The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed November 2015 at TEDMED 2015
Vanessa Ruiz: The spellbinding art of human anatomy
Vanessa Ruiz takes us on an illustrated journey of human anatomical art over the centuries, sharing captivating images that bring this visual science — and the contemporary artists inspired by it — to life. "Anatomical art has the power to reach far beyond the pages of a medical textbook," she says, "connecting our innermost selves with our bodies through art."
Transcript:
As a lover of human anatomy, I'm so excited that we're finally putting our bodies at the center of focus. Through practices such as preventive medicine, patient empowerment and self-monitoring -- down to now obsessing over every single step we take in a day. All of this works to promote a healthy connection between ourselves and our bodies.
Despite all this focus on the healthy self, general public knowledge of the anatomical self is lacking. Many people don't know the location of their vital organs, or even how they function. And that's because human anatomy is a difficult and time-intensive subject to learn.
How many of you here made it through anatomy? Wow, good -- most of you are in medicine. I, like you, spent countless hours memorizing hundreds of structures. Something no student of anatomy could do without the help of visuals. Because at the end of the day, whether you remember every little structure or not, these medical illustrations are what makes studying anatomy so intriguing. In looking at them, we're actually viewing a manual of our very selves.
But what happens when we're done studying? These beautiful illustrations are then shut back into the pages of a medical textbook, or an app, referenced only when needed. And for the public, medical illustrations may only be encountered passively on the walls of a doctor's office.
From the beginnings of modern medicine, medical illustration, and therefore anatomy, have existed primarily within the realm of medical education. Yet there's something fascinating happening right now. Artists are breaking anatomy out of the confines of the medical world and are thrusting it into the public space. For the past nine years, I have been cataloguing and sharing this rise in anatomical art with the public -- all from my perspective as a medical illustrator.
But before I get into showing you how artists are reclaiming anatomy today, it's important to understand how art influenced anatomy in the past.
Now, anatomy is by its very nature a visual science, and the first anatomists to understand this lived during the Renaissance. They relied on artists to help advertise their discoveries to their peers in the public. And this drive to not only teach but also to entertain resulted in some of the strangest anatomical illustrations.
Anatomy was caught in a struggle between science, art and culture that lasted for over 500 years. Artists rendered dissected cadavers as alive, posed in these humorous anatomical stripteases. Imagine seeing that in your textbooks today. They also showed them as very much dead -- unwillingly stripped of their skin. Disembodied limbs were often posed in literal still lives. And some illustrations even included pop culture references. This is Clara, a famous rhinoceros that was traveling Europe in the mid-1700s, at a time when seeing a rhino was an exciting rarity. Including her in this illustration was akin to celebrity sponsorship today.
The introduction of color then brought a whole new depth and clarity to anatomy that made it stunning.
By the early 20th century, the perfect balance of science and art had finally been struck with the emergence of medical illustrators. They created a universal representation of anatomy -- something that was neither alive nor dead, that was free from those influences of artistic culture. And this focus on no-frills accuracy was precisely for the benefit of medical education. And this is what we get to study from today.
But why is it that medical illustration -- both past and present -- captures our imaginations? Now, we are innately tuned into the beauty of the human body. And medical illustration is still art. Nothing can elicit an emotional response -- from joy to complete disgust -- more than the human body. And today, artists armed with that emotion, are grasping anatomy from the medical world, and are reinvigorating it through art in the most imaginative ways.
A perfect example of this is Spanish contemporary artist Fernando Vicente. He takes 19th century anatomical illustrations of the male body and envelops them in a female sensuality. The women in his paintings taunt us to view beyond their surface anatomy, thereby introducing a strong femininity that was previously lacking in the history of anatomical representation.
Artistry can also be seen in the repair and recovery of the human body. This is an X-ray of a woman who fractured and dislocated her ankle in a roller-skating accident. As a tribute to her trauma, she commissioned Montreal-based architect Federico Carbajal to construct a wire sculpture of her damaged lower leg. Now, notice those bright red screws magnified in the sculpture. These are the actual surgical screws used in reconstructing her ankle. It's medical hardware that's been repurposed as art.
People often ask me how I choose the art that I showcase online or feature in gallery shows. And for me it's a balance between the technique and a concept that pushes the boundaries of anatomy as a way to know thyself, which is why the work of Michael Reedy struck me. His serious figure drawings are often layered in elements of humor. For instance, take a look at her face. Notice those red marks. Michael manifests the consuming insecurity of a skin condition as these maniacal cartoon monsters annoying and out of control in the background. On the mirrored figure, he renders the full anatomy and covers it in glitter, making it look like candy. By doing this, Michael downplays the common perception of anatomy so closely tied to just disease and death.
Now, this next concept might not make much sense, but human anatomy is no longer limited to humans. When you were a child, did you ever wish that your toys could come to life? Well, Jason Freeny makes those dreams come true with his magical toy dissections.
(Laughter)
One might think that this would bring a morbid edge to one's innocent childhood characters, but Jason says of his dissections, "One thing I've never seen in a child's reaction to my work is fear." It's always wonder, amazement and wanting to explore. Fear of anatomy and guts is a learned reaction.
This anatomization also extends to politically and socially charged objects. In Noah Scalin's "Anatomy of War," we see a gun dissected to reveal human organs. But if you look closely, you'll notice that it lacks a brain. And if you keep looking, you might also notice that Noah has so thoughtfully placed the rectum at the business end of that gun barrel.
Now, this next artist I've been following for many years, watching him excite the public about anatomy. Danny Quirk is a young artist who paints his subjects in the process of self-dissection. He bends the rules of medical illustration by inserting a very dramatic light and shadow. And this creates a 3-D illusion that lends itself very well to painting directly on the human skin. Danny makes it look as if a person's skin has actually been removed. And this effect -- also cool and tattoo-like -- easily transitions into a medical illustration. Now Danny is currently traveling the world, teaching anatomy to the public via his body paintings, which is why it was so shocking to find out that he was rejected from medical illustration programs. But he's doing just fine.
Then there are artists who are extracting anatomy from both the medical world and the art world and are placing it directly on the streets. London-based SHOK-1 paints giant X-rays of pop culture icons. His X-rays show how culture can come to have an anatomy of its own, and conversely how culture can become part of the anatomy of a person. You come to admire his work because reproducing X-rays by hand, let alone with spray paint, is extremely difficult. But then again this is a street artist, who also happens to hold a degree in applied chemistry.
Nychos, an Austrian street artist, takes the term "exploded view" to a whole new level, splattering human and animal dissections on walls all over the world. Influenced by comics and heavy metal, Nychos inserts a very youthful and enticing energy into anatomy that I just love.
Street artists believe that art belongs to the public. And this street anatomy is so captivating because it is the furthest removed from the medical world. It forces you to look at it, and confront your own perceptions about anatomy, whether you find it beautiful, gross, morbid or awe-inspiring, like I do. That it elicits these responses at all is due to our intimate and often changing relationship with it.
All of the artists that I showed you here today referenced medical illustrations for their art. But for them, anatomy isn't just something to memorize, but a base from which to understand the human body on a meaningful level; to depict it in ways that we can relate, whether it be through cartoons, body painting or street art.
Anatomical art has the power to reach far beyond the pages of a medical textbook, to ignite an excitement in the public, and reinvigorate an enthusiasm in the medical world, ultimately connecting our innermost selves with our bodies through art.
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, August 27, 2016
TECH/BUS/GralInt-TED Talks-Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed June 2016 at TEDSummit
Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business
What is the blockchain? If you don't know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.
Transcript:
The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it's not social media. It's not big data. It's not robotics. It's not even AI. You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It's called the blockchain. Blockchain.
Now, it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually.
You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. And that's great. This is democratized information. But when it comes to assets -- things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets -- sending you a copy is a really bad idea. If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money -
(Laughter)
and that I can't send it to you. This has been called the "double-spend" problem by cryptographers for a long time.
So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries -- middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on -- to establish trust in our economy. And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, identification of people, through to clearing, settling and record keeping. And overall, they do a pretty good job. But there are growing problems.
To begin, they're centralized. That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are -- JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. They slow things down. It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. And they take a big piece of the action -- 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country. They capture our data, and that means we can't monetize it or use it to better manage our lives. Our privacy is being undermined. And the biggest problem is that overall, they've appropriated the largesse of the digital age asymmetrically: we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality.
So what if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value -- some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? What if there were a native medium for value?
Well, in 2008, the financial industry crashed and, perhaps propitiously, an anonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto created a paper where he developed a protocol for a digital cash that used an underlying cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. And this cryptocurrency enabled people to establish trust and do transactions without a third party. And this seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world, that has everyone excited or terrified or otherwise interested in many places. Now, don't be confused about Bitcoin -- Bitcoin is an asset; it goes up and down, and that should be of interest to you if you're a speculator. More broadly, it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a fiat currency controlled by a nation-state. And that's of greater interest. But the real pony here is the underlying technology. It's called blockchain.
So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code. And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, "The Trust Protocol."
Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work? Fair enough. Assets -- digital assets like money to music and everything in between -- are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. And out there, around the world, is a group of people called "miners." These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. They have massive computing power at their fingertips -- 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. These miners do a lot of work. And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems.
And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and to validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. And then -- this is the key part -- that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. And every one is time-stamped, kind of like with a digital waxed seal. So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. Tough to do. This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. Blockchain. That's how it works.
So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. There are many. The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. One of them is that you can build smart contracts. It's kind of what it sounds like. It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment -- the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense -- of agreements between people. And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens.
(Applause)
So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. Recognize this? Rube Goldberg machine. It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success?
Now, why should you care? Well, let me describe some applications. Prosperity. The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case.
So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. Could we pre-distribute wealth? Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? Let me describe five ways that this can be done.
Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, "I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm." This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future.
So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. And once it's there, this is immutable. You can't hack it. This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people.
Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. My view is that ... these companies are not really sharing. In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. They aggregate services together, and they sell them. What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments -- they're built into the system. And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity.
Number three: the biggest flow of funds from the developed world to the developing world is not corporate investment, and it's not even foreign aid. It's remittances. This is the global diaspora; people have left their ancestral lands, and they're sending money back to their families at home. This is 600 billion dollars a year, and it's growing, and these people are getting ripped off.
Analie Domingo is a housekeeper. She lives in Toronto, and every month she goes to the Western Union office with some cash to send her remittances to her mom in Manila. It costs her around 10 percent; the money takes four to seven days to get there; her mom never knows when it's going to arrive. It takes five hours out of her week to do this.
Six months ago, Analie Domingo used a blockchain application called Abra. And from her mobile device, she sent 300 bucks. It went directly to her mom's mobile device without going through an intermediary. And then her mom looked at her mobile device -- it's kind of like an Uber interface, there's Abra "tellers" moving around. She clicks on a teller that's a five-star teller, who's seven minutes away. The guy shows up at the door, gives her Filipino pesos, she puts them in her wallet. The whole thing took minutes, and it cost her two percent. This is a big opportunity for prosperity.
Number four: the most powerful asset of the digital age is data. And data is really a new asset class, maybe bigger than previous asset classes, like land under the agrarian economy, or an industrial plant, or even money. And all of you -- we -- create this data. We create this asset, and we leave this trail of digital crumbs behind us as we go throughout life. And these crumbs are collected into a mirror image of you, the virtual you. And the virtual you may know more about you than you do, because you can't remember what you bought a year ago, or said a year ago, or your exact location a year ago. And the virtual you is not owned by you -- that's the big problem.
So today, there are companies working to create an identity in a black box, the virtual you owned by you. And this black box moves around with you as you travel throughout the world, and it's very, very stingy. It only gives away the shred of information that's required to do something. A lot of transactions, the seller doesn't even need to know who you are. They just need to know that they got paid.
And then this avatar is sweeping up all of this data and enabling you to monetize it. And this is a wonderful thing, because it can also help us protect our privacy, and privacy is the foundation of a free society. Let's get this asset that we create back under our control, where we can own our own identity and manage it responsibly.
Finally --
(Applause)
Finally, number five: there are a whole number of creators of content who don't receive fair compensation, because the system for intellectual property is broken. It was broken by the first era of the internet. Take music. Musicians are left with crumbs at the end of the whole food chain. You know, if you were a songwriter, 25 years ago, you wrote a hit song, it got a million singles, you could get royalties of around 45,000 dollars. Today, you're a songwriter, you write a hit song, it gets a million streams, you don't get 45k, you get 36 dollars, enough to buy a nice pizza.
So Imogen Heap, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, is now putting music on a blockchain ecosystem. She calls it "Mycelia." And the music has a smart contract surrounding it. And the music protects her intellectual property rights. You want to listen to the song? It's free, or maybe a few micro-cents that flow into a digital account. You want to put the song in your movie, that's different, and the IP rights are all specified. You want to make a ringtone? That's different. She describes that the song becomes a business. It's out there on this platform marketing itself, protecting the rights of the author, and because the song has a payment system in the sense of bank account, all the money flows back to the artist, and they control the industry, rather than these powerful intermediaries. Now, this is --
(Applause)
This is not just songwriters, it's any creator of content, like art, like inventions, scientific discoveries, journalists. There are all kinds of people who don't get fair compensation, and with blockchains, they're going to be able to make it rain on the blockchain. And that's a wonderful thing.
So, these are five opportunities out of a dozen to solve one problem, prosperity, which is one of countless problems that blockchains are applicable to.
Now, technology doesn't create prosperity, of course -- people do. But my case to you is that, once again, the technology genie has escaped from the bottle, and it was summoned by an unknown person or persons at this uncertain time in human history, and it's giving us another kick at the can, another opportunity to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things, and solve some of the world's most difficult problems, if we will it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed June 2016 at TEDSummit
Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business
What is the blockchain? If you don't know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.
Transcript:
The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. And it's not social media. It's not big data. It's not robotics. It's not even AI. You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. It's called the blockchain. Blockchain.
Now, it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually.
You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. And that's great. This is democratized information. But when it comes to assets -- things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets -- sending you a copy is a really bad idea. If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money -
(Laughter)
and that I can't send it to you. This has been called the "double-spend" problem by cryptographers for a long time.
So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries -- middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on -- to establish trust in our economy. And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, identification of people, through to clearing, settling and record keeping. And overall, they do a pretty good job. But there are growing problems.
To begin, they're centralized. That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are -- JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. They slow things down. It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. And they take a big piece of the action -- 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country. They capture our data, and that means we can't monetize it or use it to better manage our lives. Our privacy is being undermined. And the biggest problem is that overall, they've appropriated the largesse of the digital age asymmetrically: we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality.
So what if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value -- some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? What if there were a native medium for value?
Well, in 2008, the financial industry crashed and, perhaps propitiously, an anonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto created a paper where he developed a protocol for a digital cash that used an underlying cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. And this cryptocurrency enabled people to establish trust and do transactions without a third party. And this seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world, that has everyone excited or terrified or otherwise interested in many places. Now, don't be confused about Bitcoin -- Bitcoin is an asset; it goes up and down, and that should be of interest to you if you're a speculator. More broadly, it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a fiat currency controlled by a nation-state. And that's of greater interest. But the real pony here is the underlying technology. It's called blockchain.
So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code. And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, "The Trust Protocol."
Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work? Fair enough. Assets -- digital assets like money to music and everything in between -- are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. And out there, around the world, is a group of people called "miners." These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. They have massive computing power at their fingertips -- 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. These miners do a lot of work. And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems.
And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and to validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. And then -- this is the key part -- that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. And every one is time-stamped, kind of like with a digital waxed seal. So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. Tough to do. This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. Blockchain. That's how it works.
So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. There are many. The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. One of them is that you can build smart contracts. It's kind of what it sounds like. It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment -- the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense -- of agreements between people. And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens.
(Applause)
So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. Recognize this? Rube Goldberg machine. It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success?
Now, why should you care? Well, let me describe some applications. Prosperity. The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case.
So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. Could we pre-distribute wealth? Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? Let me describe five ways that this can be done.
Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, "I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm." This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future.
So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. And once it's there, this is immutable. You can't hack it. This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people.
Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. My view is that ... these companies are not really sharing. In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. They aggregate services together, and they sell them. What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments -- they're built into the system. And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity.
Number three: the biggest flow of funds from the developed world to the developing world is not corporate investment, and it's not even foreign aid. It's remittances. This is the global diaspora; people have left their ancestral lands, and they're sending money back to their families at home. This is 600 billion dollars a year, and it's growing, and these people are getting ripped off.
Analie Domingo is a housekeeper. She lives in Toronto, and every month she goes to the Western Union office with some cash to send her remittances to her mom in Manila. It costs her around 10 percent; the money takes four to seven days to get there; her mom never knows when it's going to arrive. It takes five hours out of her week to do this.
Six months ago, Analie Domingo used a blockchain application called Abra. And from her mobile device, she sent 300 bucks. It went directly to her mom's mobile device without going through an intermediary. And then her mom looked at her mobile device -- it's kind of like an Uber interface, there's Abra "tellers" moving around. She clicks on a teller that's a five-star teller, who's seven minutes away. The guy shows up at the door, gives her Filipino pesos, she puts them in her wallet. The whole thing took minutes, and it cost her two percent. This is a big opportunity for prosperity.
Number four: the most powerful asset of the digital age is data. And data is really a new asset class, maybe bigger than previous asset classes, like land under the agrarian economy, or an industrial plant, or even money. And all of you -- we -- create this data. We create this asset, and we leave this trail of digital crumbs behind us as we go throughout life. And these crumbs are collected into a mirror image of you, the virtual you. And the virtual you may know more about you than you do, because you can't remember what you bought a year ago, or said a year ago, or your exact location a year ago. And the virtual you is not owned by you -- that's the big problem.
So today, there are companies working to create an identity in a black box, the virtual you owned by you. And this black box moves around with you as you travel throughout the world, and it's very, very stingy. It only gives away the shred of information that's required to do something. A lot of transactions, the seller doesn't even need to know who you are. They just need to know that they got paid.
And then this avatar is sweeping up all of this data and enabling you to monetize it. And this is a wonderful thing, because it can also help us protect our privacy, and privacy is the foundation of a free society. Let's get this asset that we create back under our control, where we can own our own identity and manage it responsibly.
Finally --
(Applause)
Finally, number five: there are a whole number of creators of content who don't receive fair compensation, because the system for intellectual property is broken. It was broken by the first era of the internet. Take music. Musicians are left with crumbs at the end of the whole food chain. You know, if you were a songwriter, 25 years ago, you wrote a hit song, it got a million singles, you could get royalties of around 45,000 dollars. Today, you're a songwriter, you write a hit song, it gets a million streams, you don't get 45k, you get 36 dollars, enough to buy a nice pizza.
So Imogen Heap, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, is now putting music on a blockchain ecosystem. She calls it "Mycelia." And the music has a smart contract surrounding it. And the music protects her intellectual property rights. You want to listen to the song? It's free, or maybe a few micro-cents that flow into a digital account. You want to put the song in your movie, that's different, and the IP rights are all specified. You want to make a ringtone? That's different. She describes that the song becomes a business. It's out there on this platform marketing itself, protecting the rights of the author, and because the song has a payment system in the sense of bank account, all the money flows back to the artist, and they control the industry, rather than these powerful intermediaries. Now, this is --
(Applause)
This is not just songwriters, it's any creator of content, like art, like inventions, scientific discoveries, journalists. There are all kinds of people who don't get fair compensation, and with blockchains, they're going to be able to make it rain on the blockchain. And that's a wonderful thing.
So, these are five opportunities out of a dozen to solve one problem, prosperity, which is one of countless problems that blockchains are applicable to.
Now, technology doesn't create prosperity, of course -- people do. But my case to you is that, once again, the technology genie has escaped from the bottle, and it was summoned by an unknown person or persons at this uncertain time in human history, and it's giving us another kick at the can, another opportunity to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things, and solve some of the world's most difficult problems, if we will it.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BUS/GralInt-TED Talks-Knut Haanaes: Two reasons companies fail -- and how to avoid them
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed June 2015 at TED@BCG London
Knut Haanaes: Two reasons companies fail -- and how to avoid them
Is it possible to run a company and reinvent it at the same time? For business strategist Knut Haanaes, the ability to innovate after becoming successful is the mark of a great organization. He shares insights on how to strike a balance between perfecting what we already know and exploring totally new ideas — and lays out how to avoid two major strategy traps.
Transcript:
Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new.
To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities: exploration and exploitation. Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing.
Consider Facit. I'm actually old enough to remember them. Facit was a fantastic company. They were born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world. Everybody used them. And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? They continued doing exactly the same. In six months, they went from maximum revenue ... and they were gone. Gone.
To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap, small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators.
(Laughter)
Facit did too much exploitation. But exploration can go wild, too.
A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. Let's call them OncoSearch. The company was brilliant. They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure, certain forms of blood cancer. Every day was about creating something new. They were extremely innovative, and the mantra was, "When we only get it right," or even, "We want it perfect." The sad thing is, before they became perfect -- even good enough -- they became obsolete. OncoSearch did too much exploration.
I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The founder of the idea is Jim March. And to me the power of the idea is its practicality.
Exploration. Exploration is about coming up with what's new. It's about search, it's about discovery, it's about new products, it's about new innovations. It's about changing our frontiers. Our heroes are people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc. I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. We all know that exploration is risky. We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we know that the risks are high.
Exploitation is the opposite. Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better. Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. It's about making good products faster and cheaper. Exploitation is not risky -- in the short term. But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long term. And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. That's the risk of exploitation.
So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit. Small children, they explore all day. All day it's about exploration. As we grow older, we explore less because we have more knowledge to exploit on. The same goes for companies. Companies become, by nature, less innovative as they become more competent.
And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways. For example, "How can I both effectively run and reinvent my company?" Or, "How can I make sure that our company changes before we become obsolete or are hit by a crisis?" So, doing one well is difficult. Doing both well as the same time is art -- pushing both exploration and exploitation.
So one thing we've found is only about two percent of companies are able to effectively explore and exploit at the same time, in parallel. But when they do, the payoffs are huge. So we have lots of great examples. We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability -- there are lots of examples, and the benefits are huge.
Why is balancing so difficult? I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where we are. So I'll talk about two, but there are many.
So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. We discover something, but we don't have the patience or the persistence to get at it and make it work. So instead of staying with it, we create something new. But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but being frustrated. OncoSearch was a good example. A famous example is, of course, Xerox. But we don't only see this in companies. We see this in the public sector as well. We all know that any kind of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years to work. But still, we change much more often. We really don't give them the chance.
Another trap is the success trap. Facit fell into the success trap. They literally held the future in their hands, but they couldn't see it. They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they wouldn't change. We are like that, too. When we know something well, it's difficult to change. Bill Gates has said: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail." That's the challenge with success.
So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. And they apply to our companies. The first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also buy an insurance in the future. Netflix -- they could so easily have been content with earlier generations of distribution, but they always -- and I think they will always -- keep pushing for the next battle. I see other companies that say, "I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes."
Second one: think in multiple time scales. I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one. Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company, innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. So when we think one year, innovation isn't really that important. Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company -- suddenly, innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. But companies can't choose. They need to fund the journey and lead the long term.
Third: invite talent. I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and exploitation by ourselves. I think it's a team sport. I think we need to allow challenging. I think the mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is to constructively challenge. I think that's also what good parenting is about.
Last one: be skeptical of success. Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. Riding into Rome on the carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, "Remember, you're only human."
So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. But it's difficult, and we need to be conscious.
I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. First question is, looking at your own company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of just going on autopilot? And what can you do to challenge?
Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on me? Is that something I should do more of? In my case, yes.
So let me leave you with this. Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed June 2015 at TED@BCG London
Knut Haanaes: Two reasons companies fail -- and how to avoid them
Is it possible to run a company and reinvent it at the same time? For business strategist Knut Haanaes, the ability to innovate after becoming successful is the mark of a great organization. He shares insights on how to strike a balance between perfecting what we already know and exploring totally new ideas — and lays out how to avoid two major strategy traps.
Transcript:
Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new.
To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities: exploration and exploitation. Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing.
Consider Facit. I'm actually old enough to remember them. Facit was a fantastic company. They were born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world. Everybody used them. And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? They continued doing exactly the same. In six months, they went from maximum revenue ... and they were gone. Gone.
To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap, small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators.
(Laughter)
Facit did too much exploitation. But exploration can go wild, too.
A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. Let's call them OncoSearch. The company was brilliant. They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure, certain forms of blood cancer. Every day was about creating something new. They were extremely innovative, and the mantra was, "When we only get it right," or even, "We want it perfect." The sad thing is, before they became perfect -- even good enough -- they became obsolete. OncoSearch did too much exploration.
I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. The founder of the idea is Jim March. And to me the power of the idea is its practicality.
Exploration. Exploration is about coming up with what's new. It's about search, it's about discovery, it's about new products, it's about new innovations. It's about changing our frontiers. Our heroes are people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc. I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. We all know that exploration is risky. We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we know that the risks are high.
Exploitation is the opposite. Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better. Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. It's about making good products faster and cheaper. Exploitation is not risky -- in the short term. But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long term. And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. That's the risk of exploitation.
So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit. Small children, they explore all day. All day it's about exploration. As we grow older, we explore less because we have more knowledge to exploit on. The same goes for companies. Companies become, by nature, less innovative as they become more competent.
And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways. For example, "How can I both effectively run and reinvent my company?" Or, "How can I make sure that our company changes before we become obsolete or are hit by a crisis?" So, doing one well is difficult. Doing both well as the same time is art -- pushing both exploration and exploitation.
So one thing we've found is only about two percent of companies are able to effectively explore and exploit at the same time, in parallel. But when they do, the payoffs are huge. So we have lots of great examples. We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability -- there are lots of examples, and the benefits are huge.
Why is balancing so difficult? I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where we are. So I'll talk about two, but there are many.
So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. We discover something, but we don't have the patience or the persistence to get at it and make it work. So instead of staying with it, we create something new. But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but being frustrated. OncoSearch was a good example. A famous example is, of course, Xerox. But we don't only see this in companies. We see this in the public sector as well. We all know that any kind of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years to work. But still, we change much more often. We really don't give them the chance.
Another trap is the success trap. Facit fell into the success trap. They literally held the future in their hands, but they couldn't see it. They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they wouldn't change. We are like that, too. When we know something well, it's difficult to change. Bill Gates has said: "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail." That's the challenge with success.
So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. And they apply to our companies. The first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also buy an insurance in the future. Netflix -- they could so easily have been content with earlier generations of distribution, but they always -- and I think they will always -- keep pushing for the next battle. I see other companies that say, "I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes."
Second one: think in multiple time scales. I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one. Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company, innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. So when we think one year, innovation isn't really that important. Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company -- suddenly, innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. But companies can't choose. They need to fund the journey and lead the long term.
Third: invite talent. I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and exploitation by ourselves. I think it's a team sport. I think we need to allow challenging. I think the mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is to constructively challenge. I think that's also what good parenting is about.
Last one: be skeptical of success. Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. Riding into Rome on the carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, "Remember, you're only human."
So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. But it's difficult, and we need to be conscious.
I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. First question is, looking at your own company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of just going on autopilot? And what can you do to challenge?
Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on me? Is that something I should do more of? In my case, yes.
So let me leave you with this. Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BUS/GralInt-TED Talks-Olivier Scalabre: The next manufacturing revolution is here
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2016 at TED@BCG Paris
Olivier Scalabre: The next manufacturing revolution is here
Economic growth has been slowing for the past 50 years, but relief might come from an unexpected place — a new form of manufacturing that is neither what you thought it was nor where you thought it was. Industrial systems thinker Olivier Scalabre details how a fourth manufacturing revolution will produce a macroeconomic shift and boost employment, productivity and growth.
Transcript:
Guys, we have an issue.
(Laughter)
Growth is fading away, and it's a big deal. Our global economy stops growing. And it's not new. Growth has actually declined for the last 50 years. If we continue like this, we need to learn how to live in a world with no growth in the next decade. This is scary because when the economy doesn't grow, our children don't get better lives. What's even scarier is that when the pie does not grow, each of us get a smaller piece. We're then ready to fight for a bigger one. This creates tensions and serious conflicts. Growth matters a lot.
If we look at the history of growth, times of big growth have always been fueled by big manufacturing revolutions. It happened three times, every 50-60 years. The steam engine in the middle of the 19th century, the mass-production model in the beginning of the 20th century -- thanks, Mr. Ford. And the first automation wave in the 1970s.
Why did these manufacturing revolutions create huge growth in our economies? Because they have injected huge productivity improvement. It's rather simple: in order to grow, you need to be producing more, putting more into our economy. This means either more labor or more capital or more productivity. Each time, productivity has been the growth lever.
I'm here today to tell you that we are on the verge of another huge change, and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again. It will get us out of our growth slump and it will change radically the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade. I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway.
It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution. Actually, we've made some pretty lame attempts to try to revitalize it. But none of them have been the big overhaul we really need to get us growing again. For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor. Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long. Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized them by product. The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand.
This did help productivity for a while. But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain. Let's take fashion retail. Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid supply chains. When fast-fashion competitors like Zara started replenishing their stocks faster from two collections a year to one collection a month, none of them have been able to keep up with the pace. Most of them are in great difficulties today.
Yet, with all of their shortcomings, those are the factories we know today. When you open the doors, they look the same as they did 50 years ago. We've just changed the location, the size, the way they operate. Can you name anything else that looks the same as it did 50 years ago? It's crazy. We've made all the tweaks to the model that we could, and now we hit its limits.
After all of our attempts to fix the manufacturing model failed, we thought growth could come from elsewhere. We turned to the tech sector -- there's been quite a lot of innovations there. Just to name one: the Internet. We hoped it could produce growth. And indeed, it changed our lives. It made big waves in the media, the service, the entertainment spaces. But it hasn't done much for productivity. Actually, what's surprising is that productivity is on the decline despite all of those innovation efforts. Imagine that -- sitting at work, scrolling through Facebook, watching videos on YouTube has made us less productive. Weird.
(Laughter)
This is why we are not growing. We failed at reinventing the manufacturing space, and large technological innovations have played away from it. But what if we could combine those forces? What if the existing manufacturing and large technological innovation came together to create the next big manufacturing reinvention.
Bingo! This is the fourth manufacturing revolution, and it's happening right now. Major technologies are entering the manufacturing space, big time. They will boost industrial productivity by more than a third. This is massive, and it will do a lot in creating growth. Let me tell you about some of them.
Have you already met advanced manufacturing robots? They are the size of humans, they actually collaborate with them, and they can be programmed in order to perform complex, non-repetitive tasks. Today in our factories, only 8 percent of the tasks are automated. The less complex, the more repetitive ones. It will be 25 percent in 10 years. It means that by 2025, advanced robots will complement workers to be, together, 20 percent more productive, to manufacture 20 percent more outputs, to achieve 20 percent additional growth.
This isn't some fancy, futuristic idea. These robots are working for us right now. Last year in the US, they helped Amazon prepare and ship all the products required for Cyber Monday, the annual peak of online retail. Last year in the US, it was the biggest online shopping day of the year and of history. Consumers spent 3 billion dollars on electronics that day. That's real economic growth.
Then there's additive manufacturing, 3D printing. 3D printing has already improved plastic manufacturing and it's now making its way through metal. Those are not small industries. Plastic and metals represent 25 percent of global manufacturing production.
Let's take a real example. In the aerospace industry, fuel nozzles are some of the most complex parts to manufacture, for one reason: they are made up of 20 different parts that need to be separately produced and then painstakingly assembled. Aerospace companies are now using 3D printing, which allows them to turn those 20 different parts into just one. The results? 40 percent more productivity, 40 percent more output produced, 40 percent more growth for this specific industry.
But actually, the most exciting part of this new manufacturing revolution goes much beyond productivity. It's about producing better, smarter products. It's about scale customization. Imagine a world where you can buy the exact products you want with the functionalities you need, with the design you want, with the same cost and lead time as a product that's been mass produced, like your car, or your clothes or your cell phone. The new manufacturing revolution makes it possible.
Advanced robots can be programmed in order to perform any product configuration without any setup time or ramp up. 3D printers instantaneously produce any customized design. We are now able to produce a batch of one product, your product, at the same cost and lead time as a batch of many. Those are only a few examples of the manufacturing revolution at play.
Not only will manufacturing become more productive, it will also become more flexible, and those were exactly the elements of growth that we are missing. But actually, there are even some bigger implications for all of us when manufacturing will find its way back into the limelight. It will create a huge macroeconomic shift.
First, our factories will be relocated into our home markets. In the world of scale customization, consumer proximity is the new norm.
Then, our factories will be smaller, agile. Scale does not matter anymore, flexibility does. They will be operating on a multi-product, made-to-order basis. The change will be drastic.
Globalization will enter a new era. The East-to-West trade flows will be replaced by regional trade flows. East for East, West for West. When you think about that, the old model was pretty much insane. Piling up stocks, making products travel the whole world before they reach their end consumers. The new model, producing just next to the consumer market, will be much cleaner, much better for our environment. In mature economies, manufacturing will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity and more growth. Good news, isn't it?
But here's the thing with growth -- it does not come automatically. Mature economies will have to seize it. We'll have to massively re-train our workforce. In most countries, like in my country, France, we've told our children that manufacturing had no future. That it was something happening far away. We need to reverse that and teach manufacturing again at university. Only the countries that will boldly transform will be able to seize this growth.
It's also a chance for developing economies. Of course China and other emerging economies won't be the factory of the world anymore. Actually, it was not a sustainable model in the long term, as those countries are becoming richer. Last year, it was already as expensive to produce in Brazil as to produce in France. By 2018, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US.
The new manufacturing revolution will accelerate the transition of those emerging economies towards a model driven by domestic consumption. And this is good, because this is where growth will be created. In the next five years, the next billion consumers in China will inject more growth in our economies than the top five European markets together.
This fourth manufacturing revolution is a chance for all of us. If we play it right, we'll see sustainable growth in all of our economies. This means more wealth distributed to all of us and a better future for our children.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed May 2016 at TED@BCG Paris
Olivier Scalabre: The next manufacturing revolution is here
Economic growth has been slowing for the past 50 years, but relief might come from an unexpected place — a new form of manufacturing that is neither what you thought it was nor where you thought it was. Industrial systems thinker Olivier Scalabre details how a fourth manufacturing revolution will produce a macroeconomic shift and boost employment, productivity and growth.
Transcript:
Guys, we have an issue.
(Laughter)
Growth is fading away, and it's a big deal. Our global economy stops growing. And it's not new. Growth has actually declined for the last 50 years. If we continue like this, we need to learn how to live in a world with no growth in the next decade. This is scary because when the economy doesn't grow, our children don't get better lives. What's even scarier is that when the pie does not grow, each of us get a smaller piece. We're then ready to fight for a bigger one. This creates tensions and serious conflicts. Growth matters a lot.
If we look at the history of growth, times of big growth have always been fueled by big manufacturing revolutions. It happened three times, every 50-60 years. The steam engine in the middle of the 19th century, the mass-production model in the beginning of the 20th century -- thanks, Mr. Ford. And the first automation wave in the 1970s.
Why did these manufacturing revolutions create huge growth in our economies? Because they have injected huge productivity improvement. It's rather simple: in order to grow, you need to be producing more, putting more into our economy. This means either more labor or more capital or more productivity. Each time, productivity has been the growth lever.
I'm here today to tell you that we are on the verge of another huge change, and that this change, surprisingly enough, is going to come from manufacturing, again. It will get us out of our growth slump and it will change radically the way globalization has been shaped over the last decade. I'm here to tell you about the amazing fourth manufacturing revolution that is currently underway.
It's not as if we've done nothing with manufacturing since the last revolution. Actually, we've made some pretty lame attempts to try to revitalize it. But none of them have been the big overhaul we really need to get us growing again. For example, we've tried to relocate our factories offshore in order to reduce cost and take advantage of cheap labor. Not only did this not inspire productivity, but it only saved money for a short period of time, because cheap labor didn't stay cheap for long. Then, we've tried to make our factories larger and we specialized them by product. The idea was that we can make a lot of one product and stockpile it to be sold with demand.
This did help productivity for a while. But it introduced a lot of rigidities in our supply chain. Let's take fashion retail. Traditional clothing companies have built offshore, global, rigid supply chains. When fast-fashion competitors like Zara started replenishing their stocks faster from two collections a year to one collection a month, none of them have been able to keep up with the pace. Most of them are in great difficulties today.
Yet, with all of their shortcomings, those are the factories we know today. When you open the doors, they look the same as they did 50 years ago. We've just changed the location, the size, the way they operate. Can you name anything else that looks the same as it did 50 years ago? It's crazy. We've made all the tweaks to the model that we could, and now we hit its limits.
After all of our attempts to fix the manufacturing model failed, we thought growth could come from elsewhere. We turned to the tech sector -- there's been quite a lot of innovations there. Just to name one: the Internet. We hoped it could produce growth. And indeed, it changed our lives. It made big waves in the media, the service, the entertainment spaces. But it hasn't done much for productivity. Actually, what's surprising is that productivity is on the decline despite all of those innovation efforts. Imagine that -- sitting at work, scrolling through Facebook, watching videos on YouTube has made us less productive. Weird.
(Laughter)
This is why we are not growing. We failed at reinventing the manufacturing space, and large technological innovations have played away from it. But what if we could combine those forces? What if the existing manufacturing and large technological innovation came together to create the next big manufacturing reinvention.
Bingo! This is the fourth manufacturing revolution, and it's happening right now. Major technologies are entering the manufacturing space, big time. They will boost industrial productivity by more than a third. This is massive, and it will do a lot in creating growth. Let me tell you about some of them.
Have you already met advanced manufacturing robots? They are the size of humans, they actually collaborate with them, and they can be programmed in order to perform complex, non-repetitive tasks. Today in our factories, only 8 percent of the tasks are automated. The less complex, the more repetitive ones. It will be 25 percent in 10 years. It means that by 2025, advanced robots will complement workers to be, together, 20 percent more productive, to manufacture 20 percent more outputs, to achieve 20 percent additional growth.
This isn't some fancy, futuristic idea. These robots are working for us right now. Last year in the US, they helped Amazon prepare and ship all the products required for Cyber Monday, the annual peak of online retail. Last year in the US, it was the biggest online shopping day of the year and of history. Consumers spent 3 billion dollars on electronics that day. That's real economic growth.
Then there's additive manufacturing, 3D printing. 3D printing has already improved plastic manufacturing and it's now making its way through metal. Those are not small industries. Plastic and metals represent 25 percent of global manufacturing production.
Let's take a real example. In the aerospace industry, fuel nozzles are some of the most complex parts to manufacture, for one reason: they are made up of 20 different parts that need to be separately produced and then painstakingly assembled. Aerospace companies are now using 3D printing, which allows them to turn those 20 different parts into just one. The results? 40 percent more productivity, 40 percent more output produced, 40 percent more growth for this specific industry.
But actually, the most exciting part of this new manufacturing revolution goes much beyond productivity. It's about producing better, smarter products. It's about scale customization. Imagine a world where you can buy the exact products you want with the functionalities you need, with the design you want, with the same cost and lead time as a product that's been mass produced, like your car, or your clothes or your cell phone. The new manufacturing revolution makes it possible.
Advanced robots can be programmed in order to perform any product configuration without any setup time or ramp up. 3D printers instantaneously produce any customized design. We are now able to produce a batch of one product, your product, at the same cost and lead time as a batch of many. Those are only a few examples of the manufacturing revolution at play.
Not only will manufacturing become more productive, it will also become more flexible, and those were exactly the elements of growth that we are missing. But actually, there are even some bigger implications for all of us when manufacturing will find its way back into the limelight. It will create a huge macroeconomic shift.
First, our factories will be relocated into our home markets. In the world of scale customization, consumer proximity is the new norm.
Then, our factories will be smaller, agile. Scale does not matter anymore, flexibility does. They will be operating on a multi-product, made-to-order basis. The change will be drastic.
Globalization will enter a new era. The East-to-West trade flows will be replaced by regional trade flows. East for East, West for West. When you think about that, the old model was pretty much insane. Piling up stocks, making products travel the whole world before they reach their end consumers. The new model, producing just next to the consumer market, will be much cleaner, much better for our environment. In mature economies, manufacturing will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity and more growth. Good news, isn't it?
But here's the thing with growth -- it does not come automatically. Mature economies will have to seize it. We'll have to massively re-train our workforce. In most countries, like in my country, France, we've told our children that manufacturing had no future. That it was something happening far away. We need to reverse that and teach manufacturing again at university. Only the countries that will boldly transform will be able to seize this growth.
It's also a chance for developing economies. Of course China and other emerging economies won't be the factory of the world anymore. Actually, it was not a sustainable model in the long term, as those countries are becoming richer. Last year, it was already as expensive to produce in Brazil as to produce in France. By 2018, manufacturing costs in China will be on par with the US.
The new manufacturing revolution will accelerate the transition of those emerging economies towards a model driven by domestic consumption. And this is good, because this is where growth will be created. In the next five years, the next billion consumers in China will inject more growth in our economies than the top five European markets together.
This fourth manufacturing revolution is a chance for all of us. If we play it right, we'll see sustainable growth in all of our economies. This means more wealth distributed to all of us and a better future for our children.
Thank you.
(Applause)
PSYCH/EMOT/GralInt-Ideas TED & TED Talks-5 ways to build lasting self-esteem/Guy Winch: Why we all need to practice emotional first aid
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
WE HUMANS
5 ways to build lasting self-esteem
Aug 23, 2016 / Guy Winch
Monica Ramos
Everyone is in favor of high self-esteem — but cultivating it can be surprisingly tough. Psychologist Guy Winch explains why — and describes smart ways we can help build ourselves up.
Many of us recognize the value of improving our feelings of self-worth. When our self-esteem is higher, we not only feel better about ourselves, we are more resilient as well. Brain scan studies demonstrate that when our self-esteem is higher, we are likely to experience common emotional wounds such as rejection and failure as less painful, and bounce back from them more quickly. When our self-esteem is higher, we are also less vulnerable to anxiety; we release less cortisol into our bloodstream when under stress, and it is less likely to linger in our system.
But as wonderful as it is to have higher self-esteem, it turns out that improving it is no easy task. Despite the endless array of articles, programs and products promising to enhance our self-esteem, the reality is that many of them do not work and some are even likely to make us feel worse.
Part of the problem is that our self-esteem is rather unstable to begin with, as it can fluctuate daily, if not hourly. Further complicating matters, our self-esteem comprises both our global feelings about ourselves as well as how we feel about ourselves in the specific domains of our lives (e.g., as a father, a nurse, an athlete, etc.). The more meaningful a specific domain of self-esteem, the greater the impact it has on our global self-esteem. Having someone wince when they taste the not-so-delicious dinner you prepared will hurt a chef’s self-esteem much more than someone for whom cooking is not a significant aspect of their identity.
Lastly, having high self-esteem is indeed a good thing, but only in moderation. Very high self-esteem — like that of narcissists — is often quite brittle. Such people might feel great about themselves much of the time but they also tend to be extremely vulnerable to criticism and negative feedback and respond to it in ways that stunts their psychological self-growth.
That said, it is certainly possible to improve our self-esteem if we go about it the right way. Here are five ways to nourish your self-esteem when it is low:
1. Use positive affirmations correctly
Positive affirmations such as “I am going to be a great success!” are extremely popular, but they have one critical problem — they tend to make people with low self-worth feel worse about themselves. Why? Because when our self-esteem is low, such declarations are simply too contrary to our existing beliefs. Ironically, positive affirmations do work for one subset of people — those whose self-esteem is already high. For affirmations to work when your self-esteem is lagging, tweak them to make them more believable. For example, change “I’m going to be a great success!” to “I’m going to persevere until I succeed!”
2. Identify your competencies and develop them
Self-esteem is built by demonstrating real ability and achievement in areas of our lives that matter to us. If you pride yourself on being a good cook, throw more dinner parties. If you’re a good runner, sign up for races and train for them. In short, figure out your core competencies and find opportunities and careers that accentuate them.
3. Learn to accept compliments
One of the trickiest aspects of improving self-esteem is that when we feel bad about ourselves we tend to be more resistant to compliments — even though that is when we most need them. So, set yourself the goal to tolerate compliments when you receive them, even if they make you uncomfortable (and they will). The best way to avoid the reflexive reactions of batting away compliments is to prepare simple set responses and train yourself to use them automatically whenever you get good feedback (e.g., “Thank you” or “How kind of you to say”). In time, the impulse to deny or rebuff compliments will fade — which will also be a nice indication your self-esteem is getting stronger.
4. Eliminate self-criticism and introduce self-compassion
Unfortunately, when our self-esteem is low, we are likely to damage it even further by being self-critical. Since our goal is to enhance our self-esteem, we need to substitute self-criticism (which is almost always entirely useless, even if it feels compelling) with self-compassion. Specifically, whenever your self-critical inner monologue kicks in, ask yourself what you would say to a dear friend if they were in your situation (we tend to be much more compassionate to friends than we are to ourselves) and direct those comments to yourself. Doing so will avoid damaging your self-esteem further with critical thoughts, and help build it up instead.
5. Affirm your real worth
The following exercise has been demonstrated to help revive your self-esteem after it sustained a blow: Make a list of qualities you have that are meaningful in the specific context. For example, if you got rejected by your date, list qualities that make you a good relationship prospect (for example, being loyal or emotionally available); if you failed to get a work promotion, list qualities that make you a valuable employee (you have a strong work ethic or are responsible). Then choose one of the items on your list and write a brief essay (one to two paragraphs) about why the quality is valuable and likely to be appreciated by other people in the future. Do the exercise every day for a week or whenever you need a self-esteem boost.
The bottom line is improving self-esteem requires a bit of work, as it involves developing and maintaining healthier emotional habits but doing so, and especially doing so correctly, will provide a great emotional and psychological return on your investment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guy Winch is a licensed psychologist who works with individuals, couples and families. His most recent book is "Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts." He writes the popular Squeaky Wheel Blog on PsychologyToday.com, and is the author of The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self-Esteem. He also blogs for Huffington Post.
Filmed November 2014 at TEDxLinnaeusUniversity
Guy Winch: Why we all need to practice emotional first aid
We'll go to the doctor when we feel flu-ish or a nagging pain. So why don’t we see a health professional when we feel emotional pain: guilt, loss, loneliness? Too many of us deal with common psychological-health issues on our own, says Guy Winch. But we don’t have to. He makes a compelling case to practice emotional hygiene — taking care of our emotions, our minds, with the same diligence we take care of our bodies.
Transcript:
I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. Now, one thing about being a twin is that it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. And clearly, I wasn't starving. (Laughter)
When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of a different kind, and that is how much more we value the body than we do the mind. I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say, "Oh, a psychologist. So not a real doctor," as if it should say that on my card. (Laughter) This favoritism we show the body over the mind, I see it everywhere.
I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. He was standing on a stool by the sink brushing his teeth, when he slipped, and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut, so it doesn't become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? We've known it since we were five years old. But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? Nothing. How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds. Why is it that our physical health is so much more important to us than our psychological health?
We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. It doesn't even occur to us that we should. "Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head." Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: "Oh, just walk it off; it's all in your leg." (Laughter) It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health. It's time we made them more equal, more like twins.
Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist. So he's not a real doctor, either. (Laughter) We didn't study together, though. In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together. We decide to splurge, and that week we would talk for 10 minutes. I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call -- and waiting and waiting, but the phone didn't ring. Given the time difference, I assumed, "Ok, he's out with friends, he will call later." There were no cell phones then. But he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. I woke up the next morning. I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. I stumbled out off bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later, and it was my brother, and, boy, was he pissed. (Laughter) It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. Now I tried to explain what happened, but he said, "I don't understand. If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?" He was right. Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then, but I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness.
Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me. But loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. And I did. There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. Loneliness won't just make you miserable, it will kill you. I'm not kidding. Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent. Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your longterm health and longevity as cigarette smoking. Now cigarette packs come with warnings saying, "This could kill you." But loneliness doesn't. And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us.
Failure does that as well. I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box, with her lower lip trembling. The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and and burst into tears without even touching it. Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. So three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.
Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it.
Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind. I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager with my brother. We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. There had been a robbery in the area and they were looking for suspects. The officer approached the car, and he shined his flashlight on the driver, then on my brother in the front seat, and then on me. And his eyes opened wide and he said, "Where have I seen your face before?" (Laughter) And I said, "In the front seat." (Laughter) But that made no sense to him whatsoever. So now he thought I was on drugs. (Laughter) So he drags me out of the car, he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I didn't have a police record, could I show him I had a twin in the front seat. But even as we were driving away, you could see by the look on his face he was convinced that I was getting away with something.
Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed. You have to fight feelings of helplessness. You have to gain control over the situation. And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins. Our minds and our feelings, they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. They are more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next. I once worked with this woman who after 20 years marriage and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date. She had met this guy online, and he seemed nice and he seemed successful, and most importantly, he seemed really into her. So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink. Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, "I'm not interested," and walks out. Rejection is extremely painful. The woman was so hurt she couldn't move. All she could do was call a friend. Here's what the friend said: "Well, what do you expect? You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say, why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out with a loser like you?" Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel? But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that. It's what the woman said to herself. And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection. We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't, we call ourselves names. Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it. And it's interesting that we do, because our self-esteem is already hurting. Why would we want to go and damage it even further? We wouldn't make a physical injury worse on purpose. You wouldn't get a cut on your arm and decide, "Oh, I know! I'm going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it."
But we do that with psychological injuries all the time. Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. Because we don't prioritize our psychological health. We know from dozens of studies that when your self-esteem is lower, you are more vulnerable to stress and to anxiety, that failures and rejections hurt more and it takes longer to recover from them. So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive your self-esteem, not join Fight Club and beat it into a pulp. When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend. We have to catch our unhealthy psychological habits and change them. One of unhealthiest and most common is called rumination. To ruminate means to chew over. It's when your boss yells at you, or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. Ruminating about upsetting events in this way can easily become a habit, and it's a very costly one. Because by spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease.
The problem is the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop. I know this for a fact, because a little over a year ago, I developed the habit myself. You see, my twin brother was diagnosed with stage III non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His cancer was extremly aggressive. He had visible tumors all over his body. And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through. I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was suffering, even though he never complained, not once. He had this incredibly positive attitude. His psychological health was amazing. I was physically healthy, but psychologically I was a mess. But I knew what to do. Studies tell us that even a two-minute distraction is sufficient to break the urge to ruminate in that moment. And so each time I had a worrying, upsetting, negative thought, I forced myself to concentrate on something else until the urge passed. And within one week, my whole outlook changed and became more positive and more hopeful. Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy, my brother had a CAT scan, and I was by his side when he got the results. All the tumors were gone. He still had three more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but we knew he would recover. This picture was taken two weeks ago.
By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? If there were less loneliness and less depression? If people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? If they were happier and more fulfilled? I can, because that's the world I want to live in, and that's the world my brother wants to live in as well. And if you just become informed and change a few simple habits, well, that's the world we can all live in.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
WE HUMANS
5 ways to build lasting self-esteem
Aug 23, 2016 / Guy Winch
Monica Ramos
Everyone is in favor of high self-esteem — but cultivating it can be surprisingly tough. Psychologist Guy Winch explains why — and describes smart ways we can help build ourselves up.
Many of us recognize the value of improving our feelings of self-worth. When our self-esteem is higher, we not only feel better about ourselves, we are more resilient as well. Brain scan studies demonstrate that when our self-esteem is higher, we are likely to experience common emotional wounds such as rejection and failure as less painful, and bounce back from them more quickly. When our self-esteem is higher, we are also less vulnerable to anxiety; we release less cortisol into our bloodstream when under stress, and it is less likely to linger in our system.
But as wonderful as it is to have higher self-esteem, it turns out that improving it is no easy task. Despite the endless array of articles, programs and products promising to enhance our self-esteem, the reality is that many of them do not work and some are even likely to make us feel worse.
Part of the problem is that our self-esteem is rather unstable to begin with, as it can fluctuate daily, if not hourly. Further complicating matters, our self-esteem comprises both our global feelings about ourselves as well as how we feel about ourselves in the specific domains of our lives (e.g., as a father, a nurse, an athlete, etc.). The more meaningful a specific domain of self-esteem, the greater the impact it has on our global self-esteem. Having someone wince when they taste the not-so-delicious dinner you prepared will hurt a chef’s self-esteem much more than someone for whom cooking is not a significant aspect of their identity.
Lastly, having high self-esteem is indeed a good thing, but only in moderation. Very high self-esteem — like that of narcissists — is often quite brittle. Such people might feel great about themselves much of the time but they also tend to be extremely vulnerable to criticism and negative feedback and respond to it in ways that stunts their psychological self-growth.
That said, it is certainly possible to improve our self-esteem if we go about it the right way. Here are five ways to nourish your self-esteem when it is low:
1. Use positive affirmations correctly
Positive affirmations such as “I am going to be a great success!” are extremely popular, but they have one critical problem — they tend to make people with low self-worth feel worse about themselves. Why? Because when our self-esteem is low, such declarations are simply too contrary to our existing beliefs. Ironically, positive affirmations do work for one subset of people — those whose self-esteem is already high. For affirmations to work when your self-esteem is lagging, tweak them to make them more believable. For example, change “I’m going to be a great success!” to “I’m going to persevere until I succeed!”
2. Identify your competencies and develop them
Self-esteem is built by demonstrating real ability and achievement in areas of our lives that matter to us. If you pride yourself on being a good cook, throw more dinner parties. If you’re a good runner, sign up for races and train for them. In short, figure out your core competencies and find opportunities and careers that accentuate them.
3. Learn to accept compliments
One of the trickiest aspects of improving self-esteem is that when we feel bad about ourselves we tend to be more resistant to compliments — even though that is when we most need them. So, set yourself the goal to tolerate compliments when you receive them, even if they make you uncomfortable (and they will). The best way to avoid the reflexive reactions of batting away compliments is to prepare simple set responses and train yourself to use them automatically whenever you get good feedback (e.g., “Thank you” or “How kind of you to say”). In time, the impulse to deny or rebuff compliments will fade — which will also be a nice indication your self-esteem is getting stronger.
4. Eliminate self-criticism and introduce self-compassion
Unfortunately, when our self-esteem is low, we are likely to damage it even further by being self-critical. Since our goal is to enhance our self-esteem, we need to substitute self-criticism (which is almost always entirely useless, even if it feels compelling) with self-compassion. Specifically, whenever your self-critical inner monologue kicks in, ask yourself what you would say to a dear friend if they were in your situation (we tend to be much more compassionate to friends than we are to ourselves) and direct those comments to yourself. Doing so will avoid damaging your self-esteem further with critical thoughts, and help build it up instead.
5. Affirm your real worth
The following exercise has been demonstrated to help revive your self-esteem after it sustained a blow: Make a list of qualities you have that are meaningful in the specific context. For example, if you got rejected by your date, list qualities that make you a good relationship prospect (for example, being loyal or emotionally available); if you failed to get a work promotion, list qualities that make you a valuable employee (you have a strong work ethic or are responsible). Then choose one of the items on your list and write a brief essay (one to two paragraphs) about why the quality is valuable and likely to be appreciated by other people in the future. Do the exercise every day for a week or whenever you need a self-esteem boost.
The bottom line is improving self-esteem requires a bit of work, as it involves developing and maintaining healthier emotional habits but doing so, and especially doing so correctly, will provide a great emotional and psychological return on your investment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guy Winch is a licensed psychologist who works with individuals, couples and families. His most recent book is "Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts." He writes the popular Squeaky Wheel Blog on PsychologyToday.com, and is the author of The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships and Enhance Self-Esteem. He also blogs for Huffington Post.
Filmed November 2014 at TEDxLinnaeusUniversity
Guy Winch: Why we all need to practice emotional first aid
We'll go to the doctor when we feel flu-ish or a nagging pain. So why don’t we see a health professional when we feel emotional pain: guilt, loss, loneliness? Too many of us deal with common psychological-health issues on our own, says Guy Winch. But we don’t have to. He makes a compelling case to practice emotional hygiene — taking care of our emotions, our minds, with the same diligence we take care of our bodies.
Transcript:
I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. Now, one thing about being a twin is that it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. And clearly, I wasn't starving. (Laughter)
When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of a different kind, and that is how much more we value the body than we do the mind. I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say, "Oh, a psychologist. So not a real doctor," as if it should say that on my card. (Laughter) This favoritism we show the body over the mind, I see it everywhere.
I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. He was standing on a stool by the sink brushing his teeth, when he slipped, and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut, so it doesn't become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? We've known it since we were five years old. But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? Nothing. How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds. Why is it that our physical health is so much more important to us than our psychological health?
We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. It doesn't even occur to us that we should. "Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head." Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: "Oh, just walk it off; it's all in your leg." (Laughter) It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health. It's time we made them more equal, more like twins.
Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist. So he's not a real doctor, either. (Laughter) We didn't study together, though. In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together. We decide to splurge, and that week we would talk for 10 minutes. I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call -- and waiting and waiting, but the phone didn't ring. Given the time difference, I assumed, "Ok, he's out with friends, he will call later." There were no cell phones then. But he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. I woke up the next morning. I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. I stumbled out off bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later, and it was my brother, and, boy, was he pissed. (Laughter) It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. Now I tried to explain what happened, but he said, "I don't understand. If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?" He was right. Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then, but I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness.
Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me. But loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. And I did. There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. Loneliness won't just make you miserable, it will kill you. I'm not kidding. Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent. Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your longterm health and longevity as cigarette smoking. Now cigarette packs come with warnings saying, "This could kill you." But loneliness doesn't. And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us.
Failure does that as well. I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box, with her lower lip trembling. The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and and burst into tears without even touching it. Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. So three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.
Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it.
Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind. I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager with my brother. We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. There had been a robbery in the area and they were looking for suspects. The officer approached the car, and he shined his flashlight on the driver, then on my brother in the front seat, and then on me. And his eyes opened wide and he said, "Where have I seen your face before?" (Laughter) And I said, "In the front seat." (Laughter) But that made no sense to him whatsoever. So now he thought I was on drugs. (Laughter) So he drags me out of the car, he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I didn't have a police record, could I show him I had a twin in the front seat. But even as we were driving away, you could see by the look on his face he was convinced that I was getting away with something.
Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed. You have to fight feelings of helplessness. You have to gain control over the situation. And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins. Our minds and our feelings, they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. They are more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next. I once worked with this woman who after 20 years marriage and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date. She had met this guy online, and he seemed nice and he seemed successful, and most importantly, he seemed really into her. So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink. Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, "I'm not interested," and walks out. Rejection is extremely painful. The woman was so hurt she couldn't move. All she could do was call a friend. Here's what the friend said: "Well, what do you expect? You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say, why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out with a loser like you?" Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel? But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that. It's what the woman said to herself. And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection. We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't, we call ourselves names. Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it. And it's interesting that we do, because our self-esteem is already hurting. Why would we want to go and damage it even further? We wouldn't make a physical injury worse on purpose. You wouldn't get a cut on your arm and decide, "Oh, I know! I'm going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it."
But we do that with psychological injuries all the time. Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. Because we don't prioritize our psychological health. We know from dozens of studies that when your self-esteem is lower, you are more vulnerable to stress and to anxiety, that failures and rejections hurt more and it takes longer to recover from them. So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive your self-esteem, not join Fight Club and beat it into a pulp. When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend. We have to catch our unhealthy psychological habits and change them. One of unhealthiest and most common is called rumination. To ruminate means to chew over. It's when your boss yells at you, or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. Ruminating about upsetting events in this way can easily become a habit, and it's a very costly one. Because by spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease.
The problem is the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop. I know this for a fact, because a little over a year ago, I developed the habit myself. You see, my twin brother was diagnosed with stage III non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His cancer was extremly aggressive. He had visible tumors all over his body. And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through. I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was suffering, even though he never complained, not once. He had this incredibly positive attitude. His psychological health was amazing. I was physically healthy, but psychologically I was a mess. But I knew what to do. Studies tell us that even a two-minute distraction is sufficient to break the urge to ruminate in that moment. And so each time I had a worrying, upsetting, negative thought, I forced myself to concentrate on something else until the urge passed. And within one week, my whole outlook changed and became more positive and more hopeful. Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy, my brother had a CAT scan, and I was by his side when he got the results. All the tumors were gone. He still had three more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but we knew he would recover. This picture was taken two weeks ago.
By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene.
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? If there were less loneliness and less depression? If people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? If they were happier and more fulfilled? I can, because that's the world I want to live in, and that's the world my brother wants to live in as well. And if you just become informed and change a few simple habits, well, that's the world we can all live in.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
POL/GralInt-La recuperación de activos de la corrupción
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
La recuperación de activos de la corrupción
No basta con condenar a los corruptos; urge contar con un marco legal que permita al Estado recobrar los fondos del erario que fueron malversados
24 DE AGOSTO DE 2016
Numerosos sectores ciudadanos, escandalizados por los elevadísimos niveles que alcanzó la corrupción de los últimos años, reclaman con justicia que el castigo a los funcionarios involucrados no se limite a la condena que los magistrados determinen, si ésta alguna vez llega, sino que también los obligue a reintegrar los bienes y caudales malversados o robados.
Difícilmente podría haber serios disensos en esta materia, en la que se busca una acción ejemplificadora que impida que, una vez cumplida la condena, quien ha delinquido goce con toda tranquilidad de los bienes mal habidos.
La discusión, en cambio, puede girar alrededor de los aspectos legales para compatibilizarlos con nuestra legislación. Por ejemplo, la eventual vulneración del derecho a la propiedad, del que nadie puede ser privado en forma arbitraria. La extinción del dominio para que el Estado recupere lo que fue malversado o mal habido se basa en que ese dinero o los bienes que se obtuvieron con fondos ilícitos no son legítimos ni gozan de protección legal. Se trata de un procedimiento especial que es independiente del proceso judicial.
La Constitución nacional de 1853 suprimió la figura de la confiscación de bienes, tan usada por los caudillos provinciales y por Juan Manuel de Rosas en Buenos Aires para castigar a quienes se animaban a oponerse a sus regímenes. No se trata de sancionar ideas ni tampoco de penalizar gestiones de gobierno, sino de imponer el debido castigo por hechos comprobadamente delictivos cometidos durante el ejercicio de funciones de gobierno.
Durante la gestión de Gustavo Beliz al frente del Ministerio de Justicia y Seguridad se elaboró un programa para destinar los fondos que se recuperaran de la corrupción de los años noventa a planes educativos y de interés social. Resulta vital para estos casos la contratación de abogados de los países en los que los fondos están radicados.
Distintas naciones sortearon exitosamente el desafío. Perú demostró que es definitivamente posible recuperar activos generados por actos de corrupción cuando logró la repatriación de considerables sumas saqueadas por el ex presidente Alberto Fujimori y varios de sus colaboradores. Filipinas rescató también cuantiosos fondos transferidos por el corrupto matrimonio Marcos.
Por desgracia, la experiencia argentina es muy diferente e indica la imperiosa necesidad de contar con instrumentos capaces de revertir el actual estado de cosas y la impunidad resultante.
El principal motivo por el cual es tan escasa la recuperación del dinero de la corrupción se encuentra en la actitud indiferente o francamente cómplice de jueces federales que prolongan durante más de diez años la instrucción de las causas de corrupción flagrante, con largos períodos de inactividad. Debido al paso del tiempo hay causas que prescriben y otras llegan a juicio oral transcurrida más de una década, lapso al que luego hay que sumar varios años más hasta que la Cámara de Casación pueda confirmar las condenas.
Mientras se extienden los procesos en la etapa de instrucción -como el enriquecimiento ilícito prescribe rápidamente, existe una petición pública para que esa figura sea imprescriptible, y puede suscribirse en www.change.org, no es infrecuente que los jueces federales, cuando piden datos sobre cuentas bancarias, cometan groseros errores al librar exhortos a los países donde se encuentra depositado el dinero de la corrupción.
A esta altura ya no cabe sólo considerar esos errores como tales, sino como maniobras claramente dilatorias. Debido a los yerros que algunos jueces federales cometían al librar exhortos a Suiza durante el menemismo, el Poder Judicial de ese país les explicó con claridad el procedimiento que se debía seguir y la necesidad, ineludible, de que el delito imputado por la justicia argentina, además de estar claramente definido, también debía constituir un delito en los códigos suizos. De poco servirá contar con las herramientas adecuadas para recuperar activos generados por la corrupción si la Justicia no pone voluntad, honestidad y celeridad.
Se trata de contar con una férrea voluntad política, con jueces y fiscales dispuestos a cumplir su deber y eficacia para obtener la colaboración de otros Estados. Sólo así los procesos servirán para que los funcionarios públicos comprueben que nunca más podrán enriquecerse sin temer las consecuencias.
Los procesos judiciales por corrupción son excesivamente largos y las condenas de cumplimiento efectivo, que pueden llegar a demorar entre 10 y 20 años, resultan, cuando llegan, por demás livianas. Los ciudadanos terminan convencidos, no sin razón, de la importancia efectiva y ejemplificadora de castigar a los corruptos privándolos del goce de sus mal habidas fortunas.
El vergonzoso saqueo al erario debe ser castigado y los fondos tienen que ser recuperados para paliar ingentes necesidades sociales y contribuir a recomponer el clima moral de la República.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
La recuperación de activos de la corrupción
No basta con condenar a los corruptos; urge contar con un marco legal que permita al Estado recobrar los fondos del erario que fueron malversados
24 DE AGOSTO DE 2016
Numerosos sectores ciudadanos, escandalizados por los elevadísimos niveles que alcanzó la corrupción de los últimos años, reclaman con justicia que el castigo a los funcionarios involucrados no se limite a la condena que los magistrados determinen, si ésta alguna vez llega, sino que también los obligue a reintegrar los bienes y caudales malversados o robados.
Difícilmente podría haber serios disensos en esta materia, en la que se busca una acción ejemplificadora que impida que, una vez cumplida la condena, quien ha delinquido goce con toda tranquilidad de los bienes mal habidos.
La discusión, en cambio, puede girar alrededor de los aspectos legales para compatibilizarlos con nuestra legislación. Por ejemplo, la eventual vulneración del derecho a la propiedad, del que nadie puede ser privado en forma arbitraria. La extinción del dominio para que el Estado recupere lo que fue malversado o mal habido se basa en que ese dinero o los bienes que se obtuvieron con fondos ilícitos no son legítimos ni gozan de protección legal. Se trata de un procedimiento especial que es independiente del proceso judicial.
La Constitución nacional de 1853 suprimió la figura de la confiscación de bienes, tan usada por los caudillos provinciales y por Juan Manuel de Rosas en Buenos Aires para castigar a quienes se animaban a oponerse a sus regímenes. No se trata de sancionar ideas ni tampoco de penalizar gestiones de gobierno, sino de imponer el debido castigo por hechos comprobadamente delictivos cometidos durante el ejercicio de funciones de gobierno.
Durante la gestión de Gustavo Beliz al frente del Ministerio de Justicia y Seguridad se elaboró un programa para destinar los fondos que se recuperaran de la corrupción de los años noventa a planes educativos y de interés social. Resulta vital para estos casos la contratación de abogados de los países en los que los fondos están radicados.
Distintas naciones sortearon exitosamente el desafío. Perú demostró que es definitivamente posible recuperar activos generados por actos de corrupción cuando logró la repatriación de considerables sumas saqueadas por el ex presidente Alberto Fujimori y varios de sus colaboradores. Filipinas rescató también cuantiosos fondos transferidos por el corrupto matrimonio Marcos.
Por desgracia, la experiencia argentina es muy diferente e indica la imperiosa necesidad de contar con instrumentos capaces de revertir el actual estado de cosas y la impunidad resultante.
El principal motivo por el cual es tan escasa la recuperación del dinero de la corrupción se encuentra en la actitud indiferente o francamente cómplice de jueces federales que prolongan durante más de diez años la instrucción de las causas de corrupción flagrante, con largos períodos de inactividad. Debido al paso del tiempo hay causas que prescriben y otras llegan a juicio oral transcurrida más de una década, lapso al que luego hay que sumar varios años más hasta que la Cámara de Casación pueda confirmar las condenas.
Mientras se extienden los procesos en la etapa de instrucción -como el enriquecimiento ilícito prescribe rápidamente, existe una petición pública para que esa figura sea imprescriptible, y puede suscribirse en www.change.org, no es infrecuente que los jueces federales, cuando piden datos sobre cuentas bancarias, cometan groseros errores al librar exhortos a los países donde se encuentra depositado el dinero de la corrupción.
A esta altura ya no cabe sólo considerar esos errores como tales, sino como maniobras claramente dilatorias. Debido a los yerros que algunos jueces federales cometían al librar exhortos a Suiza durante el menemismo, el Poder Judicial de ese país les explicó con claridad el procedimiento que se debía seguir y la necesidad, ineludible, de que el delito imputado por la justicia argentina, además de estar claramente definido, también debía constituir un delito en los códigos suizos. De poco servirá contar con las herramientas adecuadas para recuperar activos generados por la corrupción si la Justicia no pone voluntad, honestidad y celeridad.
Se trata de contar con una férrea voluntad política, con jueces y fiscales dispuestos a cumplir su deber y eficacia para obtener la colaboración de otros Estados. Sólo así los procesos servirán para que los funcionarios públicos comprueben que nunca más podrán enriquecerse sin temer las consecuencias.
Los procesos judiciales por corrupción son excesivamente largos y las condenas de cumplimiento efectivo, que pueden llegar a demorar entre 10 y 20 años, resultan, cuando llegan, por demás livianas. Los ciudadanos terminan convencidos, no sin razón, de la importancia efectiva y ejemplificadora de castigar a los corruptos privándolos del goce de sus mal habidas fortunas.
El vergonzoso saqueo al erario debe ser castigado y los fondos tienen que ser recuperados para paliar ingentes necesidades sociales y contribuir a recomponer el clima moral de la República.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Sunday, August 21, 2016
¡FELIZ DÍA DEL NIÑO!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
¡FELIZ DÍA DEL NIÑO!
Fuente: Google Images
¡FELIZ DÍA DEL NIÑO!
Fuente: Google Images
Saturday, August 20, 2016
GralInt-TED Talks-Gonzalo Vilariño: How Argentina's blind soccer team became champions
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed September 2015 at TEDxRiodelaPlata
Gonzalo Vilariño: How Argentina's blind soccer team became champions
With warmth and respect, Gonzalo Vilariño tells the captivating story of Argentina's blind soccer team — and how a sincere belief in themselves and their capabilities transformed the players from humble beginnings into two-time World Champions. "You have to get out there and play every game in this beautiful tournament that we call life," Vilariño says.
Transcript:
I opened a blind man's head. I didn't make him think or reflect -- I cracked his head open, literally. We were walking with him holding onto my shoulder, I miscalculated how much space there was between us, and I knocked him into a gate.
(Laughter)
Five stitches in his forehead. At that moment, I felt like the worst teacher in the world. I really didn't know how to apologize. Luckily, El Pulga is one of those people who takes things quite well. And to this day, he says that I was the coach who left the most important mark on his career.
(Laughter)
The truth is, when I started working at the institute for the blind, I was surprised by a lot of things. A lot of the things they did, I never imagined they could: they swam, did exercise, played cards. They drank mate, and could pour it without burning themselves in the process.
But when I saw them playing soccer -- that was amazing. They had a dirt field, rusty goalposts and broken nets. The blind who attended the institute would play their games there, just like I did at a field near my house. But they played without being able to see. The ball made a sound so they could locate it. They had a guide behind the rival team's goal to know where to kick the ball. And they used eye masks. There were guys who could still see a little, and they wore eye masks so everyone was equal.
When I was more at ease with them, I asked for a mask myself. I put it on and tried to play. I had played soccer all my life. This is where it got even more amazing: within two seconds, I didn't know where I was standing. I had studied physical education because I loved high performance.
I started working at the institute by chance. My other job was with the Argentinian National Rowing Team, and I felt that was my thing. Here, everything was twice as hard. I'll never forget the first day I did the warm-up with the team. I lined them up in front of me -- I used to do that with the rowing team -- and I said, "OK, everyone bend down," going like this. When I looked up, two guys were seated, three were lying down and others were squatting.
(Laughter)
How could I do here the same things I was doing there? It took me a while. I started looking for tools to learn from them, from the teachers who worked with them. I learned I couldn't explain a play on a chalkboard like a coach does, but I could use a plastic tray and some bottle caps so they could follow me by way of touch. I also learned they could run on a track if I ran with them, holding a rope. So we started looking for volunteers to help us run with them.
I was enjoying it, and finding purpose and meaning in what we were doing. It was hard at first, it was uncomfortable, but I decided to overcome the discomfort. And there came a time when it became the most fascinating job I'd ever had.
I think that's when I wondered: Why couldn't we be a high-performance team as well? Of course, one thing was missing: I needed to find out what they wanted, the real protagonists of this story. Three hours of training, playing soccer on that field, were not going to be enough. We would have to train differently.
We started to train harder, and the results were great; they asked for more. I came to understand that they, too, wondered why they couldn't do high-performance. When we felt ready, we knocked at CENARD's door. CENARD is the National Center for High-Performance Sports here in Argentina. It was hard to get them to hear what we had to say. But it was considerably more difficult to get the other athletes training there to consider us their equals. In fact, they would let us use the field only when no other teams were using it. And we were known as "the blind ones." Not everyone knew exactly what we were doing there.
The 2006 World Championship was a turning point in the team's history. It was held in Buenos Aires for the first time. It was our chance to show everyone what we had been doing all that time. We made it to the finals. We were growing as a team.
It was us against Brazil in the finals. They were the best team in the tournament. They won every game by a landslide. Hardly anyone believed we could win that game. Hardly anyone -- except for us.
During pre-game meetings, in the locker room, during each warm-up, it smelled of victory. I swear that smell exists. I smelled it several times with the team, but I remember it in particular, the day before we played that final. The Argentine Football Association had opened their doors to us.
We were training at AFA, where Verón, Higuain and Messi trained. For the first time ever, we felt like a true national team. At 7:30pm, the day before the game, we were in the lounge discussing strategy, and a kid knocks on the door, interrupting our conversation. He suggested we go to church. He came to invite us to church. I tried to get rid of him, saying it wasn't a good time, that we better leave it for another day. He kept insisting, asking me to please let him take the guys to church, because that day, a pastor who performed miracles would be there.
I was slightly afraid to ask what type of miracles he meant, and he replied nonchalantly, "Coach, let me take the team to the church, and when we return, I guarantee that half of them will be able to see."
(Laughter)
Some of the guys laughed, but imagine being a blind person and someone says that to you. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing; it was an awkward silence. I didn't want to make him feel bad, because he truly believed this could happen.
One of the players saved me, when he stood up and confidently said, "Juan," -- that was the kid's name -- Gonza already told you it's not the best time to go to church. Besides, let me make this clear: if we go to that church, and I end up being able to see when we return, I will beat you so hard, I won't be able to play tomorrow."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Juan left, laughing in resignation, and we continued with our pregame talk. That night when I went to sleep, I began to dream about the next day's game, imagining what could happen, how we would play. And that's when I noticed that smell of victory I mentioned a while ago. And it's because at that moment, I thought: if the other players had the same desire as Diego going into the game, it was impossible for us not to win.
The next day was going to be wonderful. We got up at 9am, the game was at 7pm, and we were already eager to play. We left AFA, and the bus was full of flags that people had given to us. We were talking about the game, and we could hear people honking and cheering, "Go Murciélagos! Today's the day! The final challenge!"
The guys asked me, "Do they know us? Do they know we're playing?" Some people followed the bus to CENARD. We arrived and found an amazing scene. In the corridor leading from the locker room to the game field, I was walking with Silvio, who was holding onto my shoulder, so I could guide him. Fortunately, there were no gates along the way.
(Laughter)
When we reached the field, he asked me about everything. He didn't want to miss a single detail. He said, "Tell me what you see, tell me who's playing the drums."
I tried to explain what was happening with as much detail as possible. I told him, "The stands are packed, a lot of people couldn't get in, there are blue and white balloons all over the field, they're opening a giant Argentine flag that covers the entire grandstand."
Suddenly, he cuts me off and says, "Do you see a flag that says 'San Pedro'?" That's the city where he lives. I started looking into the stands and I spotted a little white flag with lettering done in black spray paint, that read: "Silvio, your family and all of San Pedro are here."
I told him that and he replied, "That's my wife, tell me where she is, I want to I wave at her." I pointed him toward the flag and showed him with his arm where they were sitting, and he waved his arms in that direction. About 20 or 30 people stood up and gave him an ovation. When that happened, I saw how his face changed, how moved he was. It was moving for me, too; two seconds later, I had a lump in my throat. It was strange -- I felt both the excitement of what was happening, and the anger and the anguish that he could not see it.
A few days later when I told him what I had experienced, he tried to reassure me, saying, "Gonza, don't feel bad, I could see them. Differently, but I swear to you that I saw them all."
The game started. We could not fail; it was the final. The audience was quiet, like here, because in soccer for the blind, the public has to be quiet so the players can hear the ball. They're only allowed to cheer when the game is over.
And when there were eight minutes to go, the crowd did all the cheering they hadn't done in the first 32 minutes. When pigeon-toed Silvio nailed the ball at an angle, they cheered with all their heart, in an incredible way.
Today, if you go to CENARD, you'll see a huge poster on the door, with a photo of our team, Los Murciélagos. They're a model national team, everyone in CENARD knows who they are, and after having won two World Championships and two Paralympic medals, no one doubts they are high-performance athletes.
(Applause)
(Applause ends)
I was lucky to train this team for 10 years, first as a trainer and later as their coach. I feel that they've given me much more than what I've given them.
Last year, they asked me to coach another national team, Power Soccer. It's a national team of young men who play soccer in wheelchairs. They use motorized wheelchairs that they drive with a joystick, because they don't have enough strength in their arms to use conventional chairs. They added a bumper to the chair, a safeguard that protects their feet, while allowing them to kick the ball. It's the first time that, instead of being the spectators, they're now the main characters. It's the first time their parents, friends and siblings can see them play.
For me, it's a new challenge, with the same discomfort, insecurity, and fear I had when I started working with the blind. But I approach it all from a more experienced position. That's why from day one, I treat them as athletes on the field, and off the field, I try to put myself in their shoes and behave without prejudice, because treating them naturally feels best to them.
Both teams play soccer; something once unthinkable for them. They had to adapt the rules to do so. And both teams broke the same rule -- the one that said they couldn't play soccer.
When you see them play, you see competition, not disability. The problem starts when the game is over, and they leave the field. Then they step in to play our game, in a society whose rules don't really take them into account or care for them.
I learned from sports that disability greatly depends on the rules of the game. I believe that if we change some of the rules of our game, we can make life a little easier for them.
We all know there are people with disabilities; we see them daily. But by having no direct contact with them, we're not aware of the problems they face every day, like how hard it is for them to get on a bus, find a job, take the subway or cross the street.
It's true that there is an increasing social responsibility regarding the inclusion of people with disabilities. But I think it's still not enough. I think change needs to come from every one of us. First, by leaving behind our indifference toward the disabled, and then by respecting the rules that do take them into account. They are few, but they do exist.
I cracked a blind man's head open -- El Pulga's head. I can assure you these two teams opened mine as well. They taught me that above all, you have to get out there and play every game in this beautiful tournament that we call life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed September 2015 at TEDxRiodelaPlata
Gonzalo Vilariño: How Argentina's blind soccer team became champions
With warmth and respect, Gonzalo Vilariño tells the captivating story of Argentina's blind soccer team — and how a sincere belief in themselves and their capabilities transformed the players from humble beginnings into two-time World Champions. "You have to get out there and play every game in this beautiful tournament that we call life," Vilariño says.
Transcript:
I opened a blind man's head. I didn't make him think or reflect -- I cracked his head open, literally. We were walking with him holding onto my shoulder, I miscalculated how much space there was between us, and I knocked him into a gate.
(Laughter)
Five stitches in his forehead. At that moment, I felt like the worst teacher in the world. I really didn't know how to apologize. Luckily, El Pulga is one of those people who takes things quite well. And to this day, he says that I was the coach who left the most important mark on his career.
(Laughter)
The truth is, when I started working at the institute for the blind, I was surprised by a lot of things. A lot of the things they did, I never imagined they could: they swam, did exercise, played cards. They drank mate, and could pour it without burning themselves in the process.
But when I saw them playing soccer -- that was amazing. They had a dirt field, rusty goalposts and broken nets. The blind who attended the institute would play their games there, just like I did at a field near my house. But they played without being able to see. The ball made a sound so they could locate it. They had a guide behind the rival team's goal to know where to kick the ball. And they used eye masks. There were guys who could still see a little, and they wore eye masks so everyone was equal.
When I was more at ease with them, I asked for a mask myself. I put it on and tried to play. I had played soccer all my life. This is where it got even more amazing: within two seconds, I didn't know where I was standing. I had studied physical education because I loved high performance.
I started working at the institute by chance. My other job was with the Argentinian National Rowing Team, and I felt that was my thing. Here, everything was twice as hard. I'll never forget the first day I did the warm-up with the team. I lined them up in front of me -- I used to do that with the rowing team -- and I said, "OK, everyone bend down," going like this. When I looked up, two guys were seated, three were lying down and others were squatting.
(Laughter)
How could I do here the same things I was doing there? It took me a while. I started looking for tools to learn from them, from the teachers who worked with them. I learned I couldn't explain a play on a chalkboard like a coach does, but I could use a plastic tray and some bottle caps so they could follow me by way of touch. I also learned they could run on a track if I ran with them, holding a rope. So we started looking for volunteers to help us run with them.
I was enjoying it, and finding purpose and meaning in what we were doing. It was hard at first, it was uncomfortable, but I decided to overcome the discomfort. And there came a time when it became the most fascinating job I'd ever had.
I think that's when I wondered: Why couldn't we be a high-performance team as well? Of course, one thing was missing: I needed to find out what they wanted, the real protagonists of this story. Three hours of training, playing soccer on that field, were not going to be enough. We would have to train differently.
We started to train harder, and the results were great; they asked for more. I came to understand that they, too, wondered why they couldn't do high-performance. When we felt ready, we knocked at CENARD's door. CENARD is the National Center for High-Performance Sports here in Argentina. It was hard to get them to hear what we had to say. But it was considerably more difficult to get the other athletes training there to consider us their equals. In fact, they would let us use the field only when no other teams were using it. And we were known as "the blind ones." Not everyone knew exactly what we were doing there.
The 2006 World Championship was a turning point in the team's history. It was held in Buenos Aires for the first time. It was our chance to show everyone what we had been doing all that time. We made it to the finals. We were growing as a team.
It was us against Brazil in the finals. They were the best team in the tournament. They won every game by a landslide. Hardly anyone believed we could win that game. Hardly anyone -- except for us.
During pre-game meetings, in the locker room, during each warm-up, it smelled of victory. I swear that smell exists. I smelled it several times with the team, but I remember it in particular, the day before we played that final. The Argentine Football Association had opened their doors to us.
We were training at AFA, where Verón, Higuain and Messi trained. For the first time ever, we felt like a true national team. At 7:30pm, the day before the game, we were in the lounge discussing strategy, and a kid knocks on the door, interrupting our conversation. He suggested we go to church. He came to invite us to church. I tried to get rid of him, saying it wasn't a good time, that we better leave it for another day. He kept insisting, asking me to please let him take the guys to church, because that day, a pastor who performed miracles would be there.
I was slightly afraid to ask what type of miracles he meant, and he replied nonchalantly, "Coach, let me take the team to the church, and when we return, I guarantee that half of them will be able to see."
(Laughter)
Some of the guys laughed, but imagine being a blind person and someone says that to you. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing; it was an awkward silence. I didn't want to make him feel bad, because he truly believed this could happen.
One of the players saved me, when he stood up and confidently said, "Juan," -- that was the kid's name -- Gonza already told you it's not the best time to go to church. Besides, let me make this clear: if we go to that church, and I end up being able to see when we return, I will beat you so hard, I won't be able to play tomorrow."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Juan left, laughing in resignation, and we continued with our pregame talk. That night when I went to sleep, I began to dream about the next day's game, imagining what could happen, how we would play. And that's when I noticed that smell of victory I mentioned a while ago. And it's because at that moment, I thought: if the other players had the same desire as Diego going into the game, it was impossible for us not to win.
The next day was going to be wonderful. We got up at 9am, the game was at 7pm, and we were already eager to play. We left AFA, and the bus was full of flags that people had given to us. We were talking about the game, and we could hear people honking and cheering, "Go Murciélagos! Today's the day! The final challenge!"
The guys asked me, "Do they know us? Do they know we're playing?" Some people followed the bus to CENARD. We arrived and found an amazing scene. In the corridor leading from the locker room to the game field, I was walking with Silvio, who was holding onto my shoulder, so I could guide him. Fortunately, there were no gates along the way.
(Laughter)
When we reached the field, he asked me about everything. He didn't want to miss a single detail. He said, "Tell me what you see, tell me who's playing the drums."
I tried to explain what was happening with as much detail as possible. I told him, "The stands are packed, a lot of people couldn't get in, there are blue and white balloons all over the field, they're opening a giant Argentine flag that covers the entire grandstand."
Suddenly, he cuts me off and says, "Do you see a flag that says 'San Pedro'?" That's the city where he lives. I started looking into the stands and I spotted a little white flag with lettering done in black spray paint, that read: "Silvio, your family and all of San Pedro are here."
I told him that and he replied, "That's my wife, tell me where she is, I want to I wave at her." I pointed him toward the flag and showed him with his arm where they were sitting, and he waved his arms in that direction. About 20 or 30 people stood up and gave him an ovation. When that happened, I saw how his face changed, how moved he was. It was moving for me, too; two seconds later, I had a lump in my throat. It was strange -- I felt both the excitement of what was happening, and the anger and the anguish that he could not see it.
A few days later when I told him what I had experienced, he tried to reassure me, saying, "Gonza, don't feel bad, I could see them. Differently, but I swear to you that I saw them all."
The game started. We could not fail; it was the final. The audience was quiet, like here, because in soccer for the blind, the public has to be quiet so the players can hear the ball. They're only allowed to cheer when the game is over.
And when there were eight minutes to go, the crowd did all the cheering they hadn't done in the first 32 minutes. When pigeon-toed Silvio nailed the ball at an angle, they cheered with all their heart, in an incredible way.
Today, if you go to CENARD, you'll see a huge poster on the door, with a photo of our team, Los Murciélagos. They're a model national team, everyone in CENARD knows who they are, and after having won two World Championships and two Paralympic medals, no one doubts they are high-performance athletes.
(Applause)
(Applause ends)
I was lucky to train this team for 10 years, first as a trainer and later as their coach. I feel that they've given me much more than what I've given them.
Last year, they asked me to coach another national team, Power Soccer. It's a national team of young men who play soccer in wheelchairs. They use motorized wheelchairs that they drive with a joystick, because they don't have enough strength in their arms to use conventional chairs. They added a bumper to the chair, a safeguard that protects their feet, while allowing them to kick the ball. It's the first time that, instead of being the spectators, they're now the main characters. It's the first time their parents, friends and siblings can see them play.
For me, it's a new challenge, with the same discomfort, insecurity, and fear I had when I started working with the blind. But I approach it all from a more experienced position. That's why from day one, I treat them as athletes on the field, and off the field, I try to put myself in their shoes and behave without prejudice, because treating them naturally feels best to them.
Both teams play soccer; something once unthinkable for them. They had to adapt the rules to do so. And both teams broke the same rule -- the one that said they couldn't play soccer.
When you see them play, you see competition, not disability. The problem starts when the game is over, and they leave the field. Then they step in to play our game, in a society whose rules don't really take them into account or care for them.
I learned from sports that disability greatly depends on the rules of the game. I believe that if we change some of the rules of our game, we can make life a little easier for them.
We all know there are people with disabilities; we see them daily. But by having no direct contact with them, we're not aware of the problems they face every day, like how hard it is for them to get on a bus, find a job, take the subway or cross the street.
It's true that there is an increasing social responsibility regarding the inclusion of people with disabilities. But I think it's still not enough. I think change needs to come from every one of us. First, by leaving behind our indifference toward the disabled, and then by respecting the rules that do take them into account. They are few, but they do exist.
I cracked a blind man's head open -- El Pulga's head. I can assure you these two teams opened mine as well. They taught me that above all, you have to get out there and play every game in this beautiful tournament that we call life.
Thank you.
(Applause)
HIST/ARCHEOL/GralInt-TED Talks-Sarah Parcak: Hunting for Peru's lost civilizations -- with satellites
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed June 2016 at TEDSummit
Sarah Parcak: Hunting for Peru's lost civilizations -- with satellites
Around the world, hundreds of thousands of lost ancient sites lie buried and hidden from view. Satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak is determined to find them before looters do. With the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak is building an online citizen-science tool called GlobalXplorer that will train an army of volunteer explorers to find and protect the world's hidden heritage. In this talk, she offers a preview of the first place they'll look: Peru — the home of Machu Picchu, the Nazca lines and other archaeological wonders waiting to be discovered.
Transcript:
In July of 1911, a 35-year-old Yale graduate and professor set out from his rainforest camp with his team. After climbing a steep hill and wiping the sweat from his brow, he described what he saw beneath him. He saw rising from the dense rainforest foliage this incredible interlocking maze of structures built of granite, beautifully put together.
What's amazing about this project is that it was the first funded by National Geographic, and it graced the front cover of its magazine in 1912. This professor used state-of-the-art photography equipment to record the site, forever changing the face of exploration.
The site was Machu Picchu, discovered and explored by Hiram Bingham. When he saw the site, he asked, "This is an impossible dream. What could it be?"
So today, 100 years later, I invite you all on an incredible journey with me, a 37-year-old Yale graduate and professor.
(Cheers)
We will do nothing less than use state-of-the-art technology to map an entire country. This is a dream started by Hiram Bingham, but we are expanding it to the world, making archaeological exploration more open, inclusive, and at a scale simply not previously possible.
This is why I am so excited to share with you all today that we will begin the 2016 TED Prize platform in Latin America, more specifically Peru.
(Applause)
Thank you.
We will be taking Hiram Bingham's impossible dream and turning it into an amazing future that we can all share in together.
So Peru doesn't just have Machu Picchu. It has absolutely stunning jewelry, like what you can see here. It has amazing Moche pottery of human figures. It has the Nazca Lines and amazing textiles. So as part of the TED Prize platform, we are going to partnering with some incredible organizations, first of all with DigitalGlobe, the world's largest provider of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. They're going to be helping us build out this amazing crowdsourcing platform they have. Maybe some of you used it with the MH370 crash and search for the airplane. Of course, they'll also be providing us with the satellite imagery. National Geographic will be helping us with education and of course exploration. As well, they'll be providing us with rich content for the platform, including some of the archival imagery like you saw at the beginning of this talk and some of their documentary footage. We've already begun to build and plan the platform, and I'm just so excited.
So here's the cool part. My team, headed up by Chase Childs, is already beginning to look at some of the satellite imagery. Of course, what you can see here is 0.3-meter data. This is site called Chan Chan in northern Peru. It dates to 850 AD. It's a really amazing city, but let's zoom in. This is the type and quality of data that you all will get to see. You can see individual structures, individual buildings. And we've already begun to find previously unknown sites. What we can say already is that as part of the platform, you will all help discover thousands of previously unknown sites, like this one here, and this potentially large one here. Unfortunately, we've also begun to uncover large-scale looting at sites, like what you see here. So many sites in Peru are threatened, but the great part is that all of this data is going to be shared with archaeologists on the front lines of protecting these sites.
So I was just in Peru, meeting with their Minister of Culture as well as UNESCO. We'll be collaborating closely with them. Just so you all know, the site is going to be in both English and Spanish, which is absolutely essential to make sure that people in Peru and across Latin America can participate. Our main project coprincipal investigator is the gentleman you see here, Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo, professor at Catholic University. As a respected Peruvian archaeologist and former vice-minister, Dr. Castillo will be helping us coordinate and share the data with archaeologists so they can explore these sites on the ground. He also runs this amazing drone mapping program, some of the images of which you can see behind me here and here. And this data will be incorporated into the platform, and also he'll be helping to image some of the new sites you help find.
Our on-the-ground partner who will be helping us with education, outreach, as well as site preservation components, is the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, led by Dr. Larry Coben. Some of you may not be aware that some of the world's poorest communities coexist with some of the world's most well-known archaeological sites. What SPI does is it helps to empower these communities, in particular women, with new economic approaches and business training. So it helps to teach them to create beautiful handicrafts which are then sold on to tourists. This empowers the women to treasure their cultural heritage and take ownership of it. I had the opportunity to spend some time with 24 of these women at a well-known archaeological site called Pachacamac, just outside Lima. These women were unbelievably inspiring, and what's great is that SPI will help us transform communities near some of the sites that you help to discover.
Peru is just the beginning. We're going to be expanding this platform to the world, but already I've gotten thousands of emails from people all across the world -- professors, educators, students, and other archaeologists -- who are so excited to help participate. In fact, they're already suggesting amazing places for us to help discover, including Atlantis. I don't know if we're going to be looking for Atlantis, but you never know.
So I'm just so excited to launch this platform. It's going to be launched formally by the end of the year. And I have to say, if what my team has already discovered in the past few weeks are any indication, what the world discovers is just going to be beyond imagination. Make sure to hold on to your alpacas.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed June 2016 at TEDSummit
Sarah Parcak: Hunting for Peru's lost civilizations -- with satellites
Around the world, hundreds of thousands of lost ancient sites lie buried and hidden from view. Satellite archaeologist Sarah Parcak is determined to find them before looters do. With the 2016 TED Prize, Parcak is building an online citizen-science tool called GlobalXplorer that will train an army of volunteer explorers to find and protect the world's hidden heritage. In this talk, she offers a preview of the first place they'll look: Peru — the home of Machu Picchu, the Nazca lines and other archaeological wonders waiting to be discovered.
Transcript:
In July of 1911, a 35-year-old Yale graduate and professor set out from his rainforest camp with his team. After climbing a steep hill and wiping the sweat from his brow, he described what he saw beneath him. He saw rising from the dense rainforest foliage this incredible interlocking maze of structures built of granite, beautifully put together.
What's amazing about this project is that it was the first funded by National Geographic, and it graced the front cover of its magazine in 1912. This professor used state-of-the-art photography equipment to record the site, forever changing the face of exploration.
The site was Machu Picchu, discovered and explored by Hiram Bingham. When he saw the site, he asked, "This is an impossible dream. What could it be?"
So today, 100 years later, I invite you all on an incredible journey with me, a 37-year-old Yale graduate and professor.
(Cheers)
We will do nothing less than use state-of-the-art technology to map an entire country. This is a dream started by Hiram Bingham, but we are expanding it to the world, making archaeological exploration more open, inclusive, and at a scale simply not previously possible.
This is why I am so excited to share with you all today that we will begin the 2016 TED Prize platform in Latin America, more specifically Peru.
(Applause)
Thank you.
We will be taking Hiram Bingham's impossible dream and turning it into an amazing future that we can all share in together.
So Peru doesn't just have Machu Picchu. It has absolutely stunning jewelry, like what you can see here. It has amazing Moche pottery of human figures. It has the Nazca Lines and amazing textiles. So as part of the TED Prize platform, we are going to partnering with some incredible organizations, first of all with DigitalGlobe, the world's largest provider of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. They're going to be helping us build out this amazing crowdsourcing platform they have. Maybe some of you used it with the MH370 crash and search for the airplane. Of course, they'll also be providing us with the satellite imagery. National Geographic will be helping us with education and of course exploration. As well, they'll be providing us with rich content for the platform, including some of the archival imagery like you saw at the beginning of this talk and some of their documentary footage. We've already begun to build and plan the platform, and I'm just so excited.
So here's the cool part. My team, headed up by Chase Childs, is already beginning to look at some of the satellite imagery. Of course, what you can see here is 0.3-meter data. This is site called Chan Chan in northern Peru. It dates to 850 AD. It's a really amazing city, but let's zoom in. This is the type and quality of data that you all will get to see. You can see individual structures, individual buildings. And we've already begun to find previously unknown sites. What we can say already is that as part of the platform, you will all help discover thousands of previously unknown sites, like this one here, and this potentially large one here. Unfortunately, we've also begun to uncover large-scale looting at sites, like what you see here. So many sites in Peru are threatened, but the great part is that all of this data is going to be shared with archaeologists on the front lines of protecting these sites.
So I was just in Peru, meeting with their Minister of Culture as well as UNESCO. We'll be collaborating closely with them. Just so you all know, the site is going to be in both English and Spanish, which is absolutely essential to make sure that people in Peru and across Latin America can participate. Our main project coprincipal investigator is the gentleman you see here, Dr. Luis Jaime Castillo, professor at Catholic University. As a respected Peruvian archaeologist and former vice-minister, Dr. Castillo will be helping us coordinate and share the data with archaeologists so they can explore these sites on the ground. He also runs this amazing drone mapping program, some of the images of which you can see behind me here and here. And this data will be incorporated into the platform, and also he'll be helping to image some of the new sites you help find.
Our on-the-ground partner who will be helping us with education, outreach, as well as site preservation components, is the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, led by Dr. Larry Coben. Some of you may not be aware that some of the world's poorest communities coexist with some of the world's most well-known archaeological sites. What SPI does is it helps to empower these communities, in particular women, with new economic approaches and business training. So it helps to teach them to create beautiful handicrafts which are then sold on to tourists. This empowers the women to treasure their cultural heritage and take ownership of it. I had the opportunity to spend some time with 24 of these women at a well-known archaeological site called Pachacamac, just outside Lima. These women were unbelievably inspiring, and what's great is that SPI will help us transform communities near some of the sites that you help to discover.
Peru is just the beginning. We're going to be expanding this platform to the world, but already I've gotten thousands of emails from people all across the world -- professors, educators, students, and other archaeologists -- who are so excited to help participate. In fact, they're already suggesting amazing places for us to help discover, including Atlantis. I don't know if we're going to be looking for Atlantis, but you never know.
So I'm just so excited to launch this platform. It's going to be launched formally by the end of the year. And I have to say, if what my team has already discovered in the past few weeks are any indication, what the world discovers is just going to be beyond imagination. Make sure to hold on to your alpacas.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
GYM/HEALTH/GralInt-Claves para arrancar o retomar el ejercicio
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Claves para arrancar o retomar el ejercicio
Fitness-Apto médico y empezar de a poco, entre los consejos.
Después de un buen tiempo de inactividad, es recomendable empezar caminando y no correr.
Domingo por la tarde, afuera nublado y ventoso. Adentro, mate con medialunas y un incontenible espíritu olímpico, control remoto mediante. Y mientras admirás a los atletas en las distintas disciplinas el gusanito te empieza a rodear la manzana y la idea comienza a germinar. Con los últimos coletazos invernales te das cuenta de que llegó el momento de volver a poner las cosas en su lugar.
¡Atención! Si bien el mundo está hecho de buenas intenciones, hay ítems que tenés que tener muy en cuenta antes de embarcarte en la aventura de volver al gimnasio, llamar a un personal trainer o convertirte en un entusiasta solitario.
Así como antes de irte de vacaciones te asegurás de que tu auto esté en perfectas condiciones y con la VTV al día, lo primero que tenés que hacer antes de arrancar con la rutina de actividad física es pasar por el consultorio, hacerte un chequeo y obtener el apto médico.
Si bien salir a correr al aire libre es genial, si hace mucho tiempo que no hacés nada, empezá caminando solo o sumate a algún grupo de caminadores para nutrirte de entusiasmo. Prestale atención al calzado que vas a usar, a la hidratación y a la superficie por la que lo vas a hacer .
Puede ser que vayas al gimnasio y te entusiasmes con todas las clases de la grilla. Independientemente de la edad que tengas, recordá que en las clases cada uno hace lo que puede y no va a competir con nadie. El desafío es con uno mismo, animándose a entrar al salón lleno de gente y terminar la clase con la mayor dignidad posible y un modesto listado de dolores. Escuchá a los instructores y prestá mucha atención a las pautas de seguridad para cada actividad.
Mi sugerencia es que empieces con las clases que más te diviertan para que te den ganas de volver. Comenzar por la sala de musculación también puede ser una buena idea. Los profes te van a armar un plan de entrenamiento a la altura de tus posibilidades, que se irá ajustando periódicamente en la medida de tu evolución y de tus objetivos.
Ahora, si definitivamente llegás hasta la puerta de tu casa y no hay manera de que arranques, siempre habrá un personal trainer dispuesto a tocarte el timbre, pasarte a buscar y no darte más excusas para que empieces a ocuparte de tu bienestar. Te armará un plan de entrenamiento a tu medida y se convertirá en tu socio incondicional para el logro de tus objetivos.
Hay que recordar que tenemos un solo cuerpo para toda la vida y que debemos ocuparnos de él para que llegue en las mejores condiciones al final del camino.
Sea por salud o estética, para competir o solo por diversión, entrenar solo se trata de sentirse mejor. Por eso gente: apto médico, botellita de agua y ¡acción!
*Alfredo Roldán es personal trainer , profesor de gimnasia para la tercera edad e instructor de fitness en Gimnasio Olimpo del Círculo Trovador, Gimnasio Gabriel Taborín y Gimnasio Starway.
Fuente: http://www.clarin.com/buena-vida/fitness/Claves-arrancar-retomar-ejercicio_0_1634236610.html
Claves para arrancar o retomar el ejercicio
Fitness-Apto médico y empezar de a poco, entre los consejos.
Después de un buen tiempo de inactividad, es recomendable empezar caminando y no correr.
Domingo por la tarde, afuera nublado y ventoso. Adentro, mate con medialunas y un incontenible espíritu olímpico, control remoto mediante. Y mientras admirás a los atletas en las distintas disciplinas el gusanito te empieza a rodear la manzana y la idea comienza a germinar. Con los últimos coletazos invernales te das cuenta de que llegó el momento de volver a poner las cosas en su lugar.
¡Atención! Si bien el mundo está hecho de buenas intenciones, hay ítems que tenés que tener muy en cuenta antes de embarcarte en la aventura de volver al gimnasio, llamar a un personal trainer o convertirte en un entusiasta solitario.
Así como antes de irte de vacaciones te asegurás de que tu auto esté en perfectas condiciones y con la VTV al día, lo primero que tenés que hacer antes de arrancar con la rutina de actividad física es pasar por el consultorio, hacerte un chequeo y obtener el apto médico.
Si bien salir a correr al aire libre es genial, si hace mucho tiempo que no hacés nada, empezá caminando solo o sumate a algún grupo de caminadores para nutrirte de entusiasmo. Prestale atención al calzado que vas a usar, a la hidratación y a la superficie por la que lo vas a hacer .
Puede ser que vayas al gimnasio y te entusiasmes con todas las clases de la grilla. Independientemente de la edad que tengas, recordá que en las clases cada uno hace lo que puede y no va a competir con nadie. El desafío es con uno mismo, animándose a entrar al salón lleno de gente y terminar la clase con la mayor dignidad posible y un modesto listado de dolores. Escuchá a los instructores y prestá mucha atención a las pautas de seguridad para cada actividad.
Mi sugerencia es que empieces con las clases que más te diviertan para que te den ganas de volver. Comenzar por la sala de musculación también puede ser una buena idea. Los profes te van a armar un plan de entrenamiento a la altura de tus posibilidades, que se irá ajustando periódicamente en la medida de tu evolución y de tus objetivos.
Ahora, si definitivamente llegás hasta la puerta de tu casa y no hay manera de que arranques, siempre habrá un personal trainer dispuesto a tocarte el timbre, pasarte a buscar y no darte más excusas para que empieces a ocuparte de tu bienestar. Te armará un plan de entrenamiento a tu medida y se convertirá en tu socio incondicional para el logro de tus objetivos.
Hay que recordar que tenemos un solo cuerpo para toda la vida y que debemos ocuparnos de él para que llegue en las mejores condiciones al final del camino.
Sea por salud o estética, para competir o solo por diversión, entrenar solo se trata de sentirse mejor. Por eso gente: apto médico, botellita de agua y ¡acción!
*Alfredo Roldán es personal trainer , profesor de gimnasia para la tercera edad e instructor de fitness en Gimnasio Olimpo del Círculo Trovador, Gimnasio Gabriel Taborín y Gimnasio Starway.
Fuente: http://www.clarin.com/buena-vida/fitness/Claves-arrancar-retomar-ejercicio_0_1634236610.html
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