The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Berugo interpreta "Piazzolex" en su álbum Solo de guitarra
El payador de Hiperhumor
En su programa Yo amo a Berugo
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
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.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
GralInt-NIK y sus reflexiones
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Pensemos, reflexionemos,analicemos,arriesguemos,mejoremos,cambiemos.Podemos hacerlo.CM
Fuente: La Nación Revista
Pensemos, reflexionemos,analicemos,arriesguemos,mejoremos,cambiemos.Podemos hacerlo.CM
Fuente: La Nación Revista
Saturday, November 7, 2015
MUS/GralInt-Creo en ti
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Creo En Ti - Reik - CON LETRA
Published on Aug 31, 2012
Para vos sólo puedo repetir lo que dice la canción y también que TE QUIERO.... Gracias por tu Amor. CM
Fuente: www.youtube.com
Creo En Ti - Reik - CON LETRA
Published on Aug 31, 2012
Para vos sólo puedo repetir lo que dice la canción y también que TE QUIERO.... Gracias por tu Amor. CM
Fuente: www.youtube.com
GralInt/HEALTH/STRESS-TED Talks-Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed September 2015 at TEDGlobal>London
Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed
You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded — the pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be."
Transcript:
A few years ago, I broke into my own house. I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees -- and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet -- it was very cold. And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys. In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them. So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight. I thought about calling a locksmith -- at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold. I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase.
So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it. This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even.
Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy.
(Laughter)
And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport.
(Laughter)
So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight. Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep.
(Laughter)
And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening? Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe. So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later. I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight.
(Laughter)
It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.
So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. I'll start with the obvious ones.
Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works. There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things -- where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things. But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around. So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. So in the home, designate a spot for your keys -- a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. For your passport, a particular drawer. For your reading glasses, a particular table. If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them.
What about travel? Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud. If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement.
Now these are some rather obvious things. Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol. Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place.
And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make. And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision.
And so I want to talk about that. And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition. But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making -- any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts.
So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, "I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high." Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke. And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, "You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin." And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them. And so you're thinking, "Yeah! Give me the statin."
But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less. It's for the number needed to treat. Now, what is this, the NNT? It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped. And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that? The number should be one. My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help. But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way. And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me. We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough. But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? How many people have to take it before one person is helped? 300. This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com. I ran through the numbers myself. 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented.
Now you're probably thinking, "Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol. Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway." But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, "Tell me about the side effects." Right? So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients. And they include terrible things -- debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress -- but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug." But wait a minute. Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly. So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot. 300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people. You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug.
Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not. I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor. Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent. You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not.
Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat. For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49. That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped. And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients. They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence. And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two.
So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot. And you also want to think about things like quality of life. Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end? These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones. You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking.
Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter. Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations.
I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. We all are going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place.
Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through. So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed September 2015 at TEDGlobal>London
Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed
You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded — the pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be."
Transcript:
A few years ago, I broke into my own house. I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees -- and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet -- it was very cold. And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys. In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them. So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight. I thought about calling a locksmith -- at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold. I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase.
So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it. This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even.
Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy.
(Laughter)
And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport.
(Laughter)
So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight. Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep.
(Laughter)
And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening? Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe. So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later. I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight.
(Laughter)
It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.
So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. I'll start with the obvious ones.
Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works. There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things -- where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things. But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around. So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. So in the home, designate a spot for your keys -- a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. For your passport, a particular drawer. For your reading glasses, a particular table. If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them.
What about travel? Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud. If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement.
Now these are some rather obvious things. Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol. Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place.
And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make. And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision.
And so I want to talk about that. And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition. But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making -- any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts.
So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, "I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high." Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke. And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, "You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin." And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them. And so you're thinking, "Yeah! Give me the statin."
But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less. It's for the number needed to treat. Now, what is this, the NNT? It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped. And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that? The number should be one. My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help. But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way. And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me. We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough. But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? How many people have to take it before one person is helped? 300. This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com. I ran through the numbers myself. 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented.
Now you're probably thinking, "Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol. Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway." But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, "Tell me about the side effects." Right? So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients. And they include terrible things -- debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress -- but now you're thinking, "Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug." But wait a minute. Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly. So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot. 300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people. You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug.
Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not. I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor. Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent. You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not.
Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat. For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49. That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped. And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients. They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence. And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two.
So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot. And you also want to think about things like quality of life. Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end? These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones. You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking.
Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter. Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations.
I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. We all are going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place.
Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through. So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
GralInt/SOC-TED Talks-Hilary Cottam: Social services are broken. How we can fix them
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed September 2015 at TEDGlobal>London
Hilary Cottam: Social services are broken. How we can fix them
When a family falls into crisis — and it sometimes happens, thanks to unemployment, drugs, bad relationships and bad luck — the social services system is supposed to step in and help them get back on track. As Hilary Cottam shows, in the UK a typical family in crisis can be eligible for services from more than 70 different agencies, but it's unlikely that any one of them can really make a difference. Cottam, a social entrepreneur herself, asks us to think about the ways we solve deep and complex social problems. How can we build supportive, enthusiastic relationships between those in need and those that provide help?
Transcript:
I want to tell you three stories about the power of relationships to solve the deep and complex social problems of this century.
You know, sometimes it seems like all these problems of poverty, inequality, ill health, unemployment, violence, addiction -- they're right there in one person's life. So I want to tell you about someone like this that I know. I'm going to call her Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening. The TV's on at full volume. One of her sons is fighting with one of her daughters. Another son, Ryan, is keeping up this constant stream of abuse from the kitchen, and the dogs are locked behind the bedroom door and straining. Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners, and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. And Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her.
But when I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives, 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them. They think nothing of calling social services to try and mediate one of the many arguments that broke out. And the family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. And the governments say that there are 100,000 families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. And they also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes. None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference.
This is a chart we made in the same city with another family like Ella's. This shows 30 years of intervention in that family's life. And just as with Ella, not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem. One of the policemen says to me, "Look, I just deliver the message and then I leave."
So, I've spent time living with families like Ella's in different parts of the world, because I want to know: what can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? I want to know what it feels like to live in Ella's family. I want to know what's going on and what we can do differently.
Well, the first thing I learned is that cost is a really slippery concept. Because when the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year. Because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart, exactly where they are.
And I also spent time with the frontline workers, and I learned that it is an impossible situation. So Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86 percent of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, more meetings with colleagues to discuss the forms, and maybe most shockingly, the 14 percent of the time he has to be with Ryan is spent getting data and information for the system. So he says to Ryan, "How often have you been smoking? Have you been drinking? When did you go to school?" And this kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan.
When we made this chart, the frontline workers, the professionals -- they stared at it absolutely amazed. It snaked around the walls of their offices. So many hours, so well meant, but ultimately so futile. And there was this moment of absolute breakdown, and then of clarity: we had to work in a different way.
So in a really brave step, the leaders of the city where Ella lives agreed that we could start by reversing Ryan's ratio. So everyone who came into contact with Ella or a family like Ella's would spend 80 percent of their time working with the families and only 20 percent servicing the system. And even more radically, the families would lead and they would decide who was in a best position to help them. So Ella and another mother were asked to be part of an interview panel, to choose from amongst the existing professionals who would work with them. And many, many people wanted to join us, because you don't go into this kind of work to manage a system, you go in because you can and you want to make a difference.
So Ella and the mother asked everybody who came through the door, "What will you do when my son starts kicking me?" And so the first person who comes in says, "Well, I'll look around for the nearest exit and I will back out very slowly, and if the noise is still going on, I'll call my supervisor." And the mothers go, "You're the system. Get out of here!" And then the next person who comes is a policeman, and he says, "Well, I'll tackle your son to the ground and then I'm not sure what I'll do." And the mothers say, "Thank you." So, they chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers, who said -- well, they weren't going to talk in jargon. They showed their human qualities and convinced the mothers that they would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them.
So these new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. And so one of the families went out for supper. They went to McDonald's and they sat down and they talked and they listened for the first time in a long time. Another family asked the team if they would help them do up their home. And one mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise.
And in a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers. And then some remarkable changes took place. Maybe it's not surprising that the journey for Ella has had some big steps backwards as well as forwards. But today, she's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, and the neighbors, who previously just hoped this family would be moved anywhere except next door to them, are fine. They've made some new friendships. And all the same people have been involved in this transformation -- same families, same workers. But the relationship between them has been supported to change.
So I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. And I've learned that this really has to change.
So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, a kind of authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change, to be brave like Ella and try something new. And, you know, it's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge, who was the architect of the first welfare state and the author of the Beveridge Report, had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system. And the impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. The Beveridge Report sold over 100,000 copies in the first weeks of publication alone. People queued in the rain on a November night to get hold of a copy, and it was read across the country, across the colonies, across Europe, across the United States of America, and it had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions -- they are global, and they've come to seem like common sense. They've become so ingrained in us, that actually we don't even see them anymore. And I think it's really important to say that in the 20th century, they were remarkably successful, these institutions. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges.
So let me tell you a second story. What do you think today is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking? It's loneliness. According to government statistics, one person over 60 -- one in three -- doesn't speak to or see another person in a week. One person in 10, that's 850,000 people, doesn't speak to anyone else in a month. And we're not the only people with this problem; this problem touches the whole of the Western world. And it's even more acute in countries like China, where a process of rapid urbanization, mass migration, has left older people alone in the villages. And so the services that Beveridge designed and exported -- they can't address this kind of problem. Loneliness is like a collective relational challenge, and it can't be addressed by a traditional bureaucratic response.
So some years ago, wanting to understand this problem, I started to work with a group of about 60 older people in South London, where I live. I went shopping, I played bingo, but mainly I was just observing and listening. I wanted to know what we could do differently. And if you ask them, people tell you they want two things. They want somebody to go up a ladder and change a light bulb, or to be there when they come out of hospital. They want on-demand, practical support. And they want to have fun. They want to go out, do interesting things with like-minded people, and make friends like we've all made friends at every stage of our lives. So we rented a phone line, hired a couple of handymen, and started a service we called "Circle." And Circle offers its local membership a toll-free 0 800 number that they can call on demand for any support. And people have called us for so many reasons. They've called because their pets are unwell, their DVD is broken, they've forgotten how to use their mobile phone, or maybe they are coming out of hospital and they want someone to be there. And Circle also offers a rich social calendar -- knitting, darts, museum tours, hot air ballooning -- you name it. But here's the interesting thing, the really deep change: over time, the friendships that have formed have begun to replace the practical offer.
So let me tell you about Belinda. Belinda's a Circle member, and she was going into hospital for a hip operation, so she called her local Circle to say they wouldn't see her for a bit. And Damon, who runs the local Circle, calls her back and says, "How can I help?" And Belinda says, "Oh no, I'm fine -- Jocelyn is doing the shopping, Tony's doing the gardening, Melissa and Joe are going to come in and cook and chat." So five Circle members had organized themselves to take care of Belinda. And Belinda's 80, although she says that she feels 25 inside, but she also says that she felt stuck and pretty down when she joined Circle. But the simple act of encouraging her to come along to that first event led to a process where natural friendships formed, friendships that today are replacing the need for expensive services. It's relationships that are making the difference.
So I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and center of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems -- they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology.
I've talked about the first two factors. It's technology that enables these approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people. So the technology we've used is really simple, it's made up of available things like databases, mobile phones. Circle has got this very simple system that underpins it, enables a small local team to support a membership of up to a thousand. And you can contrast this with a neighborhood organization of the 1970s, when this kind of scale just wasn't possible, neither was the quality or the longevity that the spine of technology can provide.
So it's relationships underpinned by technology that can turn the Beveridge models on their heads. The Beveridge models are all about institutions with finite resources, anonymously managing access. In my work at the front line, I've seen again and again how up to 80 percent of resource is spent keeping people out. So professionals have to administer these increasingly complex forms of administration that are basically about stopping people accessing the service or managing the queue. And Circle, like the relational services that we and others have designed, inverts this logic. What it says is, the more people, the more relationships, the stronger the solution. So I want to tell you my third and final story, which is about unemployment. In Britain, as in most places in the world, our welfare states were primarily designed to get people into work, to educate them for this, and to keep them healthy. But here, too, the systems are failing. And so the response has been to try and make these old systems even more efficient and transactional -- to speed up processing times, divide people into ever-smaller categories, try and target services at them more efficiently -- in other words, the very opposite of relational.
But guess how most people find work today? Through word of mouth. It turns out that in Britain today, most new jobs are not advertised. So it's friends that tell you about a job, it's friends that recommend you for a job, and it's a rich and diverse social network that helps you find work. Maybe some of you here this evening are thinking, "But I found my job through an advert," but if you think back, it was probably a friend that showed you the ad and then encouraged you to apply. But not surprisingly, people who perhaps most need this rich and diverse network are those who are most isolated from it.
So knowing this, and also knowing about the costs and failure of current systems, we designed something new with relationships at its heart. We designed a service that encourages people to meet up, people in and out of work, to work together in structured ways and try new opportunities. And, well, it's very hard to compare the results of these new systems with the old transactional models, but it looks like, with our first 1,000 members, we outperformed existing services by a factor of three, at a fraction of the cost. And here, too, we've used technology, but not to network people in the way that a social platform would do. We've used it to bring people face to face and connect them with each other, building real relationships and supporting people to find work.
At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. And in it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions. And human relationships were already withering. But unfortunately, this third report was much less read than Beveridge's earlier work.
But today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services, in an approach that I call "Relational Welfare." We need to leave behind these old, transactional, unsuitable, outdated models, and we need to adopt instead the shared collective relational responses that can support a family like Ella's, that can address an issue like loneliness, that can support people into work and up the skills curve in a modern labor market, that can also address challenges of education, of health care systems, and so many more of those problems that are pressing on our societies. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed September 2015 at TEDGlobal>London
Hilary Cottam: Social services are broken. How we can fix them
When a family falls into crisis — and it sometimes happens, thanks to unemployment, drugs, bad relationships and bad luck — the social services system is supposed to step in and help them get back on track. As Hilary Cottam shows, in the UK a typical family in crisis can be eligible for services from more than 70 different agencies, but it's unlikely that any one of them can really make a difference. Cottam, a social entrepreneur herself, asks us to think about the ways we solve deep and complex social problems. How can we build supportive, enthusiastic relationships between those in need and those that provide help?
Transcript:
I want to tell you three stories about the power of relationships to solve the deep and complex social problems of this century.
You know, sometimes it seems like all these problems of poverty, inequality, ill health, unemployment, violence, addiction -- they're right there in one person's life. So I want to tell you about someone like this that I know. I'm going to call her Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening. The TV's on at full volume. One of her sons is fighting with one of her daughters. Another son, Ryan, is keeping up this constant stream of abuse from the kitchen, and the dogs are locked behind the bedroom door and straining. Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners, and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. And Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her.
But when I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives, 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them. They think nothing of calling social services to try and mediate one of the many arguments that broke out. And the family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. And the governments say that there are 100,000 families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. And they also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes. None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference.
This is a chart we made in the same city with another family like Ella's. This shows 30 years of intervention in that family's life. And just as with Ella, not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem. One of the policemen says to me, "Look, I just deliver the message and then I leave."
So, I've spent time living with families like Ella's in different parts of the world, because I want to know: what can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? I want to know what it feels like to live in Ella's family. I want to know what's going on and what we can do differently.
Well, the first thing I learned is that cost is a really slippery concept. Because when the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year. Because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart, exactly where they are.
And I also spent time with the frontline workers, and I learned that it is an impossible situation. So Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86 percent of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, more meetings with colleagues to discuss the forms, and maybe most shockingly, the 14 percent of the time he has to be with Ryan is spent getting data and information for the system. So he says to Ryan, "How often have you been smoking? Have you been drinking? When did you go to school?" And this kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan.
When we made this chart, the frontline workers, the professionals -- they stared at it absolutely amazed. It snaked around the walls of their offices. So many hours, so well meant, but ultimately so futile. And there was this moment of absolute breakdown, and then of clarity: we had to work in a different way.
So in a really brave step, the leaders of the city where Ella lives agreed that we could start by reversing Ryan's ratio. So everyone who came into contact with Ella or a family like Ella's would spend 80 percent of their time working with the families and only 20 percent servicing the system. And even more radically, the families would lead and they would decide who was in a best position to help them. So Ella and another mother were asked to be part of an interview panel, to choose from amongst the existing professionals who would work with them. And many, many people wanted to join us, because you don't go into this kind of work to manage a system, you go in because you can and you want to make a difference.
So Ella and the mother asked everybody who came through the door, "What will you do when my son starts kicking me?" And so the first person who comes in says, "Well, I'll look around for the nearest exit and I will back out very slowly, and if the noise is still going on, I'll call my supervisor." And the mothers go, "You're the system. Get out of here!" And then the next person who comes is a policeman, and he says, "Well, I'll tackle your son to the ground and then I'm not sure what I'll do." And the mothers say, "Thank you." So, they chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers, who said -- well, they weren't going to talk in jargon. They showed their human qualities and convinced the mothers that they would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them.
So these new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. And so one of the families went out for supper. They went to McDonald's and they sat down and they talked and they listened for the first time in a long time. Another family asked the team if they would help them do up their home. And one mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise.
And in a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers. And then some remarkable changes took place. Maybe it's not surprising that the journey for Ella has had some big steps backwards as well as forwards. But today, she's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, and the neighbors, who previously just hoped this family would be moved anywhere except next door to them, are fine. They've made some new friendships. And all the same people have been involved in this transformation -- same families, same workers. But the relationship between them has been supported to change.
So I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. And I've learned that this really has to change.
So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, a kind of authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change, to be brave like Ella and try something new. And, you know, it's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge, who was the architect of the first welfare state and the author of the Beveridge Report, had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system. And the impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. The Beveridge Report sold over 100,000 copies in the first weeks of publication alone. People queued in the rain on a November night to get hold of a copy, and it was read across the country, across the colonies, across Europe, across the United States of America, and it had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions -- they are global, and they've come to seem like common sense. They've become so ingrained in us, that actually we don't even see them anymore. And I think it's really important to say that in the 20th century, they were remarkably successful, these institutions. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges.
So let me tell you a second story. What do you think today is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking? It's loneliness. According to government statistics, one person over 60 -- one in three -- doesn't speak to or see another person in a week. One person in 10, that's 850,000 people, doesn't speak to anyone else in a month. And we're not the only people with this problem; this problem touches the whole of the Western world. And it's even more acute in countries like China, where a process of rapid urbanization, mass migration, has left older people alone in the villages. And so the services that Beveridge designed and exported -- they can't address this kind of problem. Loneliness is like a collective relational challenge, and it can't be addressed by a traditional bureaucratic response.
So some years ago, wanting to understand this problem, I started to work with a group of about 60 older people in South London, where I live. I went shopping, I played bingo, but mainly I was just observing and listening. I wanted to know what we could do differently. And if you ask them, people tell you they want two things. They want somebody to go up a ladder and change a light bulb, or to be there when they come out of hospital. They want on-demand, practical support. And they want to have fun. They want to go out, do interesting things with like-minded people, and make friends like we've all made friends at every stage of our lives. So we rented a phone line, hired a couple of handymen, and started a service we called "Circle." And Circle offers its local membership a toll-free 0 800 number that they can call on demand for any support. And people have called us for so many reasons. They've called because their pets are unwell, their DVD is broken, they've forgotten how to use their mobile phone, or maybe they are coming out of hospital and they want someone to be there. And Circle also offers a rich social calendar -- knitting, darts, museum tours, hot air ballooning -- you name it. But here's the interesting thing, the really deep change: over time, the friendships that have formed have begun to replace the practical offer.
So let me tell you about Belinda. Belinda's a Circle member, and she was going into hospital for a hip operation, so she called her local Circle to say they wouldn't see her for a bit. And Damon, who runs the local Circle, calls her back and says, "How can I help?" And Belinda says, "Oh no, I'm fine -- Jocelyn is doing the shopping, Tony's doing the gardening, Melissa and Joe are going to come in and cook and chat." So five Circle members had organized themselves to take care of Belinda. And Belinda's 80, although she says that she feels 25 inside, but she also says that she felt stuck and pretty down when she joined Circle. But the simple act of encouraging her to come along to that first event led to a process where natural friendships formed, friendships that today are replacing the need for expensive services. It's relationships that are making the difference.
So I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and center of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems -- they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology.
I've talked about the first two factors. It's technology that enables these approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people. So the technology we've used is really simple, it's made up of available things like databases, mobile phones. Circle has got this very simple system that underpins it, enables a small local team to support a membership of up to a thousand. And you can contrast this with a neighborhood organization of the 1970s, when this kind of scale just wasn't possible, neither was the quality or the longevity that the spine of technology can provide.
So it's relationships underpinned by technology that can turn the Beveridge models on their heads. The Beveridge models are all about institutions with finite resources, anonymously managing access. In my work at the front line, I've seen again and again how up to 80 percent of resource is spent keeping people out. So professionals have to administer these increasingly complex forms of administration that are basically about stopping people accessing the service or managing the queue. And Circle, like the relational services that we and others have designed, inverts this logic. What it says is, the more people, the more relationships, the stronger the solution. So I want to tell you my third and final story, which is about unemployment. In Britain, as in most places in the world, our welfare states were primarily designed to get people into work, to educate them for this, and to keep them healthy. But here, too, the systems are failing. And so the response has been to try and make these old systems even more efficient and transactional -- to speed up processing times, divide people into ever-smaller categories, try and target services at them more efficiently -- in other words, the very opposite of relational.
But guess how most people find work today? Through word of mouth. It turns out that in Britain today, most new jobs are not advertised. So it's friends that tell you about a job, it's friends that recommend you for a job, and it's a rich and diverse social network that helps you find work. Maybe some of you here this evening are thinking, "But I found my job through an advert," but if you think back, it was probably a friend that showed you the ad and then encouraged you to apply. But not surprisingly, people who perhaps most need this rich and diverse network are those who are most isolated from it.
So knowing this, and also knowing about the costs and failure of current systems, we designed something new with relationships at its heart. We designed a service that encourages people to meet up, people in and out of work, to work together in structured ways and try new opportunities. And, well, it's very hard to compare the results of these new systems with the old transactional models, but it looks like, with our first 1,000 members, we outperformed existing services by a factor of three, at a fraction of the cost. And here, too, we've used technology, but not to network people in the way that a social platform would do. We've used it to bring people face to face and connect them with each other, building real relationships and supporting people to find work.
At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. And in it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions. And human relationships were already withering. But unfortunately, this third report was much less read than Beveridge's earlier work.
But today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services, in an approach that I call "Relational Welfare." We need to leave behind these old, transactional, unsuitable, outdated models, and we need to adopt instead the shared collective relational responses that can support a family like Ella's, that can address an issue like loneliness, that can support people into work and up the skills curve in a modern labor market, that can also address challenges of education, of health care systems, and so many more of those problems that are pressing on our societies. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt/ART-TED Talks-Christine Sun Kim: The enchanting music of sign language
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed August 2015 at TED Fellows Retreat 2015
Christine Sun Kim: The enchanting music of sign language
Artist and TED Fellow Christine Sun Kim was born deaf, and she was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of her life, that it was a hearing person's thing. Through her art, she discovered similarities between American Sign Language and music, and she realized that sound doesn't have to be known solely through the ears — it can be felt, seen and experienced as an idea. In this endearing talk, she invites us to open our eyes and ears and participate in the rich treasure of visual language.
Transcript:
Interpreter: Piano, "p," is my favorite musical symbol. It means to play softly. If you're playing a musical instrument and you notice a "p" in the score, you need to play softer. Two p's -- even softer. Four p's -- extremely soft. This is my drawing of a p-tree, which demonstrates no matter how many thousands upon thousands of p's there may be, you'll never reach complete silence. That's my current definition of silence: a very obscure sound.
I'd like to share a little bit about the history of American Sign Language, ASL, plus a bit of my own background. French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s, and as time went by, mixed with local signs, it evolved into the language we know today as ASL. So it has a history of about 200 years.
I was born deaf, and I was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of my life. And I believed it to be true. Yet, I realize now that that wasn't the case at all. Sound was very much a part of my life, really, on my mind every day. As a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it's as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them.
So how is it that I understand sound? Well, I watch how people behave and respond to sound. You people are like my loudspeakers, and amplify sound. I learn and mirror that behavior. At the same time, I've learned that I create sound, and I've seen how people respond to me. Thus I've learned, for example ... "Don't slam the door!" "Don't make too much noise when you're eating from the potato-chip bag!"
(Laughter)
"Don't burp, and when you're eating, make sure you don't scrape your utensils on the plate." All of these things I term "sound etiquette." Maybe I think about sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does. I'm hyper-vigilant around sound. And I'm always waiting in eager nervous anticipation around sound, about what's to come next.
Hence, this drawing. TBD, to be decided. TBC, to be continued. TBA, to be announced. And you notice the staff -- there are no notes contained in the lines. That's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears.
03:39
In Deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound. This is a sign for "staff" in ASL. A typical staff contains five lines. Yet for me, signing it with my thumb sticking up like that doesn't feel natural. That's why you'll notice in my drawings, I stick to four lines on paper.
04:04
In the year 2008, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there. Prior to this time, I had been working as a painter. During this summer, I visited different museums and gallery spaces, and as I went from one place to the next, I noticed there was no visual art there. At that time, sound was trending, and this struck me ... there was no visual art, everything was auditory.
Now sound has come into my art territory. Is it going to further distance me from art? I realized that doesn't have to be the case at all. I actually know sound. I know it so well that it doesn't have to be something just experienced through the ears. It could be felt tactually, or experienced as a visual, or even as an idea.
So I decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into my art practice. And everything that I had been taught regarding sound, I decided to do away with and unlearn. I started creating a new body of work. And when I presented this to the art community, I was blown away with the amount of support and attention I received. I realized: sound is like money, power, control -- social currency. In the back of my mind, I've always felt that sound was your thing, a hearing person's thing. And sound is so powerful that it could either disempower me and my artwork, or it could empower me. I chose to be empowered.
There's a massive culture around spoken language. And just because I don't use my literal voice to communicate, in society's eyes it's as if I don't have a voice at all. So I need to work with individuals who can support me as an equal and become my voice. And that way, I'm able to maintain relevancy in society today.
So at school, at work and institutions, I work with many different ASL interpreters. And their voice becomes my voice and identity. They help me to be heard. And their voices hold value and currency. Ironically, by borrowing out their voices, I'm able to maintain a temporary form of currency, kind of like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate. If I didn't continue this practice, I feel that I could just fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency.
So with sound as my new art medium, I delved into the world of music. And I was surprised to see the similarities between music and ASL. For example, a musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper. And the same holds true for a concept in ASL. They're both highly spatial and highly inflected -- meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.
I'd like to share with you a piano metaphor, to have you have a better understanding of how ASL works. So, envision a piano. ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano -- such as facial expression, body movement, speed, hand shape and so on, as you play the piano -- English is a linear language, as if one key is being pressed at a time. However, ASL is more like a chord -- all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL. If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning. The same applies to music in regards to pitch, tone and volume. In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical parameters, you can express different ideas.
For example, take the sign TO-LOOK-AT. This is the sign TO-LOOK-AT. I'm looking at you. Staring at you.
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
Oh -- busted.
(Laughter)
Uh-oh. What are you looking at? Aw, stop.
(Laughter)
I then started thinking, "What if I was to look at ASL through a musical lens?" If I was to create a sign and repeat it over and over, it could become like a piece of visual music. For example, this is the sign for "day," as the sun rises and sets. This is "all day." If I was to repeat it and slow it down, visually it looks like a piece of music. All ... day. I feel the same holds true for "all night." "All night." This is ALL-NIGHT, represented in this drawing. And this led me to thinking about three different kinds of nights: "last night," "overnight," (Sings) "all night long."
(Laughter)
I feel like the third one has a lot more musicality than the other two.
(Laughter)
This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time. For example, 1H is one hand, 2H is two hand, present tense happens closest and in front of the body, future is in front of the body and the past is to your back. So, the first example is "a long time ago." Then "past," "used to" and the last one, which is my favorite, with the very romantic and dramatic notion to it, "once upon a time."
(Laughter)
"Common time" is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure. Yet when I see the word "common time," what automatically comes to mind for me is "at the same time." So notice RH: right hand, LH: left hand. We have the staff across the head and the chest.
[Head: RH, Flash claw]
[Common time]
[Chest: LH, Flash claw]
I'm now going to demonstrate a hand shape called the "flash claw." Can you please follow along with me? Everybody, hands up. Now we're going to do it in both the head and the chest, kind of like "common time" or at the same time. Yes, got it. That means "to fall in love" in International [Sign].
(Laughter)
International [Sign], as a note, is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world.
The second one I'd like to demonstrate is this -- please follow along with me again. And now this. This is "colonization" in ASL.
(Laughter)
Now the third -- please follow along again. And again. This is "enlightenment" in ASL. So let's do all three together. "Fall in love," "colonization" and "enlightenment." Good job, everyone.
(Laughter)
Notice how all three signs are very similar, they all happen at the head and the chest, but they convey quite different meanings.
So it's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is. However, in this day and age, we live in a very audio-centric world. And just because ASL has no sound to it, it automatically holds no social currency. We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency -- without sound. And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society. And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music.
ASL is such a rich treasure that I'd like you to have the same experience. And I'd like to invite you to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language. And you never know, you might just fall in love with us.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Denise Kahler-Braaten: Hey, that's me.
(Applause)
Filmed August 2015 at TED Fellows Retreat 2015
Christine Sun Kim: The enchanting music of sign language
Artist and TED Fellow Christine Sun Kim was born deaf, and she was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of her life, that it was a hearing person's thing. Through her art, she discovered similarities between American Sign Language and music, and she realized that sound doesn't have to be known solely through the ears — it can be felt, seen and experienced as an idea. In this endearing talk, she invites us to open our eyes and ears and participate in the rich treasure of visual language.
Transcript:
Interpreter: Piano, "p," is my favorite musical symbol. It means to play softly. If you're playing a musical instrument and you notice a "p" in the score, you need to play softer. Two p's -- even softer. Four p's -- extremely soft. This is my drawing of a p-tree, which demonstrates no matter how many thousands upon thousands of p's there may be, you'll never reach complete silence. That's my current definition of silence: a very obscure sound.
I'd like to share a little bit about the history of American Sign Language, ASL, plus a bit of my own background. French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s, and as time went by, mixed with local signs, it evolved into the language we know today as ASL. So it has a history of about 200 years.
I was born deaf, and I was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of my life. And I believed it to be true. Yet, I realize now that that wasn't the case at all. Sound was very much a part of my life, really, on my mind every day. As a Deaf person living in a world of sound, it's as if I was living in a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms without ever questioning them.
So how is it that I understand sound? Well, I watch how people behave and respond to sound. You people are like my loudspeakers, and amplify sound. I learn and mirror that behavior. At the same time, I've learned that I create sound, and I've seen how people respond to me. Thus I've learned, for example ... "Don't slam the door!" "Don't make too much noise when you're eating from the potato-chip bag!"
(Laughter)
"Don't burp, and when you're eating, make sure you don't scrape your utensils on the plate." All of these things I term "sound etiquette." Maybe I think about sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does. I'm hyper-vigilant around sound. And I'm always waiting in eager nervous anticipation around sound, about what's to come next.
Hence, this drawing. TBD, to be decided. TBC, to be continued. TBA, to be announced. And you notice the staff -- there are no notes contained in the lines. That's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears.
03:39
In Deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound. This is a sign for "staff" in ASL. A typical staff contains five lines. Yet for me, signing it with my thumb sticking up like that doesn't feel natural. That's why you'll notice in my drawings, I stick to four lines on paper.
04:04
In the year 2008, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there. Prior to this time, I had been working as a painter. During this summer, I visited different museums and gallery spaces, and as I went from one place to the next, I noticed there was no visual art there. At that time, sound was trending, and this struck me ... there was no visual art, everything was auditory.
Now sound has come into my art territory. Is it going to further distance me from art? I realized that doesn't have to be the case at all. I actually know sound. I know it so well that it doesn't have to be something just experienced through the ears. It could be felt tactually, or experienced as a visual, or even as an idea.
So I decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into my art practice. And everything that I had been taught regarding sound, I decided to do away with and unlearn. I started creating a new body of work. And when I presented this to the art community, I was blown away with the amount of support and attention I received. I realized: sound is like money, power, control -- social currency. In the back of my mind, I've always felt that sound was your thing, a hearing person's thing. And sound is so powerful that it could either disempower me and my artwork, or it could empower me. I chose to be empowered.
There's a massive culture around spoken language. And just because I don't use my literal voice to communicate, in society's eyes it's as if I don't have a voice at all. So I need to work with individuals who can support me as an equal and become my voice. And that way, I'm able to maintain relevancy in society today.
So at school, at work and institutions, I work with many different ASL interpreters. And their voice becomes my voice and identity. They help me to be heard. And their voices hold value and currency. Ironically, by borrowing out their voices, I'm able to maintain a temporary form of currency, kind of like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate. If I didn't continue this practice, I feel that I could just fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency.
So with sound as my new art medium, I delved into the world of music. And I was surprised to see the similarities between music and ASL. For example, a musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper. And the same holds true for a concept in ASL. They're both highly spatial and highly inflected -- meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.
I'd like to share with you a piano metaphor, to have you have a better understanding of how ASL works. So, envision a piano. ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano -- such as facial expression, body movement, speed, hand shape and so on, as you play the piano -- English is a linear language, as if one key is being pressed at a time. However, ASL is more like a chord -- all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL. If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning. The same applies to music in regards to pitch, tone and volume. In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical parameters, you can express different ideas.
For example, take the sign TO-LOOK-AT. This is the sign TO-LOOK-AT. I'm looking at you. Staring at you.
(Laughter)
(Laughter)
Oh -- busted.
(Laughter)
Uh-oh. What are you looking at? Aw, stop.
(Laughter)
I then started thinking, "What if I was to look at ASL through a musical lens?" If I was to create a sign and repeat it over and over, it could become like a piece of visual music. For example, this is the sign for "day," as the sun rises and sets. This is "all day." If I was to repeat it and slow it down, visually it looks like a piece of music. All ... day. I feel the same holds true for "all night." "All night." This is ALL-NIGHT, represented in this drawing. And this led me to thinking about three different kinds of nights: "last night," "overnight," (Sings) "all night long."
(Laughter)
I feel like the third one has a lot more musicality than the other two.
(Laughter)
This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time. For example, 1H is one hand, 2H is two hand, present tense happens closest and in front of the body, future is in front of the body and the past is to your back. So, the first example is "a long time ago." Then "past," "used to" and the last one, which is my favorite, with the very romantic and dramatic notion to it, "once upon a time."
(Laughter)
"Common time" is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure. Yet when I see the word "common time," what automatically comes to mind for me is "at the same time." So notice RH: right hand, LH: left hand. We have the staff across the head and the chest.
[Head: RH, Flash claw]
[Common time]
[Chest: LH, Flash claw]
I'm now going to demonstrate a hand shape called the "flash claw." Can you please follow along with me? Everybody, hands up. Now we're going to do it in both the head and the chest, kind of like "common time" or at the same time. Yes, got it. That means "to fall in love" in International [Sign].
(Laughter)
International [Sign], as a note, is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world.
The second one I'd like to demonstrate is this -- please follow along with me again. And now this. This is "colonization" in ASL.
(Laughter)
Now the third -- please follow along again. And again. This is "enlightenment" in ASL. So let's do all three together. "Fall in love," "colonization" and "enlightenment." Good job, everyone.
(Laughter)
Notice how all three signs are very similar, they all happen at the head and the chest, but they convey quite different meanings.
So it's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is. However, in this day and age, we live in a very audio-centric world. And just because ASL has no sound to it, it automatically holds no social currency. We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency -- without sound. And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society. And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music.
ASL is such a rich treasure that I'd like you to have the same experience. And I'd like to invite you to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language. And you never know, you might just fall in love with us.
(Applause)
Thank you.
Denise Kahler-Braaten: Hey, that's me.
(Applause)
BRAIN/GralInt-El cerebro y la evolución
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
El cerebro y la evolución
Es posible crear neuronas y aprender durante toda nuestra vida
Estanislao Bachrach
PARA LA NACION
DOMINGO 01 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2015
El cerebro es clave para nuestro desarrollo como especie. Fue creciendo más y más mientras luchábamos para adaptarnos a los cambios rápidos del clima y el medio ambiente en la sabana africana 100.000 años atrás. Por ejemplo, una mutación genética ocurrida al azar nos llevó a caminar en dos piernas en lugar de cuatro patas. Este método eficiente de movernos libremente liberó mucha energía que permitió al cerebro crecer y devenir muy poderoso. Gracias a esto en algún momento nos dio una habilidad única: la representación simbólica. Sólo nosotros podemos ver una figura y comprender que representa a un animal, un lugar o una letra del alfabeto. Esto a su vez nos permitió comunicar mejor, entendernos entre nosotros trabajando juntos y desarrollar el arte, la cultura y la tecnología. Esta última nos permite saber cada vez más sobre nuestro órgano más preciado y así poder explicar de forma sencilla algunas características de nuestro día a día cerebral para ser más eficientes y vivir con mayor bienestar.
Tu cerebro fue construido mientras caminábamos unos 20 kilómetros diarios, o sea que si querés mejorar tus habilidades de pensamiento, ¡movete! Ejercitar tu cuerpo lleva más glucosa, es decir, energía y oxígeno al cerebro, limpiándolo de compuestos tóxicos derivados de las propias neuronas. También estimula ciertas proteínas que mantienen a las neuronas mejor conectadas. Algunos estudios muestran que realizar ejercicio aeróbico dos veces por semana reduce a la mitad el riesgo de demencia.
Lo que aprendés y hacés en tu vida cambia la estructura de tu cerebro, lo recablea. Además, varias de sus regiones se desarrollan a diferentes velocidades en distintas personas. No existen dos cerebros que guarden la misma información de la misma forma y en el mismo lugar. ¡Por eso, no te compares!
Tu cerebro está en constante tensión entre células y sustancias químicas que tratan de hacerte dormir y otras que quieren que estés despierto. Mientras dormís las neuronas muestran una actividad rítmica importante, probablemente reviviendo lo que aprendiste en el día. La gente varía en cuánto y cuándo quiere dormir, pero la siesta parece ser una necesidad universal. La falta de sueño empeora la atención, la memoria corta, tu humor y todas tus funciones ejecutivas. ¡Dormí lo que tu cuerpo te pida!
El sistema de defensa de tu cuerpo, la liberación de cortisol y adrenalina, fue desarrollado para responder de forma inmediata a serios peligros como tigres dientes de sable. El estrés crónico desregula este sistema haciendo que la adrenalina genere cicatrices en los vasos sanguíneos, que pueden causar ACV y ataques al corazón. El cortisol daña las células del hipocampo y disminuye la habilidad para aprender y recordar. El peor estrés es cuando tenés la sensación de no tener control sobre un problema, te sentís desesperanzado. Sé consciente de tus niveles de estrés y aprendé a regularlo. Puede salvarte la vida.
Absorbemos información a través de los sentidos, traduciéndola en señales eléctricas que se dispersan por diferentes áreas del cerebro para luego reconstruirse y eventualmente percibir ese evento como un todo. Parece que el cerebro se ayuda de sus experiencias pasadas para combinar esas señales, es decir que dos personas pueden percibir el mismo evento de forma muy diferente. Nuestros sentidos evolucionaron para trabajar juntos, lo que significa que aprendemos mejor si estimulamos varios sentidos a la vez. Te desafío a que diseñes de forma multisensorial la próxima vez que quieras explicar algo a alguien. Los bebes son los modelos perfectos de cómo aprendemos. No de forma pasiva y reaccionando al ambiente, sino testeando activamente a través de la observación, hipótesis, experimentos y conclusiones. Muchas partes de nuestro cerebro adulto son tan maleables como las de los chicos, por lo que podemos crear neuronas y aprender durante toda nuestra vida. Desafiate a seguir aprendiendo cosas durante toda tu vida. Es la mejor forma de mantener un cerebro joven y sano.
Fuente: La Nación Revista
El cerebro y la evolución
Es posible crear neuronas y aprender durante toda nuestra vida
Estanislao Bachrach
PARA LA NACION
DOMINGO 01 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2015
El cerebro es clave para nuestro desarrollo como especie. Fue creciendo más y más mientras luchábamos para adaptarnos a los cambios rápidos del clima y el medio ambiente en la sabana africana 100.000 años atrás. Por ejemplo, una mutación genética ocurrida al azar nos llevó a caminar en dos piernas en lugar de cuatro patas. Este método eficiente de movernos libremente liberó mucha energía que permitió al cerebro crecer y devenir muy poderoso. Gracias a esto en algún momento nos dio una habilidad única: la representación simbólica. Sólo nosotros podemos ver una figura y comprender que representa a un animal, un lugar o una letra del alfabeto. Esto a su vez nos permitió comunicar mejor, entendernos entre nosotros trabajando juntos y desarrollar el arte, la cultura y la tecnología. Esta última nos permite saber cada vez más sobre nuestro órgano más preciado y así poder explicar de forma sencilla algunas características de nuestro día a día cerebral para ser más eficientes y vivir con mayor bienestar.
Tu cerebro fue construido mientras caminábamos unos 20 kilómetros diarios, o sea que si querés mejorar tus habilidades de pensamiento, ¡movete! Ejercitar tu cuerpo lleva más glucosa, es decir, energía y oxígeno al cerebro, limpiándolo de compuestos tóxicos derivados de las propias neuronas. También estimula ciertas proteínas que mantienen a las neuronas mejor conectadas. Algunos estudios muestran que realizar ejercicio aeróbico dos veces por semana reduce a la mitad el riesgo de demencia.
Lo que aprendés y hacés en tu vida cambia la estructura de tu cerebro, lo recablea. Además, varias de sus regiones se desarrollan a diferentes velocidades en distintas personas. No existen dos cerebros que guarden la misma información de la misma forma y en el mismo lugar. ¡Por eso, no te compares!
Tu cerebro está en constante tensión entre células y sustancias químicas que tratan de hacerte dormir y otras que quieren que estés despierto. Mientras dormís las neuronas muestran una actividad rítmica importante, probablemente reviviendo lo que aprendiste en el día. La gente varía en cuánto y cuándo quiere dormir, pero la siesta parece ser una necesidad universal. La falta de sueño empeora la atención, la memoria corta, tu humor y todas tus funciones ejecutivas. ¡Dormí lo que tu cuerpo te pida!
El sistema de defensa de tu cuerpo, la liberación de cortisol y adrenalina, fue desarrollado para responder de forma inmediata a serios peligros como tigres dientes de sable. El estrés crónico desregula este sistema haciendo que la adrenalina genere cicatrices en los vasos sanguíneos, que pueden causar ACV y ataques al corazón. El cortisol daña las células del hipocampo y disminuye la habilidad para aprender y recordar. El peor estrés es cuando tenés la sensación de no tener control sobre un problema, te sentís desesperanzado. Sé consciente de tus niveles de estrés y aprendé a regularlo. Puede salvarte la vida.
Absorbemos información a través de los sentidos, traduciéndola en señales eléctricas que se dispersan por diferentes áreas del cerebro para luego reconstruirse y eventualmente percibir ese evento como un todo. Parece que el cerebro se ayuda de sus experiencias pasadas para combinar esas señales, es decir que dos personas pueden percibir el mismo evento de forma muy diferente. Nuestros sentidos evolucionaron para trabajar juntos, lo que significa que aprendemos mejor si estimulamos varios sentidos a la vez. Te desafío a que diseñes de forma multisensorial la próxima vez que quieras explicar algo a alguien. Los bebes son los modelos perfectos de cómo aprendemos. No de forma pasiva y reaccionando al ambiente, sino testeando activamente a través de la observación, hipótesis, experimentos y conclusiones. Muchas partes de nuestro cerebro adulto son tan maleables como las de los chicos, por lo que podemos crear neuronas y aprender durante toda nuestra vida. Desafiate a seguir aprendiendo cosas durante toda tu vida. Es la mejor forma de mantener un cerebro joven y sano.
Fuente: La Nación Revista
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)