and round the bottom as you see, and they paved it.
(Laughter)
But I think this is a wonderful reminder as well, that, actually, the world is in flux. It's constantly changing, because if you look at the top of this image, there's another desire path forming.
So these three desire paths remind me we need to design for real human needs. I think empathy for what your customers want is probably the biggest leading indicator of business success. Design for real needs and design them in low friction, because if you don't offer them in low friction, someone else will, often the customer.
Secondly, often the best way to learn what people really want is to launch your service. The answer is rarely inside the building. Get out there and see what people really want.
And finally, in part because of technology, the world is incredibly flux at the moment. It's changing constantly. These desire paths are going to spring up faster than ever. Our job is to pick the appropriate ones and pave over them.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
EDUC/GralInt-TED Talks-Seema Bansal: How to fix a broken education system ... without any more money
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2016 at TED@BCG Paris
Seema Bansal: How to fix a broken education system ... without any more money
Seema Bansal forged a path to public education reform for 15,000 schools in Haryana, India, by setting an ambitious goal: by 2020, 80 percent of children should have grade-level knowledge. She's looking to meet this goal by seeking reforms that will work in every school without additional resources. Bansal and her team have found success using creative, straightforward techniques such as communicating with teachers using SMS group chats, and they have already measurably improved learning and engagement in Haryana's schools.
Transcript:
So we all have our own biases. For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years.
This is what a classroom in a public school in India looks like. There are 1 million such schools in India. And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. These are things that you and I would expect an 8-year-old to be able to do. By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. In India, public schools not only offer free education -- they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is.
So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. So she said to us, "Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. Can you possibly help?"
Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. One, that I had never done anything like this before. And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. We knew that we had to craft our own journey.
But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. People said, "Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms." By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things.
So I said, "Hang on, stop. Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve." So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us.
So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. Well, when we went inside schools, we found something completely different. On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. But they were not teaching. I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students.
So we asked the teachers, "What's going on, why are you not teaching?" And they said, "This is what's expected of us. When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed."
You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. Not explicitly, but implicitly. And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things.
So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program.
So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, "Let's look around and see what we can find." And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. Small things being done by NGOs, being done by foundations. But what was also interesting was that none of them actually scaled. All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools.
So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, "Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools." Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. And hence, innovations don't scale. So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, "Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools." And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. Much easier said than done. (Laughter)
I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, "Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?"
In the end, I think we did find solutions to many of the issues. I'll give you an example. In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. Children shouldn't memorize things from books, they should do activities, and that's a more effective way to learn. Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. We needed another solution. We couldn't think of anything. One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. That was a huge eureka moment for us. So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, "To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids." And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one.
Now, this brings me to my last point. How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? The department used to have a process which is very interesting. I like to call it "The Chain of Hope." They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. It was a little bit ridiculous. Now, we knew technology was the answer, but we also knew that most of these schools don't have a computer or email. However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp.
So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. It spreads like wildfire. You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. Teachers can ask clarification questions instantaneously. And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. So today, when you go to a school in Haryana, things look different. The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. Often with innovative techniques. When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly.
When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. But not in Haryana. In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. And I said, "Why are you smiling, what's going on?" And she said, "I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to."
So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? I certainly believe so. I think if you give them the right levers, they can move mountains.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed May 2016 at TED@BCG Paris
Seema Bansal: How to fix a broken education system ... without any more money
Seema Bansal forged a path to public education reform for 15,000 schools in Haryana, India, by setting an ambitious goal: by 2020, 80 percent of children should have grade-level knowledge. She's looking to meet this goal by seeking reforms that will work in every school without additional resources. Bansal and her team have found success using creative, straightforward techniques such as communicating with teachers using SMS group chats, and they have already measurably improved learning and engagement in Haryana's schools.
Transcript:
So we all have our own biases. For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years.
This is what a classroom in a public school in India looks like. There are 1 million such schools in India. And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. These are things that you and I would expect an 8-year-old to be able to do. By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. In India, public schools not only offer free education -- they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is.
So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. So she said to us, "Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. Can you possibly help?"
Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. One, that I had never done anything like this before. And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. We knew that we had to craft our own journey.
But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. People said, "Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms." By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things.
So I said, "Hang on, stop. Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve." So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us.
So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. Well, when we went inside schools, we found something completely different. On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. But they were not teaching. I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students.
So we asked the teachers, "What's going on, why are you not teaching?" And they said, "This is what's expected of us. When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed."
You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. Not explicitly, but implicitly. And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things.
So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program.
So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, "Let's look around and see what we can find." And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. Small things being done by NGOs, being done by foundations. But what was also interesting was that none of them actually scaled. All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools.
So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, "Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools." Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. And hence, innovations don't scale. So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, "Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools." And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. Much easier said than done. (Laughter)
I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, "Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?"
In the end, I think we did find solutions to many of the issues. I'll give you an example. In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. Children shouldn't memorize things from books, they should do activities, and that's a more effective way to learn. Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. We needed another solution. We couldn't think of anything. One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. That was a huge eureka moment for us. So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, "To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids." And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one.
Now, this brings me to my last point. How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? The department used to have a process which is very interesting. I like to call it "The Chain of Hope." They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. It was a little bit ridiculous. Now, we knew technology was the answer, but we also knew that most of these schools don't have a computer or email. However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp.
So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. It spreads like wildfire. You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. Teachers can ask clarification questions instantaneously. And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. So today, when you go to a school in Haryana, things look different. The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. Often with innovative techniques. When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly.
When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. But not in Haryana. In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. And I said, "Why are you smiling, what's going on?" And she said, "I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to."
So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? I certainly believe so. I think if you give them the right levers, they can move mountains.
Thank you.
(Applause)
PSYCH/GralInt-TED Talks-Brian Little: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Brian Little: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality
What makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits — sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Join Little as he dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than you think.
Transcript:
What an intriguing group of individuals you are ... to a psychologist.
(Laughter)
I've had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it's fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today.
(Laughter)
And I thought you might like to know who you are.
(Laughter)
But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself.
I'm in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us -- each of you -- is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person.
Now, already you may be saying of yourself, "I'm not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere." Or you may say of yourself, "I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit."
(Laughter)
But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent "twitiness" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so.
One of the most influential approaches in personality science is known as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, "O" stands for "open to experience," versus those who are more closed. "C" stands for "conscientiousness," in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. "E" -- "extroversion," in contrast to more introverted people. "A" -- "agreeable individuals," in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And "N" -- "neurotic individuals," in contrast to those who are more stable.
All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, I find intriguing. With my classes, I sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: I tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow.
(Laughter)
Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they have successfully licked the elbow of the person sitting next to them.
(Laughter)
Those are the extroverts.
Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what I call our three natures. First, our biogenic nature -- our neurophysiology. Second, our sociogenic or second nature, which has to do with the cultural and social aspects of our lives. And third, what makes you individually you -- idiosyncratic -- what I call your "idiogenic" nature.
Let me explain. One of the things that characterizes extroverts is they need stimulation. And that stimulation can be achieved by finding things that are exciting: loud noises, parties and social events here at TED -- you see the extroverts forming a magnetic core. They all gather together. And I've seen you. The introverts are more likely to spend time in the quiet spaces up on the second floor, where they are able to reduce stimulation -- and may be misconstrued as being antisocial, but you're not necessarily antisocial. It may be that you simply realize that you do better when you have a chance to lower that level of stimulation.
Sometimes it's an internal stimulant, from your body. Caffeine, for example, works much better with extroverts than it does introverts. When extroverts come into the office at nine o'clock in the morning and say, "I really need a cup of coffee," they're not kidding -- they really do. Introverts do not do as well, particularly if the tasks they're engaged in -- and they've had some coffee -- if those tasks are speeded, and if they're quantitative, introverts may give the appearance of not being particularly quantitative. But it's a misconstrual.
So here are the consequences that are really quite intriguing: we're not always what seem to be, and that takes me to my next point. I should say, before getting to this, something about sexual intercourse, although I may not have time. And so, if you would like me to -- yes, you would? OK.
(Laughter)
There are studies done on the frequency with which individuals engage in the conjugal act, as broken down by male, female; introvert, extrovert. So I ask you: How many times per minute -- oh, I'm sorry, that was a rat study -
(Laughter)
How many times per month do introverted men engage in the act? 3.0. Extroverted men? More or less? Yes, more. 5.5 -- almost twice as much. Introverted women: 3.1. Extroverted women? Frankly, speaking as an introverted male, which I will explain later -- they are heroic. 7.5. They not only handle all the male extroverts, they pick up a few introverts as well.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
We communicate differently, extroverts and introverts. Extroverts, when they interact, want to have lots of social encounter punctuated by closeness. They'd like to stand close for comfortable communication. They like to have a lot of eye contact, or mutual gaze. We found in some research that they use more diminutive terms when they meet somebody. So when an extrovert meets a Charles, it rapidly becomes "Charlie," and then "Chuck," and then "Chuckles Baby."
(Laughter)
Whereas for introverts, it remains "Charles," until he's given a pass to be more intimate by the person he's talking to. We speak differently. Extroverts prefer black-and-white, concrete, simple language. Introverts prefer -- and I must again tell you that I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine -- we speak differently. We prefer contextually complex, contingent, weasel-word sentences -
(Laughter)
More or less.
(Laughter)
As it were.
(Laughter)
Not to put too fine a point upon it -- like that.
When we talk, we sometimes talk past each other. I had a consulting contract I shared with a colleague who's as different from me as two people can possibly be. First, his name is Tom. Mine isn't.
(Laughter)
Secondly, he's six foot five. I have a tendency not to be.
(Laughter)
And thirdly, he's as extroverted a person as you could find. I am seriously introverted. I overload so much, I can't even have a cup of coffee after three in the afternoon and expect to sleep in the evening.
We had seconded to this project a fellow called Michael. And Michael almost brought the project to a crashing halt. So the person who seconded him asked Tom and me, "What do you make of Michael?" Well, I'll tell you what Tom said in a minute. He spoke in classic "extrovert-ese." And here is how extroverted ears heard what I said, which is actually pretty accurate. I said, "Well Michael does have a tendency at times of behaving in a way that some of us might see as perhaps more assertive than is normally called for."
(Laughter)
Tom rolled his eyes and he said, "Brian, that's what I said: he's an asshole!"
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, as an introvert, I might gently allude to certain "assholic" qualities in this man's behavior, but I'm not going to lunge for the a-word.
(Laughter)
But the extrovert says, "If he walks like one, if he talks like one, I call him one." And we go past each other.
Now is this something that we should be heedful of? Of course. It's important that we know this. Is that all we are? Are we just a bunch of traits? No, we're not. Remember, you're like some other people and like no other person. How about that idiosyncratic you? As Elizabeth or as George, you may share your extroversion or your neuroticism. But are there some distinctively Elizabethan features of your behavior, or Georgian of yours, that make us understand you better than just a bunch of traits? That make us love you? Not just because you're a certain type of person.
I'm uncomfortable putting people in pigeonholes. I don't even think pigeons belong in pigeonholes. So what is it that makes us different? It's the doings that we have in our life -- the personal projects. You have a personal project right now, but nobody may know it here. It relates to your kid -- you've been back three times to the hospital, and they still don't know what's wrong. Or it could be your mom. And you'd been acting out of character. These are free traits. You're very agreeable, but you act disagreeably in order to break down those barriers of administrative torpor in the hospital, to get something for your mom or your child.
What are these free traits? They're where were enact a script in order to advance a core project in our lives. And they are what matters. Don't ask people what type you are; ask them, "What are your core projects in your life?" And we enact those free traits. I'm an introvert, but I have a core project, which is to profess. I'm a professor. And I adore my students, and I adore my field. And I can't wait to tell them about what's new, what's exciting, what I can't wait to tell them about. And so I act in an extroverted way, because at eight in the morning, the students need a little bit of humor, a little bit of engagement to keep them going in arduous days of study.
But we need to be very careful when we act protractedly out of character. Sometimes we may find that we don't take care of ourselves. I find, for example, after a period of pseudo-extroverted behavior, I need to repair somewhere on my own. As Susan Cain said in her "Quiet" book, in a chapter that featured the strange Canadian professor who was teaching at the time at Harvard, I sometimes go to the men's room to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous extroverts.
(Laughter)
I remember one particular day when I was retired to a cubicle, trying to avoid overstimulation. And a real extrovert came in beside me -- not right in my cubicle, but in the next cubicle over -- and I could hear various evacuatory noises, which we hate -- even our own, that's why we flush during as well as after.
(Laughter)
And then I heard this gravelly voice saying, "Hey, is that Dr. Little?"
(Laughter)
If anything is guaranteed to constipate an introvert for six months, it's talking on the john.
(Laughter)
That's where I'm going now. Don't follow me.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Brian Little: Who are you, really? The puzzle of personality
What makes you, you? Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits — sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Join Little as he dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than you think.
Transcript:
What an intriguing group of individuals you are ... to a psychologist.
(Laughter)
I've had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it's fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today.
(Laughter)
And I thought you might like to know who you are.
(Laughter)
But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself.
I'm in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us -- each of you -- is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person.
Now, already you may be saying of yourself, "I'm not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere." Or you may say of yourself, "I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit."
(Laughter)
But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent "twitiness" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so.
One of the most influential approaches in personality science is known as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, "O" stands for "open to experience," versus those who are more closed. "C" stands for "conscientiousness," in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. "E" -- "extroversion," in contrast to more introverted people. "A" -- "agreeable individuals," in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And "N" -- "neurotic individuals," in contrast to those who are more stable.
All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, I find intriguing. With my classes, I sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: I tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow.
(Laughter)
Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they have successfully licked the elbow of the person sitting next to them.
(Laughter)
Those are the extroverts.
Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what I call our three natures. First, our biogenic nature -- our neurophysiology. Second, our sociogenic or second nature, which has to do with the cultural and social aspects of our lives. And third, what makes you individually you -- idiosyncratic -- what I call your "idiogenic" nature.
Let me explain. One of the things that characterizes extroverts is they need stimulation. And that stimulation can be achieved by finding things that are exciting: loud noises, parties and social events here at TED -- you see the extroverts forming a magnetic core. They all gather together. And I've seen you. The introverts are more likely to spend time in the quiet spaces up on the second floor, where they are able to reduce stimulation -- and may be misconstrued as being antisocial, but you're not necessarily antisocial. It may be that you simply realize that you do better when you have a chance to lower that level of stimulation.
Sometimes it's an internal stimulant, from your body. Caffeine, for example, works much better with extroverts than it does introverts. When extroverts come into the office at nine o'clock in the morning and say, "I really need a cup of coffee," they're not kidding -- they really do. Introverts do not do as well, particularly if the tasks they're engaged in -- and they've had some coffee -- if those tasks are speeded, and if they're quantitative, introverts may give the appearance of not being particularly quantitative. But it's a misconstrual.
So here are the consequences that are really quite intriguing: we're not always what seem to be, and that takes me to my next point. I should say, before getting to this, something about sexual intercourse, although I may not have time. And so, if you would like me to -- yes, you would? OK.
(Laughter)
There are studies done on the frequency with which individuals engage in the conjugal act, as broken down by male, female; introvert, extrovert. So I ask you: How many times per minute -- oh, I'm sorry, that was a rat study -
(Laughter)
How many times per month do introverted men engage in the act? 3.0. Extroverted men? More or less? Yes, more. 5.5 -- almost twice as much. Introverted women: 3.1. Extroverted women? Frankly, speaking as an introverted male, which I will explain later -- they are heroic. 7.5. They not only handle all the male extroverts, they pick up a few introverts as well.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
We communicate differently, extroverts and introverts. Extroverts, when they interact, want to have lots of social encounter punctuated by closeness. They'd like to stand close for comfortable communication. They like to have a lot of eye contact, or mutual gaze. We found in some research that they use more diminutive terms when they meet somebody. So when an extrovert meets a Charles, it rapidly becomes "Charlie," and then "Chuck," and then "Chuckles Baby."
(Laughter)
Whereas for introverts, it remains "Charles," until he's given a pass to be more intimate by the person he's talking to. We speak differently. Extroverts prefer black-and-white, concrete, simple language. Introverts prefer -- and I must again tell you that I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine -- we speak differently. We prefer contextually complex, contingent, weasel-word sentences -
(Laughter)
More or less.
(Laughter)
As it were.
(Laughter)
Not to put too fine a point upon it -- like that.
When we talk, we sometimes talk past each other. I had a consulting contract I shared with a colleague who's as different from me as two people can possibly be. First, his name is Tom. Mine isn't.
(Laughter)
Secondly, he's six foot five. I have a tendency not to be.
(Laughter)
And thirdly, he's as extroverted a person as you could find. I am seriously introverted. I overload so much, I can't even have a cup of coffee after three in the afternoon and expect to sleep in the evening.
We had seconded to this project a fellow called Michael. And Michael almost brought the project to a crashing halt. So the person who seconded him asked Tom and me, "What do you make of Michael?" Well, I'll tell you what Tom said in a minute. He spoke in classic "extrovert-ese." And here is how extroverted ears heard what I said, which is actually pretty accurate. I said, "Well Michael does have a tendency at times of behaving in a way that some of us might see as perhaps more assertive than is normally called for."
(Laughter)
Tom rolled his eyes and he said, "Brian, that's what I said: he's an asshole!"
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Now, as an introvert, I might gently allude to certain "assholic" qualities in this man's behavior, but I'm not going to lunge for the a-word.
(Laughter)
But the extrovert says, "If he walks like one, if he talks like one, I call him one." And we go past each other.
Now is this something that we should be heedful of? Of course. It's important that we know this. Is that all we are? Are we just a bunch of traits? No, we're not. Remember, you're like some other people and like no other person. How about that idiosyncratic you? As Elizabeth or as George, you may share your extroversion or your neuroticism. But are there some distinctively Elizabethan features of your behavior, or Georgian of yours, that make us understand you better than just a bunch of traits? That make us love you? Not just because you're a certain type of person.
I'm uncomfortable putting people in pigeonholes. I don't even think pigeons belong in pigeonholes. So what is it that makes us different? It's the doings that we have in our life -- the personal projects. You have a personal project right now, but nobody may know it here. It relates to your kid -- you've been back three times to the hospital, and they still don't know what's wrong. Or it could be your mom. And you'd been acting out of character. These are free traits. You're very agreeable, but you act disagreeably in order to break down those barriers of administrative torpor in the hospital, to get something for your mom or your child.
What are these free traits? They're where were enact a script in order to advance a core project in our lives. And they are what matters. Don't ask people what type you are; ask them, "What are your core projects in your life?" And we enact those free traits. I'm an introvert, but I have a core project, which is to profess. I'm a professor. And I adore my students, and I adore my field. And I can't wait to tell them about what's new, what's exciting, what I can't wait to tell them about. And so I act in an extroverted way, because at eight in the morning, the students need a little bit of humor, a little bit of engagement to keep them going in arduous days of study.
But we need to be very careful when we act protractedly out of character. Sometimes we may find that we don't take care of ourselves. I find, for example, after a period of pseudo-extroverted behavior, I need to repair somewhere on my own. As Susan Cain said in her "Quiet" book, in a chapter that featured the strange Canadian professor who was teaching at the time at Harvard, I sometimes go to the men's room to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous extroverts.
(Laughter)
I remember one particular day when I was retired to a cubicle, trying to avoid overstimulation. And a real extrovert came in beside me -- not right in my cubicle, but in the next cubicle over -- and I could hear various evacuatory noises, which we hate -- even our own, that's why we flush during as well as after.
(Laughter)
And then I heard this gravelly voice saying, "Hey, is that Dr. Little?"
(Laughter)
If anything is guaranteed to constipate an introvert for six months, it's talking on the john.
(Laughter)
That's where I'm going now. Don't follow me.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Sunday, June 19, 2016
GRAM/GralInt-33 Commonly Misunderstood Words & Phrases (Infographic)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
33 Commonly Misunderstood Words & Phrases (Infographic)
by JENNIFER FROST
FEBRUARY 5, 2016
Source: www.grammarcheck.net
Source: http://www.grammarcheck.net/commonly-misunderstood-words-phrases/
33 Commonly Misunderstood Words & Phrases (Infographic)
by JENNIFER FROST
FEBRUARY 5, 2016
Source: www.grammarcheck.net
Source: http://www.grammarcheck.net/commonly-misunderstood-words-phrases/
Saturday, June 18, 2016
ENV/GralInt-TED Talks-Why I live a zero waste life | Lauren Singer | TEDxTeen
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Why I live a zero waste life | Lauren Singer | TEDxTeen
Published on May 27, 2015
Lauren is an Environmental Studies graduate from NYU and former Sustainability Manager at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, and the amount of trash that she has produced over the past three years can fit inside of a 16 oz. mason jar.
Lauren Singer is author of the Zero Waste blog, Trash is for Tossers and founder of organic cleaning product company, The Simply Co.
Through her blog, she has empowered millions of readers to produce less waste by shopping package-free, making their own products and refusing plastic and single-use items.
Her work has been profiled by New York Magazine, MSNBC, NBC, AOL, CNN, Yahoo, Fox Business, BBC and NPR, among others.
Vivo sin generar basura
La neoyorquina Lauren Singer, que inspira al mundo desde un blog, comparte su estilo de vida ciento por ciento sustentable.
Por Inés Pujana |
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
Lauren Singer tiene 25 años, una licenciatura en Estudios Medioambientales por la Universidad de Nueva York (NYU), un blog (trashisfortossers.com, algo así como "la basura es para los desechadores") y una cuenta de Instagram con casi 60 mil seguidores en donde postea fotos de su vida. Hasta acá, nada que la distinga de las miles de blogueras que andan dando vueltas por el mundo. Pero hay algo que marca la diferencia. Lauren tiene un objetivo que direcciona cada una de sus acciones: vive una vida "zero waste", se propone no generar basura desde hace cuatro años y le va bastante bien. De hecho, todo el desecho que produjo en ese tiempo cabe dentro de un pequeño frasquito. Si tenemos en cuenta que el habitante promedio de una ciudad genera cerca de 2 kilos de basura por día, eso quiere decir que, desde que empezó su cruzada, Lauren evitó generar cerca de 3000 kilos. Su blog, que es muy inspirador, se convirtió en un diario de consulta para miles de personas alrededor del mundo y su mensaje no para de amplificarse: la charla que dio en TEDxTeens, por ejemplo, ya lleva más de 330 mil vistas. Los beneficios de su estilo de vida, dice, son múltiples: gana tiempo, come más sano, ahorra plata y vive una vida plena de sentido.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
Esto es lo que charlamos con ella:
¿Cómo se logra vivir sin generar basura?
Primero hay que elegirlo. Yo vivo sin generar basura. Luego, la clave está en comenzar con tres simples pasos. En primer lugar, tenés que conocer tus propios desechos e identificar cuáles son sus principales fuentes. Noté que lo que más me llevaba a generar desperdicios eran los restos de comida, el packaging de los productos y los envoltorios de los alimentos. La solución era entonces hacer compost para reducir los desperdicios de la comida, comprar alimentos sin celofanes ni empaques y hacer mis propios productos e insumos de belleza. Todos pequeños cambios con un gran impacto a largo plazo.
¿Cuáles son los límites de una vida sin desperdicios?
Hay dos tipos de cosas de las que hoy por hoy no puedo prescindir: los preservativos y los lentes de contacto. La solución líquida para mis lentes también viene en envase plástico y eso es algo que aún tengo que comprar.
¿Qué tan difícil fue crear por primera vez todos los productos de belleza que consumís diariamente?
Fue un proceso. Probé un millón de recetas diferentes. Lo más cool de hacer tus propios productos es que si no te gusta algo, como el aroma, podés cambiarlo, a diferencia de cuando vas a un negocio y tenés que contentarte con lo que venden. Amo investigar, testear cosas nuevas, y la razón por la que empecé mi blog es que quería compartir los resultados de las recetas que mejor me habían funcionado con otras personas, para que que no tuvieran que esforzarse como yo.
¿Te lleva más tiempo preparar tus propios productos?
No, ¡al contrario! Pensalo de esta manera: si te quedás sin pasta de dientes, tenés que ir a un negocio a comprarla. Yo preparo la mía en solo 30 segundos. Hay un video en el blog que lo prueba. Hacer mi propia crema corporal me lleva 10 minutos, no más. Todos tenemos preconceptos, como con la cocina. Si nunca preparaste algo, tendés a pensar que lleva un montón hacerlo. Me pasó el otro día con una amiga, ella compra todo empaquetado y creyó que hacer pasta era dificilísimo. Yo la animé a que la preparáramos juntas. Le enseñé cómo hacerlo y nos llevó solo 30 minutos, además del hecho de que fue más saludable y más barato. Cuando terminamos, no lo podía creer, no paraba de decirme: "No tenía idea". Todos tenemos preconceptos de cuán difíciles son las cosas en verdad, pero eso es hasta que las hacemos, es entonces cuando realmente sabemos. Por eso subo videos en tiempo real a mi blog, para que la gente pueda verlo.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
¿Y cómo lidiás con el peso que acarreás de un lado a otro para no tener que recurrir a los descartables? Como los frascos de vidrio o las bolsas de tela.
No cargo muchas cosas. Voy a un mercado de granjeros los sábados a comprar los vegetales frescos que necesito. Es mi ejercicio aeróbico semanal (risas). Y una vez por mes voy de compras a un negocio con una lista de exactamente lo que necesito. Lo único que pongo en frascos son las cosas húmedas, como el aceite de oliva.
¿Este estilo de vida te costó más plata?
No, para nada, al contrario. Todo me sale mucho más barato. Por ejemplo, a la hora de hacer mi propia pasta de dientes, gasto solo 50 centavos de dólar.
¿Llevás la cuenta de cuánto ahorraste?
No hay forma de saber exactamente cuánto dinero ahorré, pero solo para darte una idea, cada vez que llevás tu propia taza a la cafetería te hacen un descuento de 20 centavos por no usar un vaso descartable. En el curso de 4 años, me ahorré por lo menos 365 dólares, solo por llevar mi taza. Se trata de cosas bien simples como esa.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
¿Qué hacés cuando vas a una fiesta o salís con tu familia o tus amigos y ellos no comparten tu estilo de vida?
Yo solo puedo controlarme a mí misma, no puedo controlar a los demás ni lo que ellos hacen. No juzgo a las demás personas, simplemente me enfoco en mí y doy a conocer lo que aprendí.
¿Comés en restaurantes?
Sí, claro. No puedo intervenir en cómo se administran, pero sí puedo elegir a cuáles voy y trato de que sean los que tienen los mismos valores que yo. No voy muy seguido porque me encanta cocinar, pero si lo hago, intento que sean los que tienen comida local y sustentable, los que compostan sus residuos. Si tienen servilletas de papel, me llevo las que uso a casa, para compostarlas, y si pido un licuado, llevo mi propia bombilla de metal.
¿Cómo evitás caer en la tentación de comprar algo empaquetado cuando tenés hambre y estás apurada?
Bueno, eso pasa por vagancia y por falta de preparación. Tenés que planear por adelantado. Este estilo de vida me enseñó a planear y gracias a eso nunca más tuve que comprar comida poco nutricia que no me representara y no me gustara. Tenés que guardar comida en tu mochila antes de salir. Yo me organizo con una semana de anticipación.
¿Cómo hacés con el maquillaje?
La verdad es que no uso mucho, pero cuando lo hago, solo uso la marca RMS, que es orgánica, vegana y no testea en animales. Está empaquetada en materiales reciclables y solo uso corrector y la máscara.
Comprás tu ropa en ferias americanas. ¿Qué le recomendarías a una persona que vive en una ciudad chica y no tiene muchas opciones?
Bueno, siempre hay Ejércitos de Salvación o ferias de caridad, en todos lados. Además sugeriría ir a ventas de garaje o a mercados de pulgas. También hacer tu propia ropa o comprarles a productores y diseñadores locales que usen materiales de la zona, sustentables. Además, está la opción de intercambiar ropa con tus amigas, de ahí es de donde yo saco mi ropa más cool, ¡y gratis!
¿Quién es tu inspiración?
Muchas personas me inspiran. La primera y principal fue la ambientalista Rachel Carson, que escribió Primavera silenciosa, pero la verdad es que me inspira cualquier persona que trata de ser el cambio que desea ver. Personas comunes que intentan cambiar los problemas que ven en el mundo.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
LAS CLAVES DE LAUREN
1. Conocé tu basura e identificá cuáles son tus principales fuentes de desperdicio.
2. Comprá tus alimentos sin empaques, en casas naturistas o mercados, y llevá tus propias bolsas para transportarlos.
3. Decile NO al plástico en todas sus formas.
4. Fabricá tus propios productos de belleza, como pasta de dientes o crema corporal.
5. Comprá ropa en ferias de garaje o tiendas vintage, dales una segunda oportunidad a las prendas.
6. Prepará tus propios alimentos en vez de comprar todo hecho.
7. Llevá con vos tus propios vaso y bombilla.
8. Recordá la máxima al comprar: que sea local y sustentable.
Fuente: http://www.revistaohlala.com/1909144-vivo-sin-generar-basura
Why I live a zero waste life | Lauren Singer | TEDxTeen
Published on May 27, 2015
Lauren is an Environmental Studies graduate from NYU and former Sustainability Manager at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, and the amount of trash that she has produced over the past three years can fit inside of a 16 oz. mason jar.
Lauren Singer is author of the Zero Waste blog, Trash is for Tossers and founder of organic cleaning product company, The Simply Co.
Through her blog, she has empowered millions of readers to produce less waste by shopping package-free, making their own products and refusing plastic and single-use items.
Her work has been profiled by New York Magazine, MSNBC, NBC, AOL, CNN, Yahoo, Fox Business, BBC and NPR, among others.
Vivo sin generar basura
La neoyorquina Lauren Singer, que inspira al mundo desde un blog, comparte su estilo de vida ciento por ciento sustentable.
Por Inés Pujana |
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
Lauren Singer tiene 25 años, una licenciatura en Estudios Medioambientales por la Universidad de Nueva York (NYU), un blog (trashisfortossers.com, algo así como "la basura es para los desechadores") y una cuenta de Instagram con casi 60 mil seguidores en donde postea fotos de su vida. Hasta acá, nada que la distinga de las miles de blogueras que andan dando vueltas por el mundo. Pero hay algo que marca la diferencia. Lauren tiene un objetivo que direcciona cada una de sus acciones: vive una vida "zero waste", se propone no generar basura desde hace cuatro años y le va bastante bien. De hecho, todo el desecho que produjo en ese tiempo cabe dentro de un pequeño frasquito. Si tenemos en cuenta que el habitante promedio de una ciudad genera cerca de 2 kilos de basura por día, eso quiere decir que, desde que empezó su cruzada, Lauren evitó generar cerca de 3000 kilos. Su blog, que es muy inspirador, se convirtió en un diario de consulta para miles de personas alrededor del mundo y su mensaje no para de amplificarse: la charla que dio en TEDxTeens, por ejemplo, ya lleva más de 330 mil vistas. Los beneficios de su estilo de vida, dice, son múltiples: gana tiempo, come más sano, ahorra plata y vive una vida plena de sentido.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
Esto es lo que charlamos con ella:
¿Cómo se logra vivir sin generar basura?
Primero hay que elegirlo. Yo vivo sin generar basura. Luego, la clave está en comenzar con tres simples pasos. En primer lugar, tenés que conocer tus propios desechos e identificar cuáles son sus principales fuentes. Noté que lo que más me llevaba a generar desperdicios eran los restos de comida, el packaging de los productos y los envoltorios de los alimentos. La solución era entonces hacer compost para reducir los desperdicios de la comida, comprar alimentos sin celofanes ni empaques y hacer mis propios productos e insumos de belleza. Todos pequeños cambios con un gran impacto a largo plazo.
¿Cuáles son los límites de una vida sin desperdicios?
Hay dos tipos de cosas de las que hoy por hoy no puedo prescindir: los preservativos y los lentes de contacto. La solución líquida para mis lentes también viene en envase plástico y eso es algo que aún tengo que comprar.
¿Qué tan difícil fue crear por primera vez todos los productos de belleza que consumís diariamente?
Fue un proceso. Probé un millón de recetas diferentes. Lo más cool de hacer tus propios productos es que si no te gusta algo, como el aroma, podés cambiarlo, a diferencia de cuando vas a un negocio y tenés que contentarte con lo que venden. Amo investigar, testear cosas nuevas, y la razón por la que empecé mi blog es que quería compartir los resultados de las recetas que mejor me habían funcionado con otras personas, para que que no tuvieran que esforzarse como yo.
¿Te lleva más tiempo preparar tus propios productos?
No, ¡al contrario! Pensalo de esta manera: si te quedás sin pasta de dientes, tenés que ir a un negocio a comprarla. Yo preparo la mía en solo 30 segundos. Hay un video en el blog que lo prueba. Hacer mi propia crema corporal me lleva 10 minutos, no más. Todos tenemos preconceptos, como con la cocina. Si nunca preparaste algo, tendés a pensar que lleva un montón hacerlo. Me pasó el otro día con una amiga, ella compra todo empaquetado y creyó que hacer pasta era dificilísimo. Yo la animé a que la preparáramos juntas. Le enseñé cómo hacerlo y nos llevó solo 30 minutos, además del hecho de que fue más saludable y más barato. Cuando terminamos, no lo podía creer, no paraba de decirme: "No tenía idea". Todos tenemos preconceptos de cuán difíciles son las cosas en verdad, pero eso es hasta que las hacemos, es entonces cuando realmente sabemos. Por eso subo videos en tiempo real a mi blog, para que la gente pueda verlo.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
¿Y cómo lidiás con el peso que acarreás de un lado a otro para no tener que recurrir a los descartables? Como los frascos de vidrio o las bolsas de tela.
No cargo muchas cosas. Voy a un mercado de granjeros los sábados a comprar los vegetales frescos que necesito. Es mi ejercicio aeróbico semanal (risas). Y una vez por mes voy de compras a un negocio con una lista de exactamente lo que necesito. Lo único que pongo en frascos son las cosas húmedas, como el aceite de oliva.
¿Este estilo de vida te costó más plata?
No, para nada, al contrario. Todo me sale mucho más barato. Por ejemplo, a la hora de hacer mi propia pasta de dientes, gasto solo 50 centavos de dólar.
¿Llevás la cuenta de cuánto ahorraste?
No hay forma de saber exactamente cuánto dinero ahorré, pero solo para darte una idea, cada vez que llevás tu propia taza a la cafetería te hacen un descuento de 20 centavos por no usar un vaso descartable. En el curso de 4 años, me ahorré por lo menos 365 dólares, solo por llevar mi taza. Se trata de cosas bien simples como esa.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
¿Qué hacés cuando vas a una fiesta o salís con tu familia o tus amigos y ellos no comparten tu estilo de vida?
Yo solo puedo controlarme a mí misma, no puedo controlar a los demás ni lo que ellos hacen. No juzgo a las demás personas, simplemente me enfoco en mí y doy a conocer lo que aprendí.
¿Comés en restaurantes?
Sí, claro. No puedo intervenir en cómo se administran, pero sí puedo elegir a cuáles voy y trato de que sean los que tienen los mismos valores que yo. No voy muy seguido porque me encanta cocinar, pero si lo hago, intento que sean los que tienen comida local y sustentable, los que compostan sus residuos. Si tienen servilletas de papel, me llevo las que uso a casa, para compostarlas, y si pido un licuado, llevo mi propia bombilla de metal.
¿Cómo evitás caer en la tentación de comprar algo empaquetado cuando tenés hambre y estás apurada?
Bueno, eso pasa por vagancia y por falta de preparación. Tenés que planear por adelantado. Este estilo de vida me enseñó a planear y gracias a eso nunca más tuve que comprar comida poco nutricia que no me representara y no me gustara. Tenés que guardar comida en tu mochila antes de salir. Yo me organizo con una semana de anticipación.
¿Cómo hacés con el maquillaje?
La verdad es que no uso mucho, pero cuando lo hago, solo uso la marca RMS, que es orgánica, vegana y no testea en animales. Está empaquetada en materiales reciclables y solo uso corrector y la máscara.
Comprás tu ropa en ferias americanas. ¿Qué le recomendarías a una persona que vive en una ciudad chica y no tiene muchas opciones?
Bueno, siempre hay Ejércitos de Salvación o ferias de caridad, en todos lados. Además sugeriría ir a ventas de garaje o a mercados de pulgas. También hacer tu propia ropa o comprarles a productores y diseñadores locales que usen materiales de la zona, sustentables. Además, está la opción de intercambiar ropa con tus amigas, de ahí es de donde yo saco mi ropa más cool, ¡y gratis!
¿Quién es tu inspiración?
Muchas personas me inspiran. La primera y principal fue la ambientalista Rachel Carson, que escribió Primavera silenciosa, pero la verdad es que me inspira cualquier persona que trata de ser el cambio que desea ver. Personas comunes que intentan cambiar los problemas que ven en el mundo.
Foto: Gentileza Prensa
LAS CLAVES DE LAUREN
1. Conocé tu basura e identificá cuáles son tus principales fuentes de desperdicio.
2. Comprá tus alimentos sin empaques, en casas naturistas o mercados, y llevá tus propias bolsas para transportarlos.
3. Decile NO al plástico en todas sus formas.
4. Fabricá tus propios productos de belleza, como pasta de dientes o crema corporal.
5. Comprá ropa en ferias de garaje o tiendas vintage, dales una segunda oportunidad a las prendas.
6. Prepará tus propios alimentos en vez de comprar todo hecho.
7. Llevá con vos tus propios vaso y bombilla.
8. Recordá la máxima al comprar: que sea local y sustentable.
Fuente: http://www.revistaohlala.com/1909144-vivo-sin-generar-basura
HEALTH/GralInt-No hay drogas buenas o malas
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
No hay drogas buenas o malas
Se necesita crear conciencia sobre los riesgos del consumo de sustancias nocivas para la salud y sobre políticas de Estado firmes contra el narcotráfico
SÁBADO 18 DE JUNIO DE 2016
Una interesante campaña contra el uso de drogas por parte del Observatorio de Prevención del Narcotráfico (Oprenar) vuelve a poner de manifiesto la importancia de conocer los innumerables trastornos y riesgos que el consumo de drogas provoca no sólo en la persona que consume, sino también en la comunidad en la que vive. Entre otras consideraciones, señala que el consumo de drogas limita el desarrollo intelectual y pone al adicto en una situación de minusvalía, reduciendo su potencial proactivo a bajos niveles de desarrollo laboral y afectivo, entre otras cuestiones, llegando a involucrar a su grupo familiar, que padece, a veces en silencio, el problema de adicción que lo afecta.
Las drogas son todas malas las de origen natural o sintético, a las que se suma el alcohol-, porque alteran los vínculos personales y sociales, sostiene la campaña del Oprenar, una iniciativa interinstitucional de la sociedad civil, estrechamente vinculada a diferentes actores del sistema de educación de nuestro país, que tuvo su origen en noviembre de 2014.
En muchas ocasiones, el adicto ejerce violencia contra otros para obtener recursos que le permitan seguir consumiendo. En casos extremos, puede llegar a matar para alcanzar ese objetivo. Ya no caben dudas sobre la relación que existe entre droga y delito, como tampoco las hay respecto del deterioro que estas sustancias causan en el cuerpo humano. Así, por ejemplo, diversos estudios científicos han probado los efectos nocivos de la cocaína en el organismo. Ahora se sabe que altera la materia gris y afecta los riñones y el hígado. Los peligros del consumo de cocaína para la salud cerebral y cardíaca fueron a lo largo del tiempo los más habituales, pero los últimos estudios científicos demuestran que esta droga es todavía más peligrosa de lo que se cree.
Un equipo de científicos del Hospital de Sant Pau de Barcelona, el Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Bellvitge y la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona demostró, por primera vez, que la cocaína altera las funciones cerebrales y modifica la estructura del propio órgano. Estas "modificaciones" provocan, por ejemplo, que el cerebro de los consumidores no detecte las consecuencias adversas de su propio comportamiento.
En nuestro país, el Departamento de Toxicología del Hospital Fernández presentó un informe clínico en el que se destacó la relación de la cocaína con importantes falencias orgánicas en un paciente. Luego de varios análisis y la detección de la existencia de cocaína en su cuerpo, se advirtió insuficiencia aguda renal y hepática, ambas relacionadas con el consumo de esa droga.
El uso de drogas se remonta a tiempos inmemoriales. De hecho, no hay cultura que no las haya empleado. Hoy, sin embargo, ese consumo ha ido tomando características tan peculiares que lo transforman en un verdadero problema de salud pública.
La cantidad de muertos que provoca, las discapacidades que su uso trae como consecuencia, los circuitos de criminalidad conexos, la pérdida de recursos y el fomento de una cultura no sostenible en términos económicos y sociales hacen del consumo de drogas un factor en el que todos, Estado y sociedad civil, desde distintos niveles y con grados de responsabilidad diversos, estamos implicados.
Habrá que estar dispuestos a incrementar y cualificar las inversiones sanitarias para la prevención, el tratamiento y la rehabilitación de los consumidores. Se deberían elevar los montos destinados a la educación de los jóvenes para inducir hacia el futuro una baja en el consumo y un menor abuso de las drogas.
Los adolescentes y otros grupos vulnerables deberían ser objeto de iniciativas focalizadas de inserción educativa y laboral, de recreación deportiva y de contención en un nivel amplio, tanto dentro como fuera de su grupo de pertenencia.
Desde estas columnas editoriales se ha señalado en reiteradas oportunidades la necesidad de crear una conciencia colectiva de cuán complejo es este fenómeno, de adoptar políticas de Estado contra la drogadicción y el narcotráfico, y de la importancia de abandonar la tolerancia que algunas drogas tienen en la sociedad, que ve crecer una generación de adictos al consumo y que aún no ha encontrado las soluciones apropiadas para intentar evitarlo. El problema existe, no es nuevo y merece la mayor de las atenciones para evitar males mayores.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
No hay drogas buenas o malas
Se necesita crear conciencia sobre los riesgos del consumo de sustancias nocivas para la salud y sobre políticas de Estado firmes contra el narcotráfico
SÁBADO 18 DE JUNIO DE 2016
Una interesante campaña contra el uso de drogas por parte del Observatorio de Prevención del Narcotráfico (Oprenar) vuelve a poner de manifiesto la importancia de conocer los innumerables trastornos y riesgos que el consumo de drogas provoca no sólo en la persona que consume, sino también en la comunidad en la que vive. Entre otras consideraciones, señala que el consumo de drogas limita el desarrollo intelectual y pone al adicto en una situación de minusvalía, reduciendo su potencial proactivo a bajos niveles de desarrollo laboral y afectivo, entre otras cuestiones, llegando a involucrar a su grupo familiar, que padece, a veces en silencio, el problema de adicción que lo afecta.
Las drogas son todas malas las de origen natural o sintético, a las que se suma el alcohol-, porque alteran los vínculos personales y sociales, sostiene la campaña del Oprenar, una iniciativa interinstitucional de la sociedad civil, estrechamente vinculada a diferentes actores del sistema de educación de nuestro país, que tuvo su origen en noviembre de 2014.
En muchas ocasiones, el adicto ejerce violencia contra otros para obtener recursos que le permitan seguir consumiendo. En casos extremos, puede llegar a matar para alcanzar ese objetivo. Ya no caben dudas sobre la relación que existe entre droga y delito, como tampoco las hay respecto del deterioro que estas sustancias causan en el cuerpo humano. Así, por ejemplo, diversos estudios científicos han probado los efectos nocivos de la cocaína en el organismo. Ahora se sabe que altera la materia gris y afecta los riñones y el hígado. Los peligros del consumo de cocaína para la salud cerebral y cardíaca fueron a lo largo del tiempo los más habituales, pero los últimos estudios científicos demuestran que esta droga es todavía más peligrosa de lo que se cree.
Un equipo de científicos del Hospital de Sant Pau de Barcelona, el Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Bellvitge y la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona demostró, por primera vez, que la cocaína altera las funciones cerebrales y modifica la estructura del propio órgano. Estas "modificaciones" provocan, por ejemplo, que el cerebro de los consumidores no detecte las consecuencias adversas de su propio comportamiento.
En nuestro país, el Departamento de Toxicología del Hospital Fernández presentó un informe clínico en el que se destacó la relación de la cocaína con importantes falencias orgánicas en un paciente. Luego de varios análisis y la detección de la existencia de cocaína en su cuerpo, se advirtió insuficiencia aguda renal y hepática, ambas relacionadas con el consumo de esa droga.
El uso de drogas se remonta a tiempos inmemoriales. De hecho, no hay cultura que no las haya empleado. Hoy, sin embargo, ese consumo ha ido tomando características tan peculiares que lo transforman en un verdadero problema de salud pública.
La cantidad de muertos que provoca, las discapacidades que su uso trae como consecuencia, los circuitos de criminalidad conexos, la pérdida de recursos y el fomento de una cultura no sostenible en términos económicos y sociales hacen del consumo de drogas un factor en el que todos, Estado y sociedad civil, desde distintos niveles y con grados de responsabilidad diversos, estamos implicados.
Habrá que estar dispuestos a incrementar y cualificar las inversiones sanitarias para la prevención, el tratamiento y la rehabilitación de los consumidores. Se deberían elevar los montos destinados a la educación de los jóvenes para inducir hacia el futuro una baja en el consumo y un menor abuso de las drogas.
Los adolescentes y otros grupos vulnerables deberían ser objeto de iniciativas focalizadas de inserción educativa y laboral, de recreación deportiva y de contención en un nivel amplio, tanto dentro como fuera de su grupo de pertenencia.
Desde estas columnas editoriales se ha señalado en reiteradas oportunidades la necesidad de crear una conciencia colectiva de cuán complejo es este fenómeno, de adoptar políticas de Estado contra la drogadicción y el narcotráfico, y de la importancia de abandonar la tolerancia que algunas drogas tienen en la sociedad, que ve crecer una generación de adictos al consumo y que aún no ha encontrado las soluciones apropiadas para intentar evitarlo. El problema existe, no es nuevo y merece la mayor de las atenciones para evitar males mayores.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
TECH/GralInt-TED Talks-Tristan Harris: How better tech could protect us from distraction
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed December 2014 at TEDxBrussels
Tristan Harris: How better tech could protect us from distraction
How often does technology interrupt us from what we really mean to be doing? At work and at play, we spend a startling amount of time distracted by pings and pop-ups — instead of helping us spend our time well, it often feels like our tech is stealing it away from us. Design thinker Tristan Harris offers thoughtful new ideas for technology that creates more meaningful interaction. He asks: "What does the future of technology look like when you're designing for the deepest human values?"
Transcript:
What does it mean to spend our time well? I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to spend my time. Probably too much -- I probably obsess over it. My friends think I do. But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days, it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me, and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away.
Specifically, it feels like little bits of my time get slipped away to various things like this, like technology -- I check things. I'll give you an example. If this email shows up -- how many of you have gotten an email like this, right? I've been tagged in a photo. When this appears, I can't help but click on it right now. Right? Because, like, what if it's a bad photo? So I have to click it right now. But I'm not just going to click "See photo," what I'm actually going to do is spend the next 20 minutes.
(Laughter)
But the worst part is that I know this is what's going to happen, and even knowing that's what's going to happen doesn't stop me from doing it again the next time. Or I find myself in a situation like this, where I check my email and I pull down to refresh, But the thing is that 60 seconds later, I'll pull down to refresh again. Why am I doing this? This doesn't make any sense.
But I'll give you a hint why this is happening. What do you think makes more money in the United States than movies, game parks and baseball combined? Slot machines. How can slot machines make all this money when we play with such small amounts of money? We play with coins. How is this possible? Well, the thing is ... my phone is a slot machine. Every time I check my phone, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get? What am I going to get? Every time I check my email, I'm playing the slot machine, saying, "What am I going to get?" Every time I scroll a news feed, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get next? And the thing is that, again, knowing exactly how this works -- and I'm a designer, I know exactly how the psychology of this works, I know exactly what's going on -- but it doesn't leave me with any choice, I still just get sucked into it.
So what are we going to do? Because it leaves us with this all-or-nothing relationship with technology, right? You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out. Right?
So we need to restore choice. We want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it, and we're going to need help from designers, because knowing this stuff doesn't help. We're going to need design help. So what would that look like?
So let's take an example that we all face: chat -- text messaging. So let's say there's two people. Nancy's on the left and she's working on a document, and John's on the right. And John suddenly remembers, "I need to ask Nancy for that document before I forget." So when he sends her that message, it blows away her attention.
That's what we're doing all the time, bulldozing each other's attention, left and right. And there's serious cost to this, because every time we interrupt each other, it takes us about 23 minutes, on average, to refocus our attention. We actually cycle through two different projects before we come back to the original thing we were doing. This is Gloria Mark's research combined with Microsoft research, that showed this. And her research also shows that it actually trains bad habits. The more interruptions we get externally, it's conditioning and training us to interrupt ourselves. We actually self-interrupt every three-and-a-half minutes.
This is crazy. So how do we fix this? Because Nancy and John are in this all-or-nothing relationship. Nancy might want to disconnect, but then she'd be worried: What if I'm missing something important?
Design can fix this problem. Let's say you have Nancy again on the left, John on the right. And John remembers, "I need to send Nancy that document." Except this time, Nancy can mark that she's focused. Let's say she drags a slider and says, "I want to be focused for 30 minutes," so -- bam -- she's focused. Now when John wants to message her, he can get the thought off of his mind -- because he has a need, he has this thought, and he needs to dump it out before he forgets. Except this time, it holds the messages so that Nancy can still focus, but John can get the thought off of his mind.
But this only works if one last thing is true, which is that Nancy needs to know that if something is truly important, John can still interrupt. But instead of having constant accidental or mindless interruptions, we're now only creating conscious interruptions,
So we're doing two things here. We're creating a new choice for both Nancy and John, But there's a second, subtle thing we're doing here, too. And it's that we're changing the question we're answering. Instead of the goal of chat being: "Let's design it so it's easy to send a message" -- that's the goal of chat, it should be really easy to send a message to someone -- we change the goal to something deeper and a human value, which is: "Let's create the highest possible quality communication in a relationship between two people. So we upgraded the goal.
Now, do designers actually care about this? Do we want to have conversations about what these deeper human goals are? Well, I'll tell you one story. A little over a year ago, I got to help organize a meeting between some of technology's leading designers and Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is an international spokesperson for mindfulness meditation. And it was the most amazing meeting. You have to imagine -- picture a room -- on one side of the room, you have a bunch of tech geeks; on the other side of the room, you have a bunch of long brown robes, shaved heads, Buddhist monks. And the questions were about the deepest human values, like what does the future of technology look like when you're designing for the deepest questions and the deepest human values? And our conversation centered on listening more deeply to what those values might be. He joked in our conversation that what if, instead of a spell check, you had a compassion check, meaning, you might highlight a word that might be accidentally abrasive -- perceived as abrasive by someone else.
So does this kind of conversation happen in the real world, not just in these design meetings? Well, the answer is yes, and one of my favorites is Couchsurfing. If you didn't know, Couchsurfing is a website that matches people who are looking for a place to stay with a free couch, from someone who's trying to offer it.
So, great service -- what would their design goal be? What are you designing for if you work at Couchsurfing? Well, you would think it's to match guests with hosts. Right? That's a pretty good goal. But that would kind of be like our goal with messaging before, where we're just trying to deliver a message.
So what's the deeper, human goal? Well, they set their goal as the need to create lasting, positive experiences and relationships between people who've never met before. And the most amazing thing about this was in 2007, they introduced a way to measure this, which is incredible. I'll tell you how it works. For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing -- a way of measuring success. So what they do is, let's say you take two people who meet up, and they take the number of days those two people spent together, and then they estimate how many hours were in those days -- how many hours did those two people spend together? And then after they spend that time together, they ask both of them: How positive was your experience? Did you have a good experience with this person that you met? And they subtract from those positive hours the amount of time people spent on the website, because that's a cost to people's lives. Why should we value that as success? And what you were left with is something they refer to as "net orchestrated conviviality," or, really, just a net "Good Times" created. The net hours that would have never existed, had Couchsurfing not existed.
Can you imagine how inspiring it would be to come to work every day and measure your success in the actual net new contribution of hours in people's lives that are positive, that would have never existed if you didn't do what you were about to do at work today? Can you imagine a whole world that worked this way?
Can you imagine a social network that -- let's say you care about cooking, and it measured its success in terms of cooking nights organized and the cooking articles that you were glad you read, and subtracted from that the articles you weren't glad you read or the time you spent scrolling that you didn't like? Imagine a professional social network that, instead of measuring its success in terms of connections created or messages sent, instead measured its success in terms of the job offers that people got that they were excited to get. And subtracted the amount of time people spent on the website. Or imagine dating services, like maybe Tinder or something, where instead of measuring the number of swipes left and right people did, which is how they measure success today, instead measured the deep, romantic, fulfilling connections people created. Whatever that was for them, by the way.
But can you imagine a whole world that worked this way, that was helping you spend your time well? Now to do this you also need a new system, because you're probably thinking, today's Internet economy -- today's economy in general -- is measured in time spent. The more users you have, the more usage you have, the more time people spend, that's how we measure success.
But we've solved this problem before. We solved it with organic, when we said we need to value things a different way. We said this is a different kind of food. So we can't compare it just based on price; this is a different category of food. We solved it with Leed Certification, where we said this is a different kind of building that stood for different values of environmental sustainability.
What if we had something like that for technology? What if we had something whose entire purpose and goal was to help create net new positive contributions to human life? And what if we could value it a different way, so it would actually work? Imagine you gave this different premium shelf space on app stores. Imagine you had web browsers that helped route you to these kinds of design products. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to live and create that world?
We can create this world today. Company leaders, all you have to do -- only you can prioritize a new metric, which is your metric for net positive contribution to human life. And have an honest conversation about that. Maybe you're not doing so well to start with, but let's start that conversation.
Designers, you can redefine success; you can redefine design. Arguably, you have more power than many people in your organization to create the choices that all of us live by. Maybe like in medicine, where we have a Hippocratic oath to recognize the responsibility and this higher value that we have to treat patients. What if designers had something like that, in terms of this new kind of design?
And users, for all of us -- we can demand technology that works this way. Now it may seem hard, but McDonald's didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there. Walmart didn't have organic food until the consumer demand was there. We have to demand this new kind of technology. And we can do that. And doing that would amount to shifting from a world that's driven and run entirely on time spent, to world that's driven by time well spent.
I want to live in this world, and I want this conversation to happen. Let's start that conversation now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed December 2014 at TEDxBrussels
Tristan Harris: How better tech could protect us from distraction
How often does technology interrupt us from what we really mean to be doing? At work and at play, we spend a startling amount of time distracted by pings and pop-ups — instead of helping us spend our time well, it often feels like our tech is stealing it away from us. Design thinker Tristan Harris offers thoughtful new ideas for technology that creates more meaningful interaction. He asks: "What does the future of technology look like when you're designing for the deepest human values?"
Transcript:
What does it mean to spend our time well? I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to spend my time. Probably too much -- I probably obsess over it. My friends think I do. But I feel like I kind of have to, because these days, it feels like little bits of my time kind of slip away from me, and when that happens, it feels like parts of my life are slipping away.
Specifically, it feels like little bits of my time get slipped away to various things like this, like technology -- I check things. I'll give you an example. If this email shows up -- how many of you have gotten an email like this, right? I've been tagged in a photo. When this appears, I can't help but click on it right now. Right? Because, like, what if it's a bad photo? So I have to click it right now. But I'm not just going to click "See photo," what I'm actually going to do is spend the next 20 minutes.
(Laughter)
But the worst part is that I know this is what's going to happen, and even knowing that's what's going to happen doesn't stop me from doing it again the next time. Or I find myself in a situation like this, where I check my email and I pull down to refresh, But the thing is that 60 seconds later, I'll pull down to refresh again. Why am I doing this? This doesn't make any sense.
But I'll give you a hint why this is happening. What do you think makes more money in the United States than movies, game parks and baseball combined? Slot machines. How can slot machines make all this money when we play with such small amounts of money? We play with coins. How is this possible? Well, the thing is ... my phone is a slot machine. Every time I check my phone, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get? What am I going to get? Every time I check my email, I'm playing the slot machine, saying, "What am I going to get?" Every time I scroll a news feed, I'm playing the slot machine to see, what am I going to get next? And the thing is that, again, knowing exactly how this works -- and I'm a designer, I know exactly how the psychology of this works, I know exactly what's going on -- but it doesn't leave me with any choice, I still just get sucked into it.
So what are we going to do? Because it leaves us with this all-or-nothing relationship with technology, right? You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have fear of missing out. Right?
So we need to restore choice. We want to have a relationship with technology that gives us back choice about how we spend time with it, and we're going to need help from designers, because knowing this stuff doesn't help. We're going to need design help. So what would that look like?
So let's take an example that we all face: chat -- text messaging. So let's say there's two people. Nancy's on the left and she's working on a document, and John's on the right. And John suddenly remembers, "I need to ask Nancy for that document before I forget." So when he sends her that message, it blows away her attention.
That's what we're doing all the time, bulldozing each other's attention, left and right. And there's serious cost to this, because every time we interrupt each other, it takes us about 23 minutes, on average, to refocus our attention. We actually cycle through two different projects before we come back to the original thing we were doing. This is Gloria Mark's research combined with Microsoft research, that showed this. And her research also shows that it actually trains bad habits. The more interruptions we get externally, it's conditioning and training us to interrupt ourselves. We actually self-interrupt every three-and-a-half minutes.
This is crazy. So how do we fix this? Because Nancy and John are in this all-or-nothing relationship. Nancy might want to disconnect, but then she'd be worried: What if I'm missing something important?
Design can fix this problem. Let's say you have Nancy again on the left, John on the right. And John remembers, "I need to send Nancy that document." Except this time, Nancy can mark that she's focused. Let's say she drags a slider and says, "I want to be focused for 30 minutes," so -- bam -- she's focused. Now when John wants to message her, he can get the thought off of his mind -- because he has a need, he has this thought, and he needs to dump it out before he forgets. Except this time, it holds the messages so that Nancy can still focus, but John can get the thought off of his mind.
But this only works if one last thing is true, which is that Nancy needs to know that if something is truly important, John can still interrupt. But instead of having constant accidental or mindless interruptions, we're now only creating conscious interruptions,
So we're doing two things here. We're creating a new choice for both Nancy and John, But there's a second, subtle thing we're doing here, too. And it's that we're changing the question we're answering. Instead of the goal of chat being: "Let's design it so it's easy to send a message" -- that's the goal of chat, it should be really easy to send a message to someone -- we change the goal to something deeper and a human value, which is: "Let's create the highest possible quality communication in a relationship between two people. So we upgraded the goal.
Now, do designers actually care about this? Do we want to have conversations about what these deeper human goals are? Well, I'll tell you one story. A little over a year ago, I got to help organize a meeting between some of technology's leading designers and Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is an international spokesperson for mindfulness meditation. And it was the most amazing meeting. You have to imagine -- picture a room -- on one side of the room, you have a bunch of tech geeks; on the other side of the room, you have a bunch of long brown robes, shaved heads, Buddhist monks. And the questions were about the deepest human values, like what does the future of technology look like when you're designing for the deepest questions and the deepest human values? And our conversation centered on listening more deeply to what those values might be. He joked in our conversation that what if, instead of a spell check, you had a compassion check, meaning, you might highlight a word that might be accidentally abrasive -- perceived as abrasive by someone else.
So does this kind of conversation happen in the real world, not just in these design meetings? Well, the answer is yes, and one of my favorites is Couchsurfing. If you didn't know, Couchsurfing is a website that matches people who are looking for a place to stay with a free couch, from someone who's trying to offer it.
So, great service -- what would their design goal be? What are you designing for if you work at Couchsurfing? Well, you would think it's to match guests with hosts. Right? That's a pretty good goal. But that would kind of be like our goal with messaging before, where we're just trying to deliver a message.
So what's the deeper, human goal? Well, they set their goal as the need to create lasting, positive experiences and relationships between people who've never met before. And the most amazing thing about this was in 2007, they introduced a way to measure this, which is incredible. I'll tell you how it works. For every design goal you have, you have to have a corresponding measurement to know how you're doing -- a way of measuring success. So what they do is, let's say you take two people who meet up, and they take the number of days those two people spent together, and then they estimate how many hours were in those days -- how many hours did those two people spend together? And then after they spend that time together, they ask both of them: How positive was your experience? Did you have a good experience with this person that you met? And they subtract from those positive hours the amount of time people spent on the website, because that's a cost to people's lives. Why should we value that as success? And what you were left with is something they refer to as "net orchestrated conviviality," or, really, just a net "Good Times" created. The net hours that would have never existed, had Couchsurfing not existed.
Can you imagine how inspiring it would be to come to work every day and measure your success in the actual net new contribution of hours in people's lives that are positive, that would have never existed if you didn't do what you were about to do at work today? Can you imagine a whole world that worked this way?
Can you imagine a social network that -- let's say you care about cooking, and it measured its success in terms of cooking nights organized and the cooking articles that you were glad you read, and subtracted from that the articles you weren't glad you read or the time you spent scrolling that you didn't like? Imagine a professional social network that, instead of measuring its success in terms of connections created or messages sent, instead measured its success in terms of the job offers that people got that they were excited to get. And subtracted the amount of time people spent on the website. Or imagine dating services, like maybe Tinder or something, where instead of measuring the number of swipes left and right people did, which is how they measure success today, instead measured the deep, romantic, fulfilling connections people created. Whatever that was for them, by the way.
But can you imagine a whole world that worked this way, that was helping you spend your time well? Now to do this you also need a new system, because you're probably thinking, today's Internet economy -- today's economy in general -- is measured in time spent. The more users you have, the more usage you have, the more time people spend, that's how we measure success.
But we've solved this problem before. We solved it with organic, when we said we need to value things a different way. We said this is a different kind of food. So we can't compare it just based on price; this is a different category of food. We solved it with Leed Certification, where we said this is a different kind of building that stood for different values of environmental sustainability.
What if we had something like that for technology? What if we had something whose entire purpose and goal was to help create net new positive contributions to human life? And what if we could value it a different way, so it would actually work? Imagine you gave this different premium shelf space on app stores. Imagine you had web browsers that helped route you to these kinds of design products. Can you imagine how exciting it would be to live and create that world?
We can create this world today. Company leaders, all you have to do -- only you can prioritize a new metric, which is your metric for net positive contribution to human life. And have an honest conversation about that. Maybe you're not doing so well to start with, but let's start that conversation.
Designers, you can redefine success; you can redefine design. Arguably, you have more power than many people in your organization to create the choices that all of us live by. Maybe like in medicine, where we have a Hippocratic oath to recognize the responsibility and this higher value that we have to treat patients. What if designers had something like that, in terms of this new kind of design?
And users, for all of us -- we can demand technology that works this way. Now it may seem hard, but McDonald's didn't have salads until the consumer demand was there. Walmart didn't have organic food until the consumer demand was there. We have to demand this new kind of technology. And we can do that. And doing that would amount to shifting from a world that's driven and run entirely on time spent, to world that's driven by time well spent.
I want to live in this world, and I want this conversation to happen. Let's start that conversation now.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Jamila Raqib: The secret to effective nonviolent resistance
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed November 2015 at TED Talks Live
Jamila Raqib: The secret to effective nonviolent resistance
We're not going to end violence by telling people that it's morally wrong, says Jamila Raqib, executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Instead, we must find alternative ways to conduct conflict that are equally powerful and effective. Raqib promotes nonviolent resistance to people living under tyranny — and there's a lot more to it than street protests. She shares encouraging examples of creative strategies that have led to change around the world and a message of hope for a future without armed conflict. "The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete," Raqib says.
Transcript:
War has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was born in Afghanistan, just six months after the Soviets invaded, and even though I was too young to understand what was happening, I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me.
Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict. I learned that when people have a fundamental issue at stake, for most of them, giving in is not an option. For these types conflicts -- when people's rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated -- they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. Which means that no matter how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it. Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. Instead, we must offer them a tool that's at least as powerful and as effective as violence.
This is the work I do. For the past 13 years, I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict. Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years. In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this country -- as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned with the environment -- these rights weren't handed to us. They were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them. But because we haven't learned from this history, nonviolent struggle as a technique is widely misunderstood.
I met recently with a group of Ethiopian activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot. They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked. Years ago they held a protest. The government arrested everyone, and that was the end of that. The idea that nonviolent struggle is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. Because although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own, they don't actually create change -- at least change that is fundamental.
(Laughter)
Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely ... or even not so nicely.
(Laughter)
Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power. Nonviolent activists can neutralize the military by causing soldiers to defect. They can disrupt the economy through strikes and boycotts. And they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media.
There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. My colleague and mentor, Gene Sharp, has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. And protest is only one. Let me give you a recent example.
Until a few months ago, Guatemala was ruled by corrupt former military officials with ties to organized crime. People were generally aware of this, but most of them felt powerless to do anything about it -- until one group of citizens, just 12 regular people, put out a call on Facebook to their friends to meet in the central plaza, holding signs with a message: "Renuncia YA" -- resign already. To their surprise, 30,000 people showed up. They stayed there for months as protests spread throughout the country. At one point, the organizers delivered hundreds of eggs to various government buildings with a message: "If you don't have the huevos" -- the balls -- "to stop corrupt candidates from running for office, you can borrow ours."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
President Molina responded by vowing that we would never step down. And the activists realized that they couldn't just keep protesting and ask the president to resign. They needed to leave him no choice. So they organized a general strike, in which people throughout the country refused to work. In Guatemala City alone, over 400 businesses and schools shut their doors. Meanwhile, farmers throughout the country blocked major roads. Within five days, the president, along with dozens of other government officials, resigned already.
(Applause)
I've been greatly inspired by the creativity and bravery of people using nonviolent action in nearly every country in the world. For example, recently a group of activists in Uganda released a crate of pigs in the streets. You can see here that the police are confused about what to do with them.
(Laughter)
The pigs were painted the color of the ruling party. One pig was even wearing a hat, a hat that people recognized.
(Laughter)
Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. A general wouldn't march his troops into battle unless he had a plan to win the war. Yet this is how most of the world's nonviolent movements operate. Nonviolent struggle is just as complex as military warfare, if not more. Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives.
The technique of war has been developed over thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to understanding and improving how it works. Meanwhile, nonviolent struggle is rarely systematically studied, and even though the number is growing, there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. This is dangerous, because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we're facing.
The US government recently admitted that it's in a stalemate in its war against ISIS. But what most people don't know is that people have stood up to ISIS using nonviolent action. When ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, they announced that they were putting in place a new public school curriculum, based on their own extremist ideology. But on the first day of school, not a single child showed up. Parents simply refused to send them. They told journalists they would rather homeschool their children than to have them brainwashed.
This is an example of just one act of defiance in just one city. But what if it was coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolent resistance that have taken place against ISIS? What if the parents' boycott was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function; the skilled labor needed to produce food; the engineers needed to extract and refine oil; the media infrastructure and communications networks and transportation systems, and the local businesses that ISIS relies on? It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent. But it's time we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have in facing it.
Here's an idea worth spreading: let's learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in place of war. Violence as a tool of conflict could then be abandoned in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. With human innovation, we can make nonviolent struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war. The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed November 2015 at TED Talks Live
Jamila Raqib: The secret to effective nonviolent resistance
We're not going to end violence by telling people that it's morally wrong, says Jamila Raqib, executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution. Instead, we must find alternative ways to conduct conflict that are equally powerful and effective. Raqib promotes nonviolent resistance to people living under tyranny — and there's a lot more to it than street protests. She shares encouraging examples of creative strategies that have led to change around the world and a message of hope for a future without armed conflict. "The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete," Raqib says.
Transcript:
War has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was born in Afghanistan, just six months after the Soviets invaded, and even though I was too young to understand what was happening, I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me.
Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict. I learned that when people have a fundamental issue at stake, for most of them, giving in is not an option. For these types conflicts -- when people's rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated -- they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. Which means that no matter how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it. Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. Instead, we must offer them a tool that's at least as powerful and as effective as violence.
This is the work I do. For the past 13 years, I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict. Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years. In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this country -- as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned with the environment -- these rights weren't handed to us. They were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them. But because we haven't learned from this history, nonviolent struggle as a technique is widely misunderstood.
I met recently with a group of Ethiopian activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot. They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked. Years ago they held a protest. The government arrested everyone, and that was the end of that. The idea that nonviolent struggle is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. Because although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own, they don't actually create change -- at least change that is fundamental.
(Laughter)
Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely ... or even not so nicely.
(Laughter)
Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power. Nonviolent activists can neutralize the military by causing soldiers to defect. They can disrupt the economy through strikes and boycotts. And they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media.
There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. My colleague and mentor, Gene Sharp, has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. And protest is only one. Let me give you a recent example.
Until a few months ago, Guatemala was ruled by corrupt former military officials with ties to organized crime. People were generally aware of this, but most of them felt powerless to do anything about it -- until one group of citizens, just 12 regular people, put out a call on Facebook to their friends to meet in the central plaza, holding signs with a message: "Renuncia YA" -- resign already. To their surprise, 30,000 people showed up. They stayed there for months as protests spread throughout the country. At one point, the organizers delivered hundreds of eggs to various government buildings with a message: "If you don't have the huevos" -- the balls -- "to stop corrupt candidates from running for office, you can borrow ours."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
President Molina responded by vowing that we would never step down. And the activists realized that they couldn't just keep protesting and ask the president to resign. They needed to leave him no choice. So they organized a general strike, in which people throughout the country refused to work. In Guatemala City alone, over 400 businesses and schools shut their doors. Meanwhile, farmers throughout the country blocked major roads. Within five days, the president, along with dozens of other government officials, resigned already.
(Applause)
I've been greatly inspired by the creativity and bravery of people using nonviolent action in nearly every country in the world. For example, recently a group of activists in Uganda released a crate of pigs in the streets. You can see here that the police are confused about what to do with them.
(Laughter)
The pigs were painted the color of the ruling party. One pig was even wearing a hat, a hat that people recognized.
(Laughter)
Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. A general wouldn't march his troops into battle unless he had a plan to win the war. Yet this is how most of the world's nonviolent movements operate. Nonviolent struggle is just as complex as military warfare, if not more. Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives.
The technique of war has been developed over thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to understanding and improving how it works. Meanwhile, nonviolent struggle is rarely systematically studied, and even though the number is growing, there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. This is dangerous, because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we're facing.
The US government recently admitted that it's in a stalemate in its war against ISIS. But what most people don't know is that people have stood up to ISIS using nonviolent action. When ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, they announced that they were putting in place a new public school curriculum, based on their own extremist ideology. But on the first day of school, not a single child showed up. Parents simply refused to send them. They told journalists they would rather homeschool their children than to have them brainwashed.
This is an example of just one act of defiance in just one city. But what if it was coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolent resistance that have taken place against ISIS? What if the parents' boycott was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function; the skilled labor needed to produce food; the engineers needed to extract and refine oil; the media infrastructure and communications networks and transportation systems, and the local businesses that ISIS relies on? It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent. But it's time we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have in facing it.
Here's an idea worth spreading: let's learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in place of war. Violence as a tool of conflict could then be abandoned in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. With human innovation, we can make nonviolent struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war. The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Andrew Youn: 3 reasons why we can win the fight against poverty
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Andrew Youn: 3 reasons why we can win the fight against poverty
Half of the world's poorest people have something in common: they're small farmers. In this eye-opening talk, activist Andrew Youn shows how his group, One Acre Fund, is helping these farmers lift themselves out of poverty by delivering to them life-sustaining farm services that are already in use all over the world. Enter this talk believing we'll never be able to solve hunger and extreme poverty, and leave it with a new understanding of the scale of the world's biggest problems.
Transcript:
I've been living in rural East Africa for about 10 years, and I want to share a field perspective with you on global poverty. I believe that the greatest failure of the human race is the fact that we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Hungry, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic, insurmountable problems, too big to solve. But as a field practitioner, I believe these are actually very solvable problems if we just take the right strategies.
Archimedes was an ancient Greek thinker, and he taught us that if we lean on the right levers, we can move the world. In the fight against extreme poverty, I believe there are three powerful levers that we can lean on. This talk is all about those levers, and why they make poverty a winnable fight in our lifetimes.
What is extreme poverty? When I first moved to rural East Africa, I stayed overnight with a farm family. They were wonderful people. They invited me into their home. We sang songs together and ate a simple dinner. They gave me a blanket to sleep on the floor. In the morning, however, there was nothing to eat. And then at lunchtime, I watched with an increasingly sick feeling as the eldest girl in the family cooked porridge as a substitute for lunch. For that meal, every child drank one cup to survive. And I cannot tell you how ashamed I felt when they handed one of those cups to me, and I knew I had to accept their hospitality.
Children need food not only to survive but also to grow physically and mentally. Every day they fail to eat, they lose a little bit of their future. Amongst the extreme poor, one in three children are permanently stunted from a lifetime of not eating enough. When that's combined with poor access to health care, one in 10 extremely poor children die before they reach age five. And only one quarter of children complete high school because they lack school fees. Hunger and extreme poverty curb human potential in every possible way. We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve these problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because every person on this planet matters. This child matters. These children matter. This girl matters.
You know, we see things like this, and we're upset by them, but they seem like such big problems. We don't know how to take effective action. But remember our friend Archimedes. Global poverty has powerful levers. It's a problem like any other. I live and work in the field, and as a practitioner, I believe these are very solvable problems. So for the next 10 minutes, let's not be sad about the state of the world. Let's engage our brains. Let's engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are.
Lever number one: most of the world's poor are farmers. Think about how extraordinary this is. If this picture represents the world's poor, then more than half engage in farming as a major source of income. This gets me really excited. All of these people, one profession. Think how powerful this is. When farmers become more productive, then more than half the world's poor earn more money and climb out of poverty. And it gets better. The product of farming is, of course, food. So when farmers become more productive, they earn more food, and they don't just help themselves, but they help to feed healthy communities and thriving economies. And when farmers become more productive, they reduce environmental pressure. We only have two ways we can feed the world: we can either make our existing farmland a lot more productive, or we can clear cut forest and savannah to make more farmland, which would be environmentally disastrous. Farmers are basically a really important leverage point. When farmers become more productive, they earn more income, they climb out of poverty, they feed their communities and they reduce environmental land pressure. Farmers stand at the center of the world.
And not a farmer like this one, but rather this lady. Most of the farmers I know are actually women. Look at the strength and the will radiating from this woman. She is physically strong, mentally tough, and she will do whatever it takes to earn a better life for her children. If we're going to put the future of humanity in one person's hands, then I'm really glad it's her.
(Applause)
There's just one problem: many smallholder farmers lack access to basic tools and knowledge. Currently, they take a little bit of saved food grain from the prior year, they plant it in the ground and they till it with a manual hand hoe. These are tools and techniques that date to the Bronze Age, and it's why many farmers are still very poor.
But good news, again. Lever number two: humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. Let me walk you through the three most basic factors in farming. First, hybrid seed is created when you cross two seeds together. If you naturally pollinate a high-yielding variety together with a drought-resistant variety, you get a hybrid that inherits positive traits from both of its parents. Next, conventional fertilizer, if used responsibly, is environmentally sustainable. If you micro-dose just a pinch of fertilizer to a plant that's taller than I am, you unlock enormous yield gain. These are known as farm inputs. Farm inputs need to be combined with good practice. When you space your seeds and plant with massive amounts of compost, farmers multiply their harvests. These proven tools and practices have more than tripled agricultural productivity in every major region of the world, moving mass numbers of people out of poverty. We just haven't finished delivering these things to everybody just yet, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
So overall, this is amazing news. Humanity actually solved agricultural poverty a century ago, in theory. We just haven't delivered these things to everybody just yet. In this century, the reason that people remain poor is because maybe they live in remote places. They lack access to these things. Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people. We don't need more genius types right now. The humble delivery guy is going to end global poverty in our lifetime.
So these are the three levers, and the most powerful lever is simply delivery. Wherever the world's companies, governments and nonprofits set up delivery networks for life-improving goods, we eliminate poverty.
OK, so that sounds really nice in theory, but what about in practice? What do these delivery networks look like? I want to share the concrete example that I know best, my organization, One Acre Fund. We only serve the farmer, and our job is to provide her with the tools that she needs to succeed. We start off by delivering farm inputs to really rural places. Now, this may appear initially very challenging, but it's pretty possible. Let me show you. We buy farm inputs with the combined power of our farmer network, and store it in 20 warehouses like this. Then, during input delivery, we rent hundreds of 10-ton trucks and send them out to where farmers are waiting in the field. They then get their individual orders and walk it home to their farms. It's kind of like Amazon for rural farmers. Importantly, realistic delivery also includes finance, a way to pay. Farmers pay us little by little over time, covering most of our expenses. And then we surround all that with training. Our rural field officers deliver practical, hands-on training to farmers in the field every two weeks.
Wherever we deliver our services, farmers use these tools to climb out of poverty. This is a farmer in our program, Consolata. Look at the pride on her face. She has achieved a modest prosperity that I believe is the human right of every hardworking person on the planet. Today, I'm proud to say that we're serving about 400,000 farmers like Consolata.
(Applause)
The key to doing this is scalable delivery. In any given area, we hire a rural field officer who delivers our services to 200 farmers, on average, with more than 1,000 people living in those families. Today, we have 2,000 of these rural field officers growing very quickly. This is our delivery army, and we're just one organization. There are many companies, governments and nonprofits that have delivery armies just like this. And I believe we stand at a moment in time where collectively, we are capable of delivering farm services to all farmers.
Let me show you how possible this is. This is a map of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a map of the United States for scale. I chose Sub-Saharan Africa because this is a huge delivery territory. It's very challenging. But we analyzed every 50-mile by 50-mile block on the continent, and we found that half of farmers live in just these shaded regions. That's a remarkably small area overall. If you were to lay these boxes next to each other within a map of the United States, they would only cover the Eastern United States. You can order pizza anywhere in this territory and it'll arrive to your house hot, fresh and delicious. If America can deliver pizza to an area of this size, then Africa's companies, governments and non-profits can deliver farm services to all of her farmers. This is possible.
I'm going to wrap up by generalizing beyond just farming. In every field of human development, humanity has already invented effective tools to end poverty. We just need to deliver them. So again, in every area of human development, super-smart people a long time ago invented inexpensive, highly effective tools. Humanity is armed to the teeth with simple, effective solutions to poverty. We just need to deliver these to a pretty small area. Again using the map of Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, remember that rural poverty is concentrated in these blue shaded areas. Urban poverty is even more concentrated, in these green little dots. Again, using a map of the United States for scale, this is what I would call a highly achievable delivery zone. In fact, for the first time in human history, we have a vast amount of delivery infrastructure available to us. The world's companies, governments and non-profits have delivery armies that are fully capable of covering this relatively small area. We just lack the will.
If we are willing, every one of us has a role to play. We first need more people to pursue careers in human development, especially if you live in a developing nation. We need more front line health workers, teachers, farmer trainers, sales agents for life-improving goods. These are the delivery people that dedicate their careers to improving the lives of others. But we also need a lot of support roles. These are roles available at just my organization alone, and we're just one out of many. This may surprise you, but no matter what your technical specialty, there is a role for you in this fight. And no matter how logistically possible it is to end poverty, we need a lot more resources. This is our number one constraint. For private investors, we need a big expansion of venture capital, private equity, working capital, available in emerging markets. But there are also limits to what private business can accomplish. Private businesses often struggle to profitably serve the extreme poor, so philanthropy still has a major role to play. Anybody can give, but we need more leadership. We need more visionary philanthropists and global leaders who will take problems in human development and lead humanity to wipe them off the face of the planet. If you're interested in these ideas, check out this website.
We need more leaders. Humanity has put people on the moon. We've invented supercomputers that fit into our pockets and connect us with anybody on the planet. We've run marathons at a five-minute mile pace. We are an exceptional people. But we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Until every girl like this one has an opportunity to earn her full human potential, we have failed to become a truly moral and just human race. Logistically speaking, it's incredibly possible to end extreme poverty. We just need to deliver proven goods and services to everybody. If we have the will, every one of us has a role to play. Let's deploy our time, our careers, our collective wealth. Let us deliver an end to extreme poverty in this lifetime.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Andrew Youn: 3 reasons why we can win the fight against poverty
Half of the world's poorest people have something in common: they're small farmers. In this eye-opening talk, activist Andrew Youn shows how his group, One Acre Fund, is helping these farmers lift themselves out of poverty by delivering to them life-sustaining farm services that are already in use all over the world. Enter this talk believing we'll never be able to solve hunger and extreme poverty, and leave it with a new understanding of the scale of the world's biggest problems.
Transcript:
I've been living in rural East Africa for about 10 years, and I want to share a field perspective with you on global poverty. I believe that the greatest failure of the human race is the fact that we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Hungry, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic, insurmountable problems, too big to solve. But as a field practitioner, I believe these are actually very solvable problems if we just take the right strategies.
Archimedes was an ancient Greek thinker, and he taught us that if we lean on the right levers, we can move the world. In the fight against extreme poverty, I believe there are three powerful levers that we can lean on. This talk is all about those levers, and why they make poverty a winnable fight in our lifetimes.
What is extreme poverty? When I first moved to rural East Africa, I stayed overnight with a farm family. They were wonderful people. They invited me into their home. We sang songs together and ate a simple dinner. They gave me a blanket to sleep on the floor. In the morning, however, there was nothing to eat. And then at lunchtime, I watched with an increasingly sick feeling as the eldest girl in the family cooked porridge as a substitute for lunch. For that meal, every child drank one cup to survive. And I cannot tell you how ashamed I felt when they handed one of those cups to me, and I knew I had to accept their hospitality.
Children need food not only to survive but also to grow physically and mentally. Every day they fail to eat, they lose a little bit of their future. Amongst the extreme poor, one in three children are permanently stunted from a lifetime of not eating enough. When that's combined with poor access to health care, one in 10 extremely poor children die before they reach age five. And only one quarter of children complete high school because they lack school fees. Hunger and extreme poverty curb human potential in every possible way. We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve these problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because every person on this planet matters. This child matters. These children matter. This girl matters.
You know, we see things like this, and we're upset by them, but they seem like such big problems. We don't know how to take effective action. But remember our friend Archimedes. Global poverty has powerful levers. It's a problem like any other. I live and work in the field, and as a practitioner, I believe these are very solvable problems. So for the next 10 minutes, let's not be sad about the state of the world. Let's engage our brains. Let's engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are.
Lever number one: most of the world's poor are farmers. Think about how extraordinary this is. If this picture represents the world's poor, then more than half engage in farming as a major source of income. This gets me really excited. All of these people, one profession. Think how powerful this is. When farmers become more productive, then more than half the world's poor earn more money and climb out of poverty. And it gets better. The product of farming is, of course, food. So when farmers become more productive, they earn more food, and they don't just help themselves, but they help to feed healthy communities and thriving economies. And when farmers become more productive, they reduce environmental pressure. We only have two ways we can feed the world: we can either make our existing farmland a lot more productive, or we can clear cut forest and savannah to make more farmland, which would be environmentally disastrous. Farmers are basically a really important leverage point. When farmers become more productive, they earn more income, they climb out of poverty, they feed their communities and they reduce environmental land pressure. Farmers stand at the center of the world.
And not a farmer like this one, but rather this lady. Most of the farmers I know are actually women. Look at the strength and the will radiating from this woman. She is physically strong, mentally tough, and she will do whatever it takes to earn a better life for her children. If we're going to put the future of humanity in one person's hands, then I'm really glad it's her.
(Applause)
There's just one problem: many smallholder farmers lack access to basic tools and knowledge. Currently, they take a little bit of saved food grain from the prior year, they plant it in the ground and they till it with a manual hand hoe. These are tools and techniques that date to the Bronze Age, and it's why many farmers are still very poor.
But good news, again. Lever number two: humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. Let me walk you through the three most basic factors in farming. First, hybrid seed is created when you cross two seeds together. If you naturally pollinate a high-yielding variety together with a drought-resistant variety, you get a hybrid that inherits positive traits from both of its parents. Next, conventional fertilizer, if used responsibly, is environmentally sustainable. If you micro-dose just a pinch of fertilizer to a plant that's taller than I am, you unlock enormous yield gain. These are known as farm inputs. Farm inputs need to be combined with good practice. When you space your seeds and plant with massive amounts of compost, farmers multiply their harvests. These proven tools and practices have more than tripled agricultural productivity in every major region of the world, moving mass numbers of people out of poverty. We just haven't finished delivering these things to everybody just yet, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.
So overall, this is amazing news. Humanity actually solved agricultural poverty a century ago, in theory. We just haven't delivered these things to everybody just yet. In this century, the reason that people remain poor is because maybe they live in remote places. They lack access to these things. Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people. We don't need more genius types right now. The humble delivery guy is going to end global poverty in our lifetime.
So these are the three levers, and the most powerful lever is simply delivery. Wherever the world's companies, governments and nonprofits set up delivery networks for life-improving goods, we eliminate poverty.
OK, so that sounds really nice in theory, but what about in practice? What do these delivery networks look like? I want to share the concrete example that I know best, my organization, One Acre Fund. We only serve the farmer, and our job is to provide her with the tools that she needs to succeed. We start off by delivering farm inputs to really rural places. Now, this may appear initially very challenging, but it's pretty possible. Let me show you. We buy farm inputs with the combined power of our farmer network, and store it in 20 warehouses like this. Then, during input delivery, we rent hundreds of 10-ton trucks and send them out to where farmers are waiting in the field. They then get their individual orders and walk it home to their farms. It's kind of like Amazon for rural farmers. Importantly, realistic delivery also includes finance, a way to pay. Farmers pay us little by little over time, covering most of our expenses. And then we surround all that with training. Our rural field officers deliver practical, hands-on training to farmers in the field every two weeks.
Wherever we deliver our services, farmers use these tools to climb out of poverty. This is a farmer in our program, Consolata. Look at the pride on her face. She has achieved a modest prosperity that I believe is the human right of every hardworking person on the planet. Today, I'm proud to say that we're serving about 400,000 farmers like Consolata.
(Applause)
The key to doing this is scalable delivery. In any given area, we hire a rural field officer who delivers our services to 200 farmers, on average, with more than 1,000 people living in those families. Today, we have 2,000 of these rural field officers growing very quickly. This is our delivery army, and we're just one organization. There are many companies, governments and nonprofits that have delivery armies just like this. And I believe we stand at a moment in time where collectively, we are capable of delivering farm services to all farmers.
Let me show you how possible this is. This is a map of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a map of the United States for scale. I chose Sub-Saharan Africa because this is a huge delivery territory. It's very challenging. But we analyzed every 50-mile by 50-mile block on the continent, and we found that half of farmers live in just these shaded regions. That's a remarkably small area overall. If you were to lay these boxes next to each other within a map of the United States, they would only cover the Eastern United States. You can order pizza anywhere in this territory and it'll arrive to your house hot, fresh and delicious. If America can deliver pizza to an area of this size, then Africa's companies, governments and non-profits can deliver farm services to all of her farmers. This is possible.
I'm going to wrap up by generalizing beyond just farming. In every field of human development, humanity has already invented effective tools to end poverty. We just need to deliver them. So again, in every area of human development, super-smart people a long time ago invented inexpensive, highly effective tools. Humanity is armed to the teeth with simple, effective solutions to poverty. We just need to deliver these to a pretty small area. Again using the map of Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, remember that rural poverty is concentrated in these blue shaded areas. Urban poverty is even more concentrated, in these green little dots. Again, using a map of the United States for scale, this is what I would call a highly achievable delivery zone. In fact, for the first time in human history, we have a vast amount of delivery infrastructure available to us. The world's companies, governments and non-profits have delivery armies that are fully capable of covering this relatively small area. We just lack the will.
If we are willing, every one of us has a role to play. We first need more people to pursue careers in human development, especially if you live in a developing nation. We need more front line health workers, teachers, farmer trainers, sales agents for life-improving goods. These are the delivery people that dedicate their careers to improving the lives of others. But we also need a lot of support roles. These are roles available at just my organization alone, and we're just one out of many. This may surprise you, but no matter what your technical specialty, there is a role for you in this fight. And no matter how logistically possible it is to end poverty, we need a lot more resources. This is our number one constraint. For private investors, we need a big expansion of venture capital, private equity, working capital, available in emerging markets. But there are also limits to what private business can accomplish. Private businesses often struggle to profitably serve the extreme poor, so philanthropy still has a major role to play. Anybody can give, but we need more leadership. We need more visionary philanthropists and global leaders who will take problems in human development and lead humanity to wipe them off the face of the planet. If you're interested in these ideas, check out this website.
We need more leaders. Humanity has put people on the moon. We've invented supercomputers that fit into our pockets and connect us with anybody on the planet. We've run marathons at a five-minute mile pace. We are an exceptional people. But we've left more than one billion of our members behind. Until every girl like this one has an opportunity to earn her full human potential, we have failed to become a truly moral and just human race. Logistically speaking, it's incredibly possible to end extreme poverty. We just need to deliver proven goods and services to everybody. If we have the will, every one of us has a role to play. Let's deploy our time, our careers, our collective wealth. Let us deliver an end to extreme poverty in this lifetime.
Thank you.
(Applause)
SC/HEALTH/GralInt-TED Talks-Andrew Pelling: This scientist makes ears out of apples
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Andrew Pelling: This scientist makes ears out of apples
Andrew Pelling is a biohacker, and nature is his hardware. His favorite materials are the simplest ones (and oftentimes he finds them in the garbage). Building on the cellulose structure that gives an apple its shape, he "grows" lifelike human ears, pioneering a process that might someday be used to repair body parts safely and cheaply. And he has some even wilder ideas to share ... "What I'm really curious about is if one day it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen," he says.
Transcript:
I've got a confession. I love looking through people's garbage. Now, it's not some creepy thing. I'm usually just looking for old electronics, stuff I can take to my workshop and hack. I do have a fetish for CD-ROM drives. Each one's got three different motors, so now you can build things that move. There's switches so you can turn things on and off. There's even a freaking laser, so you can make a cool robot into an awesome robot.
Now, I've built a lot of stuff out of garbage, and some of these things have even been kind of useful. But here's the thing, for me, garbage is just a chance to play, to be creative and build things to amuse myself. This is what I love doing, so I just made it part of my day job. I lead a university-based biological research lab, where we value curiosity and exploration above all else. We aren't focused on any particular problem, and we're not trying to solve any particular disease. This is just a place where people can come and ask fascinating questions and find answers. And I realized a long time ago that if I challenge people to build the equipment they need out of the garbage I find, it's a great way to foster creativity. And what happened was that artists and scientists from around the world started coming to my lab. And it's not just because we value unconventional ideas, it's because we test and validate them with scientific rigor.
So one day I was hacking something, I was taking it apart, and I had this sudden idea: Could I treat biology like hardware? Could I dismantle a biological system, mix and match the parts and then put it back together in some new and creative way? My lab started working on this, and I want to show you the result.
Can any of you guys tell me what fruit this is?
Audience: Apple!
Andrew Pelling: That's right -- it's an apple. Now, I actually want you to notice as well that this is a lot redder than most apples. And that's because we grew human cells into it. We took a totally innocent Macintosh apple, removed all the apple cells and DNA and then implanted human cells. And what we're left with after removing all the apple cells is this cellulose scaffold. This is the stuff that gives plants their shape and texture. And these little holes that you can see, this is where all the apple cells used to be. So then we come along, we implant some mammalian cells that you can see in blue. What happens is, these guys start multiplying and they fill up this entire scaffold.
As weird as this is, it's actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized. And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. This is the point when people started asking me, "Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?" And I'm like, "You've come to the right place."
(Laughter)
I actually brought this up with my wife. She's a musical instrument maker, and she does a lot of wood carving for a living. So I asked her, "Could you, like, literally carve some ears out of an apple for us?" And she did. So I took her ears to the lab. We then started preparing them. Yeah, I know.
(Laughter)
It's a good lab, man.
(Laughter)
And then we grew cells on them. And this is the result.
Listen, my lab is not in the ear-manufacturing business. People have actually been working on this for decades. Here's the issue: commercial scaffolds can be really expensive and problematic, because they're sourced from proprietary products, animals or cadavers. We used an apple and it cost pennies.
What's also really cool here is it's not that hard to make these things. The equipment you need can be built from garbage, and the key processing step only requires soap and water. So what we did was put all the instructions online as open source. And then we founded a mission-driven company, and we're developing kits to make it easier for anyone with a sink and a soldering iron to make these things at home. What I'm really curious about is if one day, it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen.
Speaking of kitchens, here's some asparagus. They're tasty, and they make your pee smell funny.
(Laughter)
Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord.
So here's the question: Can we grow axons and neurons down these channels? Because if we can, then maybe we can use asparagus to form new connections between the ends of damaged and severed nerves. Or maybe even a spinal cord. Don't get me wrong -- this is exceptionally challenging and really hard work to do, and we are not the only ones working on this. But we are the only ones using asparagus.
(Laughter)
Right now, we've got really promising pilot data. And we're working with tissue engineers and neurosurgeons to find out what's actually possible.
So listen, all of the work I've shown you, the stuff that I've built that's all around me on this stage and the other projects my lab is involved in are all a direct result of me playing with your garbage. Play -- play is a key part of my scientific practice. It's how I train my mind to be unconventional and to be creative and to decide to make human apple ears.
So, the next time any of you are looking at some old, broken-down, malfunctioning, piece-of-crap technology, I want you to think of me. Because I want it.
(Laughter)
Seriously, please find any way to get in touch with me, and let's see what we can build.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed February 2016 at TED2016
Andrew Pelling: This scientist makes ears out of apples
Andrew Pelling is a biohacker, and nature is his hardware. His favorite materials are the simplest ones (and oftentimes he finds them in the garbage). Building on the cellulose structure that gives an apple its shape, he "grows" lifelike human ears, pioneering a process that might someday be used to repair body parts safely and cheaply. And he has some even wilder ideas to share ... "What I'm really curious about is if one day it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen," he says.
Transcript:
I've got a confession. I love looking through people's garbage. Now, it's not some creepy thing. I'm usually just looking for old electronics, stuff I can take to my workshop and hack. I do have a fetish for CD-ROM drives. Each one's got three different motors, so now you can build things that move. There's switches so you can turn things on and off. There's even a freaking laser, so you can make a cool robot into an awesome robot.
Now, I've built a lot of stuff out of garbage, and some of these things have even been kind of useful. But here's the thing, for me, garbage is just a chance to play, to be creative and build things to amuse myself. This is what I love doing, so I just made it part of my day job. I lead a university-based biological research lab, where we value curiosity and exploration above all else. We aren't focused on any particular problem, and we're not trying to solve any particular disease. This is just a place where people can come and ask fascinating questions and find answers. And I realized a long time ago that if I challenge people to build the equipment they need out of the garbage I find, it's a great way to foster creativity. And what happened was that artists and scientists from around the world started coming to my lab. And it's not just because we value unconventional ideas, it's because we test and validate them with scientific rigor.
So one day I was hacking something, I was taking it apart, and I had this sudden idea: Could I treat biology like hardware? Could I dismantle a biological system, mix and match the parts and then put it back together in some new and creative way? My lab started working on this, and I want to show you the result.
Can any of you guys tell me what fruit this is?
Audience: Apple!
Andrew Pelling: That's right -- it's an apple. Now, I actually want you to notice as well that this is a lot redder than most apples. And that's because we grew human cells into it. We took a totally innocent Macintosh apple, removed all the apple cells and DNA and then implanted human cells. And what we're left with after removing all the apple cells is this cellulose scaffold. This is the stuff that gives plants their shape and texture. And these little holes that you can see, this is where all the apple cells used to be. So then we come along, we implant some mammalian cells that you can see in blue. What happens is, these guys start multiplying and they fill up this entire scaffold.
As weird as this is, it's actually really reminiscent of how our own tissues are organized. And we found in our pre-clinical work that you can implant these scaffolds into the body, and the body will send in cells and a blood supply and actually keep these things alive. This is the point when people started asking me, "Andrew, can you make body parts out of apples?" And I'm like, "You've come to the right place."
(Laughter)
I actually brought this up with my wife. She's a musical instrument maker, and she does a lot of wood carving for a living. So I asked her, "Could you, like, literally carve some ears out of an apple for us?" And she did. So I took her ears to the lab. We then started preparing them. Yeah, I know.
(Laughter)
It's a good lab, man.
(Laughter)
And then we grew cells on them. And this is the result.
Listen, my lab is not in the ear-manufacturing business. People have actually been working on this for decades. Here's the issue: commercial scaffolds can be really expensive and problematic, because they're sourced from proprietary products, animals or cadavers. We used an apple and it cost pennies.
What's also really cool here is it's not that hard to make these things. The equipment you need can be built from garbage, and the key processing step only requires soap and water. So what we did was put all the instructions online as open source. And then we founded a mission-driven company, and we're developing kits to make it easier for anyone with a sink and a soldering iron to make these things at home. What I'm really curious about is if one day, it will be possible to repair, rebuild and augment our own bodies with stuff we make in the kitchen.
Speaking of kitchens, here's some asparagus. They're tasty, and they make your pee smell funny.
(Laughter)
Now, I was in my kitchen, and I was noticing that when you look down the stalks of these asparagus, what you can see are all these tiny little vessels. And when we image them in the lab, you can see how the cellulose forms these structures. This image reminds me of two things: our blood vessels and the structure and organization of our nerves and spinal cord.
So here's the question: Can we grow axons and neurons down these channels? Because if we can, then maybe we can use asparagus to form new connections between the ends of damaged and severed nerves. Or maybe even a spinal cord. Don't get me wrong -- this is exceptionally challenging and really hard work to do, and we are not the only ones working on this. But we are the only ones using asparagus.
(Laughter)
Right now, we've got really promising pilot data. And we're working with tissue engineers and neurosurgeons to find out what's actually possible.
So listen, all of the work I've shown you, the stuff that I've built that's all around me on this stage and the other projects my lab is involved in are all a direct result of me playing with your garbage. Play -- play is a key part of my scientific practice. It's how I train my mind to be unconventional and to be creative and to decide to make human apple ears.
So, the next time any of you are looking at some old, broken-down, malfunctioning, piece-of-crap technology, I want you to think of me. Because I want it.
(Laughter)
Seriously, please find any way to get in touch with me, and let's see what we can build.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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