The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Catherine Crump:
The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you
TEDGlobal2014-Filmed Oct 2014
A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals, but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows, the data they collect in aggregate could have disastrous consequences for everyone the world over.
Transcript:
The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment.
NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible.
Location information can be very sensitive. If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church or if you don't go to church. And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact.
This information used to be private. Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information.
One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for -- they're everywhere. Mounted on roads or on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing.
But more than that, increasingly, local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. Did you know this was happening?
When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date, time and location, the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with. The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. And if you drive a car in the United States, I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life.
Mike hasn't done anything wrong. Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it. At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal the existence of this database. Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending.
The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees.
License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods.
Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.
The question is, what should we do about this? I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism.
Fortunately, there are steps we can take. Local police departments can be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. 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, December 13, 2014
URB/SOC/GralInt-TED Talks-Dave Troy: Social maps that reveals a city´s intersections-and separations
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Dave Troy:
Social maps that reveals a city´s intersections-and separations
TEDGlobal2014-Filmed Oct 2014
Every city has its neighborhoods, cliques and clubs, the hidden lines that join and divide people in the same town. What can we learn about cities by looking at what people share online? Starting with his own home town of Baltimore, Dave Troy has been visualizing what the tweets of city dwellers reveal about who lives there, who they talk to — and who they don’t.
Transcript:
When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network.
Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. Under Armour, you may have heard of, is a Baltimore company, and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network.
Let's take a look at San Francisco. You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. And so it leads to things like this. ["Evict Twitter"] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this.
Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. It's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. How cool is that? And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city.
So we have all this data. It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. So what can we do with it? Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit.
The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here -- only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think about diversity in a new way.
And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so.
So what is a city? I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Dave Troy:
Social maps that reveals a city´s intersections-and separations
TEDGlobal2014-Filmed Oct 2014
Every city has its neighborhoods, cliques and clubs, the hidden lines that join and divide people in the same town. What can we learn about cities by looking at what people share online? Starting with his own home town of Baltimore, Dave Troy has been visualizing what the tweets of city dwellers reveal about who lives there, who they talk to — and who they don’t.
Transcript:
When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network.
Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. Under Armour, you may have heard of, is a Baltimore company, and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network.
Let's take a look at San Francisco. You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. And so it leads to things like this. ["Evict Twitter"] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this.
Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. It's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. How cool is that? And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city.
So we have all this data. It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. So what can we do with it? Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit.
The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here -- only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think about diversity in a new way.
And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so.
So what is a city? I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have.
Thank you.
(Applause)
EDUC/GralInt-TED Talks-Bill Gates: Teachers need real feedback
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
"Making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams … wouldn't just make us a more successful country — it would also make us a more fair and just one."
Bill Gates:
Teachers need real feedback
TED Talks Education-Filmed May 2013
Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: “satisfactory.” And with no feedback, no coaching, there’s just no way to improve. Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback — and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom.
Transcript:
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter)
My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "satisfactory," I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them. It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve.
Let's start by asking who's doing well. Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills.
Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues.
You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best.
What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?"
And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we're asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action.
(Music)
(Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let's talk about what's going on today. To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays.
My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa.
Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about -
I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it.
Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers.
I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I'm able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection.
All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay?
Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don't write things down, I don't remember them.
So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom.
I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't.
I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy.
Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I'll see you later.
[Every classroom could look like that]
(Applause)
Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.
So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate.
Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries.
The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it.
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too.
I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
"Making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams … wouldn't just make us a more successful country — it would also make us a more fair and just one."
Bill Gates:
Teachers need real feedback
TED Talks Education-Filmed May 2013
Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: “satisfactory.” And with no feedback, no coaching, there’s just no way to improve. Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback — and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom.
Transcript:
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter)
My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "satisfactory," I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them. It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve.
Let's start by asking who's doing well. Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills.
Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues.
You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best.
What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?"
And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we're asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action.
(Music)
(Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let's talk about what's going on today. To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays.
My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa.
Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about -
I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it.
Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers.
I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I'm able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection.
All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay?
Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don't write things down, I don't remember them.
So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom.
I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't.
I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy.
Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I'll see you later.
[Every classroom could look like that]
(Applause)
Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions.
So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate.
Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries.
The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it.
But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too.
I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Monday, December 8, 2014
HR/GralInt-Agua: un derecho humano al que no todos acceden
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Según el Indec, las tres jurisdicciones provinciales donde más aumentó el número de hogares sin acceso a agua corriente son la Capital Federal, Tierra del Fuego y Santa Cruz. Foto: Archivo
Agua: un derecho humano al que no todos acceden
Escasea o está mal distribuida, es causa de reclamos judiciales y donde hay suele tener problemas de calidad; una carencia que es sinónimo de la pobreza rural y urbana
Por Aigul Safiullina | LA NACION
El 16% de los argentinos no tiene acceso a agua potable. Son 6,4 millones de personas. Eso si se tienen en cuenta las estadísticas oficiales. Si, en cambio, se miran los datos de organizaciones no gubernamentales que trabajan en el tema, la falta de agua puede llegar al 21% de los habitantes. Entre los dos últimos censos, los hogares afectados por este faltante pasaron de 1.545.668 en 2001 a 1.956.089 en 2010. Y aunque las cataratas del Iguazú estén colmadas, es Misiones la provincia en la que mayor cantidad de personas carecen de agua corriente, faltante que afecta al 28% de los hogares. Le siguen la provincia de Buenos Aires (25%) y Santiago del Estero (25%).
La falta de agua está asociada a la pobreza, sea urbana o rural. En las villas de emergencia, la cantidad de familias sin agua llega al 55,8 por ciento.Sin embargo, es peor en el ámbito rural. En Santiago del Estero, cuatro de cada diez hogares (41%) carecen de conexión de agua corriente y deben buscarla fuera del hogar. Lo mismo pasa en el 35% de los hogares de Formosa y de Chaco. Según la Fundación Plurales, hay casos en los que se debe caminar entre cuatro y seis horas para conseguir el recurso.
El agua falta porque faltan obras. O porque, por culpa del cambio climático, dejó de llover (y entonces surge una nueva demanda de obras). En Socavones, localidad de la provincia de Córdoba, hace siete años que no llueve. El lugar tiene una extensión de 40km cuadrados y una población de 100 habitantes. La sequía mató a casi todos los animales, ni hablar de las huertas, fuente principal de alimentación de los habitantes.
En otros lugares, donde el servicio (a cargo de la empresa estatizada Aysa) está subsidiado, el agua se derrocha. En la Capital Federal, el consumo diario por persona asciende a más de 560 litros, mientras en el promedio del país es de 180 litros y la recomendación de la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) es de 50 litros mínimos para el consumo humano.
Para juntar 50 litros, en el paraje patagónico Fita Huao, a 150 km de Bariloche, hay que desplazarse varios kilómetros y esperar por lo menos una hora. Allí viven siete familias que utilizan agua de pozo. Pero una extensa sequía y las cenizas volcánicas de 2011 dejaron a los habitantes sin agua. "La fuente más cercana queda a 5 km y hay que ir al menos dos veces por día, porque sólo se pueden llevar 25 litros en un viaje a caballo", cuenta a LA NACION Rubén Curricoy, cuya familia vive en la zona. Estos 50 litros diarios se distribuyen entre todos los miembros de la familia, los animales y las huertas, que hay que regar tres o cuatro veces por día.
Según el Indec, las tres jurisdicciones provinciales donde más aumentó el número de hogares sin acceso a agua corriente son la Capital Federal (462% más casos en diez años), Tierra del Fuego (283%) y Santa Cruz (144%). En el mundo, las cifras tampoco son alentadoras: 748.000.000 de personas aún viven sin acceso a agua potable, aunque son 2.300.000 menos en comparación con 1990, según detalla el último reporte de la OMS sobre agua y saneamiento realizado en 86 países de bajos y medianos ingresos.
Entre los dos últimos censos, los hogares afectados por la falta de agua pasaron de 1.545.668 en 2001 a 1.956.089 en 2010
Y aunque los países más pobres invierten más dinero proporcionalmente en políticas de agua y saneamiento que los países ricos, el 66% dice que el financiamiento no es suficiente para lograr las metas del acceso al agua potable. Uno de cada cuatro de esos países no reconoce el acceso al agua potable como derecho humano.
En la Argentina, la falta de agua mantiene abiertas al menos dos "guerras" interprovinciales: la de Mendoza y La Pampa por el río Atuel, y la de Santa Fe y Santiago del Estero, por el Salado. Se pelean por el agua, cuando hay.
Marisa Arienza, de Green Cross, organización mundial con sede en la Argentina, encabeza una suerte de cruzada personal contra lo que para ella es un mito. "Es falso que haya poca agua", afirma. "Hay varios mitos. El primero es que hay poca agua, cuando en realidad el agua está mal distribuida y es parte de la situación mundial -explica Arienza a LA NACION-. El segundo mito es que tenemos el acuífero más grande del mundo [Guaraní], y con eso se genera mucho desconocimiento."
El desconocimiento y la confusión sobre los datos científicos y estadísticos sobre la cantidad, la distribución y la calidad del agua en el país se refleja en la legislación de tres niveles -nacional, provincial y municipal-, a punto tal que el artículo que reconocía el acceso al agua como "derecho fundamental" fue eliminado del nuevo Código Civil y Comercial. Estaba y se sacó.
En la Argentina, las "guerras" del agua a veces se ganan y otras se pierden. Los habitantes del asentamiento Los Sauces, en Cipolletti, Río Negro, donde sólo hay una canilla, no lograron que la justicia provincial aceptara un amparo para que la empresa Aguas Rionegrinas SA instrumentara un plan de conexión a la red de agua potable. El tribunal argumentó que los vecinos no contaban con el "derecho legítimo" sobre la tierra.
En la Argentina, la falta de agua mantiene abiertas al menos dos "guerras" interprovinciales: la de Mendoza y La Pampa por el río Atuel, y la de Santa Fe y Santiago del Estero, por el Salado.
La marginalización de las villas, cuyo número creció 156% sólo en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (de 107.422 hogares en 2001 a 275.000 en 2013, según cifras oficiales), explica por qué la Capital encabeza la lista de las jurisdicciones donde más aumentó el número de hogares sin acceso a agua corriente. Entre 2001 y 2010, pasó de 827 a 4651, lo que equivale a un incremento de 462 por ciento.
Diego Muñiz, vocero de Aysa (una empresa bajo control indirecto del sindicato del saneamiento), explicó a LA NACION que las villas están dentro de la cobertura, pero "sin acceso regularizado". De acuerdo con los últimos números de esa empresa, sus servicios llegan a 10.625.043 habitantes en el área metropolitana, de los cuales "2,5 millones se incorporaron a partir de 2006", afirmó.
De acuerdo con un relevamiento de la ONG Techo en siete jurisdicciones (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Salta, Misiones, Neuquén, Río Negro, Gran Rosario y Capital Federal) en 2013, existen 1862 asentamientos informales con 532.800 familias. "Más de la mitad (57%) de los asentamientos está en la provincia de Buenos Aires", advierte el informe. Tampoco sorprenden los altos niveles de contaminación del agua en estas zonas: en el 90% de los asentamientos informales no hay acceso al agua potable.
Según la ONU, actualmente más del 50% de la población mundial vive en ciudades, pero en 2030 esa cantidad subirá a 60% y en 2050 alcanzará el 70%, lo cual traerá más necesidades y dificultades en la eficiencia del abastecimiento de agua segura. "Los núcleos poblacionales más expuestos a la falta de agua de red y saneamiento son los que habitan en la periferia de las grandes capitales, siendo el conurbano bonaerense el más importante", puede leerse en Agua, panorama general en Argentina, publicado por Green Cross en 2012.
El problema del agua no es sólo su disponibilidad, sino también su calidad. La semana pasada, la Corte Suprema reconoció que ese recurso es "un bien público fundamental para la vida y la salud", en la causa contra la empresa Aguas Bonaerenses SA (ABSA), y le ordenó distribuir agua potable a vecinos de la localidad bonaerense de 9 de Julio que habían denunciado altos niveles de arsénico en el fluido. Los habitantes habían presentado a la Justicia un recurso de amparo en 2010.
No es la única localidad afectada: los servicios de ABSA llegan a 91 localidades de la provincia Buenos Aires, donde viven sus 3.700.000 usuarios. El caso evidencia otro fenómeno en torno del agua: la falta de monitoreo sobre la calidad. Según la definición de la OMS, "el arsénico es un elemento natural de la corteza terrestre ampliamente distribuido en todo el medio ambiente; está presente en el aire, el agua y la tierra. En su forma inorgánica es muy tóxico". Ése es el problema del agua subterránea en muchos lugares de la Argentina, donde lo que también escasea es la información.
La propia Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) advierte sobre la falta de monitoreo de la calidad de agua potable en acuerdo con las normas nacionales en las zonas vulnerables de las ciudades y en las zonas rurales de la Argentina. Sin embargo, las declaraciones del ministro de Planificación Federal, Julio De Vido , durante el IV Encuentro de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Operadores de Agua y Saneamiento (Aloas), que se realizó a fines de noviembre, describen la realidad: "La inversión nacional anual para obras hídricas y de saneamiento se incrementó un 2100%, acumulando obras por más de US$ 4500 millones", dijo De Vido, quien destacó: "El gobierno nacional transformó desde 2003 en política de Estado los servicios de agua y saneamiento asumiendo decididamente el rol de planificador, llevando a cabo obras de infraestructura que transformaron el sector con un impacto directo en la mejora de la calidad de vida".
Entre otras cifras, el ministro enumeró la construcción de 17.000 kilómetros de cañería de agua y 22.000 kilómetros de cloacas que incluyeron a nueve millones de habitantes. Semejante obra parece no haber alcanzado a los habitantes de Socavones, Fita Huao o los asentamientos relevados por Techo. Según cifras de Green Cross, la construcción de un pozo de agua potable en La Matanza podría costar 25.000 pesos; en la Patagonia, unos 20.000, y en Chaco, 13.000.
La falta de acceso a agua potable también limita otros derechos, como a la salud, la educación y el trabajo.
Desde 2010, el Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), Nutrired y Techo conformaron una comisión interdisciplinaria que aborda el tema del agua y sus consecuencias para salud. En junio pasado presentaron el programa Mapa de arsénico-Problemática del agua de consumo en Argentina, con el objetivo de informar acerca de la problemática y buscar soluciones concretas, como pueden ser las donaciones de filtros para el uso doméstico a corto plazo y el desarrollo de un filtro doméstico de abatimiento de arsénico en los laboratorios del Centro de Ingeniería en Medio Ambiente del ITBA. A su vez, el mapa del arsénico del país -que se encuentra en la página de nutrired - ha sido desarrollado con datos de muestras de agua de consumo traídas de diferentes organizaciones del país y de particulares. La comisión se junta una vez por mes y el programa busca cooperación en todo el país.
Es que son cada vez más las ONG que intentan suplir la ausencia del Estado. Miriam Vilcay es dirigente del Colectivo de Mujeres del Gran Chaco y vive en Socavones y fue una de las personas que salieron en busca de una solución para su comunidad tras una larga sequía. "Aprendimos por la fuerza el valor del agua y comenzamos con las pequeñas acciones", contó Vilcay en la jornada Políticas Públicas y Derechos Humanos: Agua para el Desarrollo, organizada por el programa Sedcero de la Fundación Plurales.
Sedcero lleva adelante proyectos sustentables en el Gran Chaco Americano y busca soluciones mediante la construcción de cisternas y la capacitación de las comunidades rurales. Según el censo oficial de 2010, hay cinco millones de personas en el Gran Chaco que no tienen agua potable, y un millón de ellas se encuentra en la Argentina. Paradójicamente, la región conocida como Gran Chaco se superpone parcialmente con la zona en la que se encuentra el acuífero Guaraní, del que se dice es la mayor reserva subterránea de agua dulce del mundo.
La falta de acceso a agua potable también limita otros derechos, como a la salud, la educación y el trabajo. Fernanda Malnis, directora de la fundación Escolares, lamentó que la falta de agua "esté naturalizada y no se perciba como algo importante".
Según un relevamiento de esa entidad, en 1200 escuelas de cinco provincias, apenas el 16% tiene agua potable suficiente todo el año. Asimismo, la mayoría de estas escuelas podrían adaptar sus techos para recolectar agua de lluvia. "No son obras faraónicas", comentó Malnis, en referencia a los costos de esos proyectos.
La lista de iniciativas no gubernamentales es extensa: la fundación Conin, que entrega agua y ayuda a construir pozos en la provincias del Norte; Agua y Juventud, que creó junto a Unicef Argentina la Escuela de Héroes, una campaña de sensibilización con videos y acciones concretas para cuidar el agua, y la Asociación Amigos de la Patagonia, con su programa Agua y Educación, que desde 2004 capacitó a más de 1600 docentes de escuelas públicas y privadas en Tunuyán, Mendoza y Buenos Aires, son sólo tres ejemplos entre decenas de programas que buscan soluciones para el acceso y el uso racional del agua.
Los habitantes de las comunidades rurales están acostumbrados a vivir en condiciones de escasez de agua, afirma Curricoy, que señala que a la dificultad para acceder al agua potable hoy se suma otra amenaza. "El problema es la contaminación industrial de parte de las petroleras y minerías, que antes no realizaban sus actividades en la zona", agrega. Algunos contaminantes potenciales de las industrias son los acrilatos, nitratos, pesticidas, aluminio, fenoles y dioxinas, entre muchos otros.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Según el Indec, las tres jurisdicciones provinciales donde más aumentó el número de hogares sin acceso a agua corriente son la Capital Federal, Tierra del Fuego y Santa Cruz. Foto: Archivo
Agua: un derecho humano al que no todos acceden
Escasea o está mal distribuida, es causa de reclamos judiciales y donde hay suele tener problemas de calidad; una carencia que es sinónimo de la pobreza rural y urbana
Por Aigul Safiullina | LA NACION
El 16% de los argentinos no tiene acceso a agua potable. Son 6,4 millones de personas. Eso si se tienen en cuenta las estadísticas oficiales. Si, en cambio, se miran los datos de organizaciones no gubernamentales que trabajan en el tema, la falta de agua puede llegar al 21% de los habitantes. Entre los dos últimos censos, los hogares afectados por este faltante pasaron de 1.545.668 en 2001 a 1.956.089 en 2010. Y aunque las cataratas del Iguazú estén colmadas, es Misiones la provincia en la que mayor cantidad de personas carecen de agua corriente, faltante que afecta al 28% de los hogares. Le siguen la provincia de Buenos Aires (25%) y Santiago del Estero (25%).
La falta de agua está asociada a la pobreza, sea urbana o rural. En las villas de emergencia, la cantidad de familias sin agua llega al 55,8 por ciento.Sin embargo, es peor en el ámbito rural. En Santiago del Estero, cuatro de cada diez hogares (41%) carecen de conexión de agua corriente y deben buscarla fuera del hogar. Lo mismo pasa en el 35% de los hogares de Formosa y de Chaco. Según la Fundación Plurales, hay casos en los que se debe caminar entre cuatro y seis horas para conseguir el recurso.
El agua falta porque faltan obras. O porque, por culpa del cambio climático, dejó de llover (y entonces surge una nueva demanda de obras). En Socavones, localidad de la provincia de Córdoba, hace siete años que no llueve. El lugar tiene una extensión de 40km cuadrados y una población de 100 habitantes. La sequía mató a casi todos los animales, ni hablar de las huertas, fuente principal de alimentación de los habitantes.
En otros lugares, donde el servicio (a cargo de la empresa estatizada Aysa) está subsidiado, el agua se derrocha. En la Capital Federal, el consumo diario por persona asciende a más de 560 litros, mientras en el promedio del país es de 180 litros y la recomendación de la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) es de 50 litros mínimos para el consumo humano.
Para juntar 50 litros, en el paraje patagónico Fita Huao, a 150 km de Bariloche, hay que desplazarse varios kilómetros y esperar por lo menos una hora. Allí viven siete familias que utilizan agua de pozo. Pero una extensa sequía y las cenizas volcánicas de 2011 dejaron a los habitantes sin agua. "La fuente más cercana queda a 5 km y hay que ir al menos dos veces por día, porque sólo se pueden llevar 25 litros en un viaje a caballo", cuenta a LA NACION Rubén Curricoy, cuya familia vive en la zona. Estos 50 litros diarios se distribuyen entre todos los miembros de la familia, los animales y las huertas, que hay que regar tres o cuatro veces por día.
Según el Indec, las tres jurisdicciones provinciales donde más aumentó el número de hogares sin acceso a agua corriente son la Capital Federal (462% más casos en diez años), Tierra del Fuego (283%) y Santa Cruz (144%). En el mundo, las cifras tampoco son alentadoras: 748.000.000 de personas aún viven sin acceso a agua potable, aunque son 2.300.000 menos en comparación con 1990, según detalla el último reporte de la OMS sobre agua y saneamiento realizado en 86 países de bajos y medianos ingresos.
Entre los dos últimos censos, los hogares afectados por la falta de agua pasaron de 1.545.668 en 2001 a 1.956.089 en 2010
Y aunque los países más pobres invierten más dinero proporcionalmente en políticas de agua y saneamiento que los países ricos, el 66% dice que el financiamiento no es suficiente para lograr las metas del acceso al agua potable. Uno de cada cuatro de esos países no reconoce el acceso al agua potable como derecho humano.
En la Argentina, la falta de agua mantiene abiertas al menos dos "guerras" interprovinciales: la de Mendoza y La Pampa por el río Atuel, y la de Santa Fe y Santiago del Estero, por el Salado. Se pelean por el agua, cuando hay.
Marisa Arienza, de Green Cross, organización mundial con sede en la Argentina, encabeza una suerte de cruzada personal contra lo que para ella es un mito. "Es falso que haya poca agua", afirma. "Hay varios mitos. El primero es que hay poca agua, cuando en realidad el agua está mal distribuida y es parte de la situación mundial -explica Arienza a LA NACION-. El segundo mito es que tenemos el acuífero más grande del mundo [Guaraní], y con eso se genera mucho desconocimiento."
El desconocimiento y la confusión sobre los datos científicos y estadísticos sobre la cantidad, la distribución y la calidad del agua en el país se refleja en la legislación de tres niveles -nacional, provincial y municipal-, a punto tal que el artículo que reconocía el acceso al agua como "derecho fundamental" fue eliminado del nuevo Código Civil y Comercial. Estaba y se sacó.
En la Argentina, las "guerras" del agua a veces se ganan y otras se pierden. Los habitantes del asentamiento Los Sauces, en Cipolletti, Río Negro, donde sólo hay una canilla, no lograron que la justicia provincial aceptara un amparo para que la empresa Aguas Rionegrinas SA instrumentara un plan de conexión a la red de agua potable. El tribunal argumentó que los vecinos no contaban con el "derecho legítimo" sobre la tierra.
En la Argentina, la falta de agua mantiene abiertas al menos dos "guerras" interprovinciales: la de Mendoza y La Pampa por el río Atuel, y la de Santa Fe y Santiago del Estero, por el Salado.
La marginalización de las villas, cuyo número creció 156% sólo en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (de 107.422 hogares en 2001 a 275.000 en 2013, según cifras oficiales), explica por qué la Capital encabeza la lista de las jurisdicciones donde más aumentó el número de hogares sin acceso a agua corriente. Entre 2001 y 2010, pasó de 827 a 4651, lo que equivale a un incremento de 462 por ciento.
Diego Muñiz, vocero de Aysa (una empresa bajo control indirecto del sindicato del saneamiento), explicó a LA NACION que las villas están dentro de la cobertura, pero "sin acceso regularizado". De acuerdo con los últimos números de esa empresa, sus servicios llegan a 10.625.043 habitantes en el área metropolitana, de los cuales "2,5 millones se incorporaron a partir de 2006", afirmó.
De acuerdo con un relevamiento de la ONG Techo en siete jurisdicciones (Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Salta, Misiones, Neuquén, Río Negro, Gran Rosario y Capital Federal) en 2013, existen 1862 asentamientos informales con 532.800 familias. "Más de la mitad (57%) de los asentamientos está en la provincia de Buenos Aires", advierte el informe. Tampoco sorprenden los altos niveles de contaminación del agua en estas zonas: en el 90% de los asentamientos informales no hay acceso al agua potable.
Según la ONU, actualmente más del 50% de la población mundial vive en ciudades, pero en 2030 esa cantidad subirá a 60% y en 2050 alcanzará el 70%, lo cual traerá más necesidades y dificultades en la eficiencia del abastecimiento de agua segura. "Los núcleos poblacionales más expuestos a la falta de agua de red y saneamiento son los que habitan en la periferia de las grandes capitales, siendo el conurbano bonaerense el más importante", puede leerse en Agua, panorama general en Argentina, publicado por Green Cross en 2012.
El problema del agua no es sólo su disponibilidad, sino también su calidad. La semana pasada, la Corte Suprema reconoció que ese recurso es "un bien público fundamental para la vida y la salud", en la causa contra la empresa Aguas Bonaerenses SA (ABSA), y le ordenó distribuir agua potable a vecinos de la localidad bonaerense de 9 de Julio que habían denunciado altos niveles de arsénico en el fluido. Los habitantes habían presentado a la Justicia un recurso de amparo en 2010.
No es la única localidad afectada: los servicios de ABSA llegan a 91 localidades de la provincia Buenos Aires, donde viven sus 3.700.000 usuarios. El caso evidencia otro fenómeno en torno del agua: la falta de monitoreo sobre la calidad. Según la definición de la OMS, "el arsénico es un elemento natural de la corteza terrestre ampliamente distribuido en todo el medio ambiente; está presente en el aire, el agua y la tierra. En su forma inorgánica es muy tóxico". Ése es el problema del agua subterránea en muchos lugares de la Argentina, donde lo que también escasea es la información.
La propia Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) advierte sobre la falta de monitoreo de la calidad de agua potable en acuerdo con las normas nacionales en las zonas vulnerables de las ciudades y en las zonas rurales de la Argentina. Sin embargo, las declaraciones del ministro de Planificación Federal, Julio De Vido , durante el IV Encuentro de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Operadores de Agua y Saneamiento (Aloas), que se realizó a fines de noviembre, describen la realidad: "La inversión nacional anual para obras hídricas y de saneamiento se incrementó un 2100%, acumulando obras por más de US$ 4500 millones", dijo De Vido, quien destacó: "El gobierno nacional transformó desde 2003 en política de Estado los servicios de agua y saneamiento asumiendo decididamente el rol de planificador, llevando a cabo obras de infraestructura que transformaron el sector con un impacto directo en la mejora de la calidad de vida".
Entre otras cifras, el ministro enumeró la construcción de 17.000 kilómetros de cañería de agua y 22.000 kilómetros de cloacas que incluyeron a nueve millones de habitantes. Semejante obra parece no haber alcanzado a los habitantes de Socavones, Fita Huao o los asentamientos relevados por Techo. Según cifras de Green Cross, la construcción de un pozo de agua potable en La Matanza podría costar 25.000 pesos; en la Patagonia, unos 20.000, y en Chaco, 13.000.
La falta de acceso a agua potable también limita otros derechos, como a la salud, la educación y el trabajo.
Desde 2010, el Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), Nutrired y Techo conformaron una comisión interdisciplinaria que aborda el tema del agua y sus consecuencias para salud. En junio pasado presentaron el programa Mapa de arsénico-Problemática del agua de consumo en Argentina, con el objetivo de informar acerca de la problemática y buscar soluciones concretas, como pueden ser las donaciones de filtros para el uso doméstico a corto plazo y el desarrollo de un filtro doméstico de abatimiento de arsénico en los laboratorios del Centro de Ingeniería en Medio Ambiente del ITBA. A su vez, el mapa del arsénico del país -que se encuentra en la página de nutrired - ha sido desarrollado con datos de muestras de agua de consumo traídas de diferentes organizaciones del país y de particulares. La comisión se junta una vez por mes y el programa busca cooperación en todo el país.
Es que son cada vez más las ONG que intentan suplir la ausencia del Estado. Miriam Vilcay es dirigente del Colectivo de Mujeres del Gran Chaco y vive en Socavones y fue una de las personas que salieron en busca de una solución para su comunidad tras una larga sequía. "Aprendimos por la fuerza el valor del agua y comenzamos con las pequeñas acciones", contó Vilcay en la jornada Políticas Públicas y Derechos Humanos: Agua para el Desarrollo, organizada por el programa Sedcero de la Fundación Plurales.
Sedcero lleva adelante proyectos sustentables en el Gran Chaco Americano y busca soluciones mediante la construcción de cisternas y la capacitación de las comunidades rurales. Según el censo oficial de 2010, hay cinco millones de personas en el Gran Chaco que no tienen agua potable, y un millón de ellas se encuentra en la Argentina. Paradójicamente, la región conocida como Gran Chaco se superpone parcialmente con la zona en la que se encuentra el acuífero Guaraní, del que se dice es la mayor reserva subterránea de agua dulce del mundo.
La falta de acceso a agua potable también limita otros derechos, como a la salud, la educación y el trabajo. Fernanda Malnis, directora de la fundación Escolares, lamentó que la falta de agua "esté naturalizada y no se perciba como algo importante".
Según un relevamiento de esa entidad, en 1200 escuelas de cinco provincias, apenas el 16% tiene agua potable suficiente todo el año. Asimismo, la mayoría de estas escuelas podrían adaptar sus techos para recolectar agua de lluvia. "No son obras faraónicas", comentó Malnis, en referencia a los costos de esos proyectos.
La lista de iniciativas no gubernamentales es extensa: la fundación Conin, que entrega agua y ayuda a construir pozos en la provincias del Norte; Agua y Juventud, que creó junto a Unicef Argentina la Escuela de Héroes, una campaña de sensibilización con videos y acciones concretas para cuidar el agua, y la Asociación Amigos de la Patagonia, con su programa Agua y Educación, que desde 2004 capacitó a más de 1600 docentes de escuelas públicas y privadas en Tunuyán, Mendoza y Buenos Aires, son sólo tres ejemplos entre decenas de programas que buscan soluciones para el acceso y el uso racional del agua.
Los habitantes de las comunidades rurales están acostumbrados a vivir en condiciones de escasez de agua, afirma Curricoy, que señala que a la dificultad para acceder al agua potable hoy se suma otra amenaza. "El problema es la contaminación industrial de parte de las petroleras y minerías, que antes no realizaban sus actividades en la zona", agrega. Algunos contaminantes potenciales de las industrias son los acrilatos, nitratos, pesticidas, aluminio, fenoles y dioxinas, entre muchos otros.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Saturday, December 6, 2014
MED/GralInt-TED Talks-Barbara Natterson-Horowitz:What veterinarians know that doctors don´t
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz:What veterinarians know that doctors don´t
TEDMED 2014-Filmed Sept 2014
What do you call a veterinarian that can only take care of one species? A physician. In a fascinating talk, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz shares how a species-spanning approach to health can improve medical care of the human animal — particularly when it comes to mental health.
Transcript:
Ten years ago, I got a phone call that changed my life. At the time, I was cardiologist at UCLA, specializing in cardiac imaging techniques. The call came from a veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo. An elderly female chimpanzee had woken up with a facial droop and the veterinarians were worried that she'd had a stroke. They asked if I'd come to the zoo and image the animal's heart to look for a possible cardiac cause.
Now, to be clear, North American zoos are staffed by highly qualified, board-certified veterinarians who take outstanding care of their animal patients. But occasionally, they do reach into the human medical community, particularly for some speciality consultation, and I was one of the lucky physicians who was invited in to help. I had a chance to rule out a stroke in this chimpanzee and make sure that this gorilla didn't have a torn aorta, evaluate this macaw for a heart murmur, make sure that this California sea lion's paricardium wasn't inflamed, and in this picture, I'm listening to the heart of a lion after a lifesaving, collaborative procedure with veterinarians and physicians where we drained 700 cc's of fluid from the sac in which this lion's heart was contained. And this procedure, which I have done on many human patients, was identical, with the exception of that paw and that tail.
Now most of the time, I was working at UCLA Medical Center with physicians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for my human patients, but some of the time, I was working at the Los Angeles Zoo with veterinarians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for their animal patients. And occasionally, on the very same day, I went on rounds at UCLA Medical Center and at the Los Angeles Zoo. And here's what started coming into very clear focus for me. Physicians and veterinarians were essentially taking care of the same disorders in their animal and human patients: congestive heart failure, brain tumors, leukemia, diabetes, arthritis, ALS, breast cancer, even psychiatric syndromes like depression, anxiety, compulsions, eating disorders and self-injury.
Now, I've got a confession to make. Even though I studied comparative physiology and evolutionary biology as an undergrad -- I had even written my senior thesis on Darwinian theory -- learning about the significant overlap between the disorders of animals and humans, it came as a much needed wake-up call for me. So I started wondering, with all of these overlaps, how was it that I had never thought to ask a veterinarian, or consult the veterinary literature, for insights into one of my human patients? Why had I never, nor had any of my physician friends and colleagues whom I asked, ever attended a veterinary conference? For that matter, why was any of this a surprise? I mean, look, every single physician accepts some biological connection between animals and humans. Every medication that we prescribe or that we've taken ourselves or we've given to our families has first been tested on an animal.
But there's something very different about giving an animal a medication or a human disease and the animal developing congestive heart failure or diabetes or breast cancer on their own. Now, maybe some of the surprise comes from the increasing separation in our world between the urban and the nonurban. You know, we hear about these city kids who think that wool grows on trees or that cheese comes from a plant. Well, today's human hospitals, increasingly, are turning into these gleaming cathedrals of technology. And this creates a psychological distance between the human patients who are being treated there and animal patients who are living in oceans and farms and jungles.
But I think there's an even deeper reason. Physicians and scientists, we accept intellectually that our species, Homo sapiens, is merely one species, no more unique or special than any other. But in our hearts, we don't completely believe that. I feel it myself when I'm listening to Mozart or looking at pictures of the Mars Rover on my MacBook. I feel that tug of human exceptionalism, even as I recognize the scientifically isolating cost of seeing ourselves as a superior species, apart. Well, I'm trying these days. When I see a human patient now, I always ask, what do the animal doctors know about this problem that I don't know? And, might I be taking better care of my human patient if I saw them as a human animal patient?
Here are a few examples of the kind of exciting connections that this kind of thinking has led me to. Fear-induced heart failure. Around the year 2000, human cardiologists "discovered" emotionally induced heart failure. It was described in a gambling father who had lost his life's savings with a roll of the dice, in a bride who'd been left at the alter. But it turns out, this "new" human diagnosis was neither new, nor was it uniquely human. Veterinarians had been diagnosing, treating and even preventing emotionally induced symptoms in animals ranging from monkeys to flamingos, from to deer to rabbits, since the 1970s. How many human lives might have been saved if this veterinary knowledge had been put into the hands of E.R. docs and cardiologists?
Self-injury. Some human patients harm themselves. Some pluck out patches of hair, others actually cut themselves. Some animal patients also harm themselves. There are birds that pluck out feathers. There are stallions that repetitively bite their flanks until they bleed. But veterinarians have very specific and very effective ways of treating and even preventing self-injury in their self-injuring animals. Shouldn't this veterinary knowledge be put into the hands of psychotherapists and parents and patients struggling with self-injury?
Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Sometimes, soon after giving birth, some women become depressed, and sometimes they become seriously depressed and even psychotic. They may neglect their newborn, and in some extreme cases, even harm the child. Equine veterinarians also know that occasionally, a mare, soon after giving birth, will neglect the foal, refusing to nurse, and in some instances, kick the foal, even to death. But veterinarians have devised an intervention to deal with this foal rejection syndrome that involves increasing oxytocin in the mare. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, and this leads to renewed interest, on the part of the mare, in her foal. Shouldn't this information be put into the hands of ob/gyn's and family doctors and patients who are struggling with postpartum depression and psychosis?
Well, despite all of this promise, unfortunately the gulf between our fields remains large. To explain it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to air some dirty laundry. Some physicians can be real snobs about doctors who are not M.D.'s. I'm talking about dentists and optometrists and psychologists, but maybe especially animal doctors. Of course, most physicians don't realize that it is harder to get into vet school these days than medical school, and that when we go to medical school, we learn everything there is to know about one species, Homo sapiens, but veterinarians need to learn about health and disease in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and birds. So I don't blame the vets for feeling annoyed by my profession's condescension and ignorance. But here's one from the vets: What do you call a veterinarian who can only take care of one species? A physician. (Laughter)
Closing the gap has become a passion for me, and I'm doing this through programs like Darwin on Rounds at UCLA, where we're bringing animal experts and evolutionary biologists and embedding them on our medical teams with our interns and our residents. And through Zoobiquity conferences, where we bring medical schools together with veterinary schools for collabortive discussions of the shared diseases and disorders of animal and human patients. At Zoobiquity conferences, participants learn how treating breast cancer in a tiger can help us better treat breast cancer in a kindergarten teacher; how understanding polycystic overies in a Holstein cow can help us better take care of a dance instructor with painful periods; and how better understanding the treatment of separation anxiety in a high-strung Sheltie can help an anxious young child struggling with his first days of school.
In the United States and now internationally, at Zoobiquity conferences physicians and veterinarians check their attitudes and their preconceptions at the door and come together as colleagues, as peers, as doctors. After all, we humans are animals, too, and it's time for us physicians to embrace our patients' and our own animal natures and join veterinarians in a species-spanning approach to health.
Because it turns out, some of the best and most humanistic medicine is being practiced by doctors whose patients aren't human. And one of the best ways we can take care of the human patient is by paying close attention to how all the other patients on the planet live, grow, get sick and heal.
Thank you.
(Applause).
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz:What veterinarians know that doctors don´t
TEDMED 2014-Filmed Sept 2014
What do you call a veterinarian that can only take care of one species? A physician. In a fascinating talk, Barbara Natterson-Horowitz shares how a species-spanning approach to health can improve medical care of the human animal — particularly when it comes to mental health.
Transcript:
Ten years ago, I got a phone call that changed my life. At the time, I was cardiologist at UCLA, specializing in cardiac imaging techniques. The call came from a veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo. An elderly female chimpanzee had woken up with a facial droop and the veterinarians were worried that she'd had a stroke. They asked if I'd come to the zoo and image the animal's heart to look for a possible cardiac cause.
Now, to be clear, North American zoos are staffed by highly qualified, board-certified veterinarians who take outstanding care of their animal patients. But occasionally, they do reach into the human medical community, particularly for some speciality consultation, and I was one of the lucky physicians who was invited in to help. I had a chance to rule out a stroke in this chimpanzee and make sure that this gorilla didn't have a torn aorta, evaluate this macaw for a heart murmur, make sure that this California sea lion's paricardium wasn't inflamed, and in this picture, I'm listening to the heart of a lion after a lifesaving, collaborative procedure with veterinarians and physicians where we drained 700 cc's of fluid from the sac in which this lion's heart was contained. And this procedure, which I have done on many human patients, was identical, with the exception of that paw and that tail.
Now most of the time, I was working at UCLA Medical Center with physicians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for my human patients, but some of the time, I was working at the Los Angeles Zoo with veterinarians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for their animal patients. And occasionally, on the very same day, I went on rounds at UCLA Medical Center and at the Los Angeles Zoo. And here's what started coming into very clear focus for me. Physicians and veterinarians were essentially taking care of the same disorders in their animal and human patients: congestive heart failure, brain tumors, leukemia, diabetes, arthritis, ALS, breast cancer, even psychiatric syndromes like depression, anxiety, compulsions, eating disorders and self-injury.
Now, I've got a confession to make. Even though I studied comparative physiology and evolutionary biology as an undergrad -- I had even written my senior thesis on Darwinian theory -- learning about the significant overlap between the disorders of animals and humans, it came as a much needed wake-up call for me. So I started wondering, with all of these overlaps, how was it that I had never thought to ask a veterinarian, or consult the veterinary literature, for insights into one of my human patients? Why had I never, nor had any of my physician friends and colleagues whom I asked, ever attended a veterinary conference? For that matter, why was any of this a surprise? I mean, look, every single physician accepts some biological connection between animals and humans. Every medication that we prescribe or that we've taken ourselves or we've given to our families has first been tested on an animal.
But there's something very different about giving an animal a medication or a human disease and the animal developing congestive heart failure or diabetes or breast cancer on their own. Now, maybe some of the surprise comes from the increasing separation in our world between the urban and the nonurban. You know, we hear about these city kids who think that wool grows on trees or that cheese comes from a plant. Well, today's human hospitals, increasingly, are turning into these gleaming cathedrals of technology. And this creates a psychological distance between the human patients who are being treated there and animal patients who are living in oceans and farms and jungles.
But I think there's an even deeper reason. Physicians and scientists, we accept intellectually that our species, Homo sapiens, is merely one species, no more unique or special than any other. But in our hearts, we don't completely believe that. I feel it myself when I'm listening to Mozart or looking at pictures of the Mars Rover on my MacBook. I feel that tug of human exceptionalism, even as I recognize the scientifically isolating cost of seeing ourselves as a superior species, apart. Well, I'm trying these days. When I see a human patient now, I always ask, what do the animal doctors know about this problem that I don't know? And, might I be taking better care of my human patient if I saw them as a human animal patient?
Here are a few examples of the kind of exciting connections that this kind of thinking has led me to. Fear-induced heart failure. Around the year 2000, human cardiologists "discovered" emotionally induced heart failure. It was described in a gambling father who had lost his life's savings with a roll of the dice, in a bride who'd been left at the alter. But it turns out, this "new" human diagnosis was neither new, nor was it uniquely human. Veterinarians had been diagnosing, treating and even preventing emotionally induced symptoms in animals ranging from monkeys to flamingos, from to deer to rabbits, since the 1970s. How many human lives might have been saved if this veterinary knowledge had been put into the hands of E.R. docs and cardiologists?
Self-injury. Some human patients harm themselves. Some pluck out patches of hair, others actually cut themselves. Some animal patients also harm themselves. There are birds that pluck out feathers. There are stallions that repetitively bite their flanks until they bleed. But veterinarians have very specific and very effective ways of treating and even preventing self-injury in their self-injuring animals. Shouldn't this veterinary knowledge be put into the hands of psychotherapists and parents and patients struggling with self-injury?
Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Sometimes, soon after giving birth, some women become depressed, and sometimes they become seriously depressed and even psychotic. They may neglect their newborn, and in some extreme cases, even harm the child. Equine veterinarians also know that occasionally, a mare, soon after giving birth, will neglect the foal, refusing to nurse, and in some instances, kick the foal, even to death. But veterinarians have devised an intervention to deal with this foal rejection syndrome that involves increasing oxytocin in the mare. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, and this leads to renewed interest, on the part of the mare, in her foal. Shouldn't this information be put into the hands of ob/gyn's and family doctors and patients who are struggling with postpartum depression and psychosis?
Well, despite all of this promise, unfortunately the gulf between our fields remains large. To explain it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to air some dirty laundry. Some physicians can be real snobs about doctors who are not M.D.'s. I'm talking about dentists and optometrists and psychologists, but maybe especially animal doctors. Of course, most physicians don't realize that it is harder to get into vet school these days than medical school, and that when we go to medical school, we learn everything there is to know about one species, Homo sapiens, but veterinarians need to learn about health and disease in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and birds. So I don't blame the vets for feeling annoyed by my profession's condescension and ignorance. But here's one from the vets: What do you call a veterinarian who can only take care of one species? A physician. (Laughter)
Closing the gap has become a passion for me, and I'm doing this through programs like Darwin on Rounds at UCLA, where we're bringing animal experts and evolutionary biologists and embedding them on our medical teams with our interns and our residents. And through Zoobiquity conferences, where we bring medical schools together with veterinary schools for collabortive discussions of the shared diseases and disorders of animal and human patients. At Zoobiquity conferences, participants learn how treating breast cancer in a tiger can help us better treat breast cancer in a kindergarten teacher; how understanding polycystic overies in a Holstein cow can help us better take care of a dance instructor with painful periods; and how better understanding the treatment of separation anxiety in a high-strung Sheltie can help an anxious young child struggling with his first days of school.
In the United States and now internationally, at Zoobiquity conferences physicians and veterinarians check their attitudes and their preconceptions at the door and come together as colleagues, as peers, as doctors. After all, we humans are animals, too, and it's time for us physicians to embrace our patients' and our own animal natures and join veterinarians in a species-spanning approach to health.
Because it turns out, some of the best and most humanistic medicine is being practiced by doctors whose patients aren't human. And one of the best ways we can take care of the human patient is by paying close attention to how all the other patients on the planet live, grow, get sick and heal.
Thank you.
(Applause).
HHRR/GralInt-TED Talks-Rainer Strack: The workforce crisis of 2030-and how to start solving it now
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Rainer Strack: The workforce crisis of 2030-and how to start solving it now
TED@BCG Berlin-Filmed Oct 2014
It sounds counterintuitive, but by 2030, many of the world's largest economies will have more jobs than adult citizens to do those jobs. In this data-filled — and quite charming — talk, human resources expert Rainer Strack suggests that countries ought to look across borders for mobile and willing job seekers. But to do that, they need to start by changing the culture in their businesses.
Transcript:
2014 is a very special year for me: 20 years as a consultant, 20 years of marriage, and I'm turning 50 in one month. That means I was born in 1964 in a small town in Germany.
It was a gray November day, and I was overdue. The hospital's maternity ward was really stressed out because a lot of babies were born on this gray November day. As a matter of fact, 1964 was the year with the highest birth rate ever in Germany: more than 1.3 million. Last year, we just hit over 600,000, so half of my number.
What you can see here is the German age pyramid, and there, the small black point at the top, that's me. (Laughter) (Applause) In red, you can see the potential working-age population, so people over 15 and under 65, and I'm actually only interested in this red area.
Now, let's do a simple simulation of how this age structure will develop over the next couple of years. As you can see, the peak is moving to the right, and I, with many other baby boomers, will retire in 2030. By the way, I don't need any forecasts of birth rates for predicting this red area. The red area, so the potential working-age population in 2030, is already set in stone today, except for much higher migration rates. And if you compare this red area in 2030 with the red area in 2014, it is much, much smaller.
So before I show you the rest of the world, what does this mean for Germany? So what we know from this picture is that the labor supply, so people who provide labor, will go down in Germany, and will go down significantly. Now, what about labor demand? That's where it gets tricky. As you might know, the consultant's favorite answer to any question is, "It depends." So I would say it depends. We didn't want to forecast the future. Highly speculative. We did something else. We looked at the GDP and productivity growth of Germany over the last 20 years, and calculated the following scenario: if Germany wants to continue this GDP and productivity growth, we could directly calculate how many people Germany would need to support this growth. And this is the green line: labor demand. So Germany will run into a major talent shortage very quickly. Eight million people are missing, which is more than 20 percent of our current workforce, so big numbers, really big numbers. And we calculated several scenarios, and the picture always looked like this.
Now, to close the gap, Germany has to significantly increase migration, get many more women in the workforce, increase retirement age — by the way, we just lowered it this year — and all these measures at once. If Germany fails here, Germany will stagnate. We won't grow anymore. Why? Because the workers are not there who can generate this growth. And companies will look for talents somewhere else. But where?
Now, we simulated labor supply and labor demand for the largest 15 economies in the world, representing more than 70 percent of world GDP, and the overall picture looks like this by 2020. Blue indicates a labor surplus, red indicates a labor shortfall, and gray are those countries which are borderline. So by 2020, we still see a labor surplus in some countries, like Italy, France, the U.S., but this picture will change dramatically by 2030. By 2030, we will face a global workforce crisis in most of our largest economies, including three out of the four BRIC countries. China, with its former one-child policy, will be hit, as well as Brazil and Russia.
Now, to tell the truth, in reality, the situation will be even more challenging. What you can see here are average numbers. We de-averaged them and broke them down into different skill levels, and what we found were even higher shortfalls for high-skilled people and a partial surplus for low-skilled workers. So on top of an overall labor shortage, we will face a big skill mismatch in the future, and this means huge challenges in terms of education, qualification, upskilling for governments and companies.
Now, the next thing we looked into was robots, automation, technology. Will technology change this picture and boost productivity? Now, the short answer would be that our numbers already include a significant growth in productivity driven by technology. A long answer would go like this. Let's take Germany again. The Germans have a certain reputation in the world when it comes to productivity. In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, "Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines." (Laughter) That was 1998. Sixteen years later, you'd probably say the opposite. "Send me more of these machines. They work like Germans." (Laughter) (Applause)
Technology will replace a lot of jobs, regular jobs. Not only in the production industry, but even office workers are in jeopardy and might be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence, big data, or automation. So the key question is not if technology replaces some of these jobs, but when, how fast, and to what extent? Or in other words, will technology help us to solve this global workforce crisis? Yes and no. This is a more sophisticated version of "it depends." (Laughter)
Let's take the automotive industry as an example, because there, more than 40 percent of industrial robots are already working and automation has already taken place. In 1980, less than 10 percent of the production cost of a car was caused by electronic parts. Today, this number is more than 30 percent and it will grow to more than 50 percent by 2030. And these new electronic parts and applications require new skills and have created a lot of new jobs, like the cognitive systems engineer who optimizes the interaction between driver and electronic system. In 1980, no one had the slightest clue that such a job would ever exist. As a matter of fact, the overall number of people involved in the production of a car has only changed slightly in the last decades, in spite of robots and automation.
So what does this mean? Yes, technology will replace a lot of jobs, but we will also see a lot of new jobs and new skills on the horizon, and that means technology will worsen our overall skill mismatch. And this kind of de-averaging reveals the crucial challenge for governments and businesses.
So people, high-skilled people, talents, will be the big thing in the next decade. If they are the scarce resource, we have to understand them much better. Are they actually willing to work abroad? What are their job preferences?
To find out, this year we conducted a global survey among more than 200,000 job seekers from 189 countries. Migration is certainly one key measure to close a gap, at least in the short term, so we asked about mobility. More than 60 percent of these 200,000 job seekers are willing to work abroad. For me, a surprisingly high number. If you look at the employees aged 21 to 30, this number is even higher. If you split this number up by country, yes, the world is mobile, but only partly. The least mobile countries are Russia, Germany and the U.S. Now where would these people like to move? Number seven is Australia, where 28 percent could imagine moving. Then France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, U.K., and the top choice worldwide is the U.S.
Now, what are the job preferences of these 200,000 people? So, what are they looking for? Out of a list of 26 topics, salary is only number eight. The top four topics are all around culture. Number four, having a great relationship with the boss; three, enjoying a great work-life balance; two, having a great relationship with colleagues; and the top priority worldwide is being appreciated for your work. So, do I get a thank you? Not only once a year with the annual bonus payment, but every day. And now, our global workforce crisis becomes very personal. People are looking for recognition. Aren't we all looking for recognition in our jobs?
Now, let me connect the dots. We will face a global workforce crisis which consists of an overall labor shortage plus a huge skill mismatch, plus a big cultural challenge. And this global workforce crisis is approaching very fast. Right now, we are just at the turning point. So what can we, what can governments, what can companies do? Every company, but also every country, needs a people strategy, and to act on it immediately, and such a people strategy consists of four parts. Number one, a plan for how to forecast supply and demand for different jobs and different skills. Workforce planning will become more important than financial planning. Two, a plan for how to attract great people: generation Y, women, but also retirees. Three, a plan for how to educate and upskill them. There's a huge upskilling challenge ahead of us. And four, for how to retain the best people, or in other words, how to realize an appreciation and relationship culture.
However, one crucial underlying factor is to change our attitudes. Employees are resources, are assets, not costs, not head counts, not machines, not even the Germans.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Rainer Strack: The workforce crisis of 2030-and how to start solving it now
TED@BCG Berlin-Filmed Oct 2014
It sounds counterintuitive, but by 2030, many of the world's largest economies will have more jobs than adult citizens to do those jobs. In this data-filled — and quite charming — talk, human resources expert Rainer Strack suggests that countries ought to look across borders for mobile and willing job seekers. But to do that, they need to start by changing the culture in their businesses.
Transcript:
2014 is a very special year for me: 20 years as a consultant, 20 years of marriage, and I'm turning 50 in one month. That means I was born in 1964 in a small town in Germany.
It was a gray November day, and I was overdue. The hospital's maternity ward was really stressed out because a lot of babies were born on this gray November day. As a matter of fact, 1964 was the year with the highest birth rate ever in Germany: more than 1.3 million. Last year, we just hit over 600,000, so half of my number.
What you can see here is the German age pyramid, and there, the small black point at the top, that's me. (Laughter) (Applause) In red, you can see the potential working-age population, so people over 15 and under 65, and I'm actually only interested in this red area.
Now, let's do a simple simulation of how this age structure will develop over the next couple of years. As you can see, the peak is moving to the right, and I, with many other baby boomers, will retire in 2030. By the way, I don't need any forecasts of birth rates for predicting this red area. The red area, so the potential working-age population in 2030, is already set in stone today, except for much higher migration rates. And if you compare this red area in 2030 with the red area in 2014, it is much, much smaller.
So before I show you the rest of the world, what does this mean for Germany? So what we know from this picture is that the labor supply, so people who provide labor, will go down in Germany, and will go down significantly. Now, what about labor demand? That's where it gets tricky. As you might know, the consultant's favorite answer to any question is, "It depends." So I would say it depends. We didn't want to forecast the future. Highly speculative. We did something else. We looked at the GDP and productivity growth of Germany over the last 20 years, and calculated the following scenario: if Germany wants to continue this GDP and productivity growth, we could directly calculate how many people Germany would need to support this growth. And this is the green line: labor demand. So Germany will run into a major talent shortage very quickly. Eight million people are missing, which is more than 20 percent of our current workforce, so big numbers, really big numbers. And we calculated several scenarios, and the picture always looked like this.
Now, to close the gap, Germany has to significantly increase migration, get many more women in the workforce, increase retirement age — by the way, we just lowered it this year — and all these measures at once. If Germany fails here, Germany will stagnate. We won't grow anymore. Why? Because the workers are not there who can generate this growth. And companies will look for talents somewhere else. But where?
Now, we simulated labor supply and labor demand for the largest 15 economies in the world, representing more than 70 percent of world GDP, and the overall picture looks like this by 2020. Blue indicates a labor surplus, red indicates a labor shortfall, and gray are those countries which are borderline. So by 2020, we still see a labor surplus in some countries, like Italy, France, the U.S., but this picture will change dramatically by 2030. By 2030, we will face a global workforce crisis in most of our largest economies, including three out of the four BRIC countries. China, with its former one-child policy, will be hit, as well as Brazil and Russia.
Now, to tell the truth, in reality, the situation will be even more challenging. What you can see here are average numbers. We de-averaged them and broke them down into different skill levels, and what we found were even higher shortfalls for high-skilled people and a partial surplus for low-skilled workers. So on top of an overall labor shortage, we will face a big skill mismatch in the future, and this means huge challenges in terms of education, qualification, upskilling for governments and companies.
Now, the next thing we looked into was robots, automation, technology. Will technology change this picture and boost productivity? Now, the short answer would be that our numbers already include a significant growth in productivity driven by technology. A long answer would go like this. Let's take Germany again. The Germans have a certain reputation in the world when it comes to productivity. In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, "Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines." (Laughter) That was 1998. Sixteen years later, you'd probably say the opposite. "Send me more of these machines. They work like Germans." (Laughter) (Applause)
Technology will replace a lot of jobs, regular jobs. Not only in the production industry, but even office workers are in jeopardy and might be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence, big data, or automation. So the key question is not if technology replaces some of these jobs, but when, how fast, and to what extent? Or in other words, will technology help us to solve this global workforce crisis? Yes and no. This is a more sophisticated version of "it depends." (Laughter)
Let's take the automotive industry as an example, because there, more than 40 percent of industrial robots are already working and automation has already taken place. In 1980, less than 10 percent of the production cost of a car was caused by electronic parts. Today, this number is more than 30 percent and it will grow to more than 50 percent by 2030. And these new electronic parts and applications require new skills and have created a lot of new jobs, like the cognitive systems engineer who optimizes the interaction between driver and electronic system. In 1980, no one had the slightest clue that such a job would ever exist. As a matter of fact, the overall number of people involved in the production of a car has only changed slightly in the last decades, in spite of robots and automation.
So what does this mean? Yes, technology will replace a lot of jobs, but we will also see a lot of new jobs and new skills on the horizon, and that means technology will worsen our overall skill mismatch. And this kind of de-averaging reveals the crucial challenge for governments and businesses.
So people, high-skilled people, talents, will be the big thing in the next decade. If they are the scarce resource, we have to understand them much better. Are they actually willing to work abroad? What are their job preferences?
To find out, this year we conducted a global survey among more than 200,000 job seekers from 189 countries. Migration is certainly one key measure to close a gap, at least in the short term, so we asked about mobility. More than 60 percent of these 200,000 job seekers are willing to work abroad. For me, a surprisingly high number. If you look at the employees aged 21 to 30, this number is even higher. If you split this number up by country, yes, the world is mobile, but only partly. The least mobile countries are Russia, Germany and the U.S. Now where would these people like to move? Number seven is Australia, where 28 percent could imagine moving. Then France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, U.K., and the top choice worldwide is the U.S.
Now, what are the job preferences of these 200,000 people? So, what are they looking for? Out of a list of 26 topics, salary is only number eight. The top four topics are all around culture. Number four, having a great relationship with the boss; three, enjoying a great work-life balance; two, having a great relationship with colleagues; and the top priority worldwide is being appreciated for your work. So, do I get a thank you? Not only once a year with the annual bonus payment, but every day. And now, our global workforce crisis becomes very personal. People are looking for recognition. Aren't we all looking for recognition in our jobs?
Now, let me connect the dots. We will face a global workforce crisis which consists of an overall labor shortage plus a huge skill mismatch, plus a big cultural challenge. And this global workforce crisis is approaching very fast. Right now, we are just at the turning point. So what can we, what can governments, what can companies do? Every company, but also every country, needs a people strategy, and to act on it immediately, and such a people strategy consists of four parts. Number one, a plan for how to forecast supply and demand for different jobs and different skills. Workforce planning will become more important than financial planning. Two, a plan for how to attract great people: generation Y, women, but also retirees. Three, a plan for how to educate and upskill them. There's a huge upskilling challenge ahead of us. And four, for how to retain the best people, or in other words, how to realize an appreciation and relationship culture.
However, one crucial underlying factor is to change our attitudes. Employees are resources, are assets, not costs, not head counts, not machines, not even the Germans.
Thank you.
(Applause)
ADV/GralInt-TED Talks-Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back-the hardest 105 days of my life
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back-the hardest 105 days of my life
TED2014-Filmed Mar2014
This year, explorer Ben Saunders attempted his most ambitious trek yet. He set out to complete Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s failed 1912 polar expedition — a four-month, 1,800-mile round trip journey from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole and back. In the first talk given after his adventure, just five weeks after his return, Saunders offers a raw, honest look at this “hubris”-tinged mission that brought him to the most difficult decision of his life.
Transcript:
So in the oasis of intelligentsia that is TED, I stand here before you this evening as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places. I've been leading polar expeditions for most of my adult life, and last month, my teammate Tarka L'Herpiniere and I finished the most ambitious expedition I've ever attempted. In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here from four months in the middle of nowhere, mostly grunting and swearing, straight to the TED stage. So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless. One of the interesting side effects seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot. So I've had to write some notes to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes. This is the first talk I've given about this expedition, and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes, this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something that hadn't been done before. So I hope in that you might find some food for thought.
It was a journey, an expedition in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth. It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place. It's twice the size of Australia, a continent that is the same size as China and India put together.
As an aside, I have experienced an interesting phenomenon in the last few days, something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time, conversations that go something like this: "Oh, Antarctica. Awesome. My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary." Or, "Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?" (Laughter)
Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. In the process, we broke the record for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles. (Applause) For those of you from the Bay Area, it was the same as walking from here to San Francisco, then turning around and walking back again. So as camping trips go, it was a long one, and one I've seen summarized most succinctly here on the hallowed pages of Business Insider Malaysia. ["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"]
Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival. Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us, none had made it to the pole and back, and five had died in the process.
This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition. Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted.
Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, where they would turn around and ski back to the coast again on foot. Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. Scott's team ended up on foot. And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. Scott's team of five died on the return journey. And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. How come this has remained the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. No one's come close to that ever since. So this is the high-water mark of human endurance, human endeavor, human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. And of course some strange and predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job.
Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called "man-hauling." When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. Perhaps the reason no one had attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense. Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised.
You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. We didn't see a sunset either. It was 24-hour daylight. Living conditions were quite spartan. I changed my underwear three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet on the canvas. Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. And the writing was important to me. As a kid, I was inspired by the literature of adventure and exploration, and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and the power of storytelling.
So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: those of the weather and of what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. The lowest wind chill we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. You can see it's a beautiful, shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands and thousands of crevasses, these deep cracks in the glacial ice up to 200 feet deep. Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued.
We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop, a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. I think it's a marvelous thing that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. You can see on the left of this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. And if we'd stopped there and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this.
If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible.
But then we turned around, and this is where things get interesting. High on the Antarctic plateau, over 10,000 feet, it's very windy, very cold, very dry, we were exhausted. We'd covered 35 marathons, we were only halfway, and we had a safety net, of course, of ski planes and satellite phones and live, 24-hour tracking beacons that didn't exist for Scott, but in hindsight, rather than making our lives easier, the safety net actually allowed us to cut things very fine indeed, to sail very close to our absolute limits as human beings. And it is an exquisite form of torture to exhaust yourself to the point of starvation day after day while dragging a sledge full of food.
For years, I'd been writing glib lines in sponsorship proposals about pushing the limits of human endurance, but in reality, that was a very frightening place to be indeed. We had, before we'd got to the Pole, two weeks of almost permanent headwind, which slowed us down. As a result, we'd had several days of eating half rations. We had a finite amount of food in the sledges to make this journey, so we were trying to string that out by reducing our intake to half the calories we should have been eating. As a result, we both became increasingly hypoglycemic — we had low blood sugar levels day after day — and increasingly susceptible to the extreme cold. Tarka took this photo of me one evening after I'd nearly passed out with hypothermia. We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia, something I hadn't experienced before, and it was very humbling indeed. As much as you might like to think, as I do, that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit, that you'll go down swinging, hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice. You become utterly incapacitated. It's like being a drunk toddler. You become pathetic. I remember just wanting to lie down and quit. It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling, and a real surprise to me to be debilitated to that degree.
And then we ran out of food completely, 46 miles short of the first of the depots that we'd laid on our outward journey. We'd laid 10 depots of food, literally burying food and fuel, for our return journey — the fuel was for a cooker so you could melt snow to get water — and I was forced to make the decision to call for a resupply flight, a ski plane carrying eight days of food to tide us over that gap. They took 12 hours to reach us from the other side of Antarctica.
Calling for that plane was one of the toughest decisions of my life. And I sound like a bit of a fraud standing here now with a sort of belly. I've put on 30 pounds in the last three weeks. Being that hungry has left an interesting mental scar, which is that I've been hoovering up every hotel buffet that I can find. (Laughter) But we were genuinely quite hungry, and in quite a bad way. I don't regret calling for that plane for a second, because I'm still standing here alive, with all digits intact, telling this story. But getting external assistance like that was never part of the plan, and it's something my ego is still struggling with. This was the biggest dream I've ever had, and it was so nearly perfect.
On the way back down to the coast, our crampons — they're the spikes on our boots that we have for traveling over this blue ice on the glacier — broke on the top of the Beardmore. We still had 100 miles to go downhill on very slippery rock-hard blue ice. They needed repairing almost every hour. To give you an idea of scale, this is looking down towards the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. You could fit the entirety of Manhattan in the gap on the horizon. That's 20 miles between Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin. I've never felt as small as I did in Antarctica. When we got down to the mouth of the glacier, we found fresh snow had obscured the dozens of deep crevasses. One of Shackleton's men described crossing this sort of terrain as like walking over the glass roof of a railway station. We fell through more times than I can remember, usually just putting a ski or a boot through the snow. Occasionally we went in all the way up to our armpits, but thankfully never deeper than that.
And less than five weeks ago, after 105 days, we crossed this oddly inauspicious finish line, the coast of Ross Island on the New Zealand side of Antarctica. You can see the ice in the foreground and the sort of rubbly rock behind that. Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles. We'd made the longest ever polar journey on foot, something I'd been dreaming of doing for a decade.
And looking back, I still stand by all the things I've been saying for years about the importance of goals and determination and self-belief, but I'll also admit that I hadn't given much thought to what happens when you reach the all-consuming goal that you've dedicated most of your adult life to, and the reality is that I'm still figuring that bit out. As I said, there are very few superficial signs that I've been away. I've put on 30 pounds. I've got some very faint, probably covered in makeup now, frostbite scars. I've got one on my nose, one on each cheek, from where the goggles are, but inside I am a very different person indeed. If I'm honest, Antarctica challenged me and humbled me so deeply that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to put it into words. I'm still struggling to piece together my thoughts. That I'm standing here telling this story is proof that we all can accomplish great things, through ambition, through passion, through sheer stubbornness, by refusing to quit, that if you dream something hard enough, as Sting said, it does indeed come to pass. But I'm also standing here saying, you know what, that cliche about the journey being more important than the destination? There's something in that. The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it.
A lot of people have asked me, what next? Right now, I am very happy just recovering and in front of hotel buffets. But as Bob Hope put it, I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it. (Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ben Saunders: To the South Pole and back-the hardest 105 days of my life
TED2014-Filmed Mar2014
This year, explorer Ben Saunders attempted his most ambitious trek yet. He set out to complete Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s failed 1912 polar expedition — a four-month, 1,800-mile round trip journey from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole and back. In the first talk given after his adventure, just five weeks after his return, Saunders offers a raw, honest look at this “hubris”-tinged mission that brought him to the most difficult decision of his life.
Transcript:
So in the oasis of intelligentsia that is TED, I stand here before you this evening as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places. I've been leading polar expeditions for most of my adult life, and last month, my teammate Tarka L'Herpiniere and I finished the most ambitious expedition I've ever attempted. In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here from four months in the middle of nowhere, mostly grunting and swearing, straight to the TED stage. So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless. One of the interesting side effects seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot. So I've had to write some notes to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes. This is the first talk I've given about this expedition, and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes, this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something that hadn't been done before. So I hope in that you might find some food for thought.
It was a journey, an expedition in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth. It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place. It's twice the size of Australia, a continent that is the same size as China and India put together.
As an aside, I have experienced an interesting phenomenon in the last few days, something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time, conversations that go something like this: "Oh, Antarctica. Awesome. My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary." Or, "Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?" (Laughter)
Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. In the process, we broke the record for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles. (Applause) For those of you from the Bay Area, it was the same as walking from here to San Francisco, then turning around and walking back again. So as camping trips go, it was a long one, and one I've seen summarized most succinctly here on the hallowed pages of Business Insider Malaysia. ["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"]
Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival. Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us, none had made it to the pole and back, and five had died in the process.
This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition. Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted.
Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, where they would turn around and ski back to the coast again on foot. Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. Scott's team ended up on foot. And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. Scott's team of five died on the return journey. And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. How come this has remained the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. No one's come close to that ever since. So this is the high-water mark of human endurance, human endeavor, human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. And of course some strange and predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job.
Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called "man-hauling." When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. Perhaps the reason no one had attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense. Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised.
You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. We didn't see a sunset either. It was 24-hour daylight. Living conditions were quite spartan. I changed my underwear three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet on the canvas. Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. And the writing was important to me. As a kid, I was inspired by the literature of adventure and exploration, and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and the power of storytelling.
So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: those of the weather and of what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. The lowest wind chill we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. You can see it's a beautiful, shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands and thousands of crevasses, these deep cracks in the glacial ice up to 200 feet deep. Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued.
We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop, a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. I think it's a marvelous thing that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. You can see on the left of this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. And if we'd stopped there and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this.
If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible.
But then we turned around, and this is where things get interesting. High on the Antarctic plateau, over 10,000 feet, it's very windy, very cold, very dry, we were exhausted. We'd covered 35 marathons, we were only halfway, and we had a safety net, of course, of ski planes and satellite phones and live, 24-hour tracking beacons that didn't exist for Scott, but in hindsight, rather than making our lives easier, the safety net actually allowed us to cut things very fine indeed, to sail very close to our absolute limits as human beings. And it is an exquisite form of torture to exhaust yourself to the point of starvation day after day while dragging a sledge full of food.
For years, I'd been writing glib lines in sponsorship proposals about pushing the limits of human endurance, but in reality, that was a very frightening place to be indeed. We had, before we'd got to the Pole, two weeks of almost permanent headwind, which slowed us down. As a result, we'd had several days of eating half rations. We had a finite amount of food in the sledges to make this journey, so we were trying to string that out by reducing our intake to half the calories we should have been eating. As a result, we both became increasingly hypoglycemic — we had low blood sugar levels day after day — and increasingly susceptible to the extreme cold. Tarka took this photo of me one evening after I'd nearly passed out with hypothermia. We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia, something I hadn't experienced before, and it was very humbling indeed. As much as you might like to think, as I do, that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit, that you'll go down swinging, hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice. You become utterly incapacitated. It's like being a drunk toddler. You become pathetic. I remember just wanting to lie down and quit. It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling, and a real surprise to me to be debilitated to that degree.
And then we ran out of food completely, 46 miles short of the first of the depots that we'd laid on our outward journey. We'd laid 10 depots of food, literally burying food and fuel, for our return journey — the fuel was for a cooker so you could melt snow to get water — and I was forced to make the decision to call for a resupply flight, a ski plane carrying eight days of food to tide us over that gap. They took 12 hours to reach us from the other side of Antarctica.
Calling for that plane was one of the toughest decisions of my life. And I sound like a bit of a fraud standing here now with a sort of belly. I've put on 30 pounds in the last three weeks. Being that hungry has left an interesting mental scar, which is that I've been hoovering up every hotel buffet that I can find. (Laughter) But we were genuinely quite hungry, and in quite a bad way. I don't regret calling for that plane for a second, because I'm still standing here alive, with all digits intact, telling this story. But getting external assistance like that was never part of the plan, and it's something my ego is still struggling with. This was the biggest dream I've ever had, and it was so nearly perfect.
On the way back down to the coast, our crampons — they're the spikes on our boots that we have for traveling over this blue ice on the glacier — broke on the top of the Beardmore. We still had 100 miles to go downhill on very slippery rock-hard blue ice. They needed repairing almost every hour. To give you an idea of scale, this is looking down towards the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. You could fit the entirety of Manhattan in the gap on the horizon. That's 20 miles between Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin. I've never felt as small as I did in Antarctica. When we got down to the mouth of the glacier, we found fresh snow had obscured the dozens of deep crevasses. One of Shackleton's men described crossing this sort of terrain as like walking over the glass roof of a railway station. We fell through more times than I can remember, usually just putting a ski or a boot through the snow. Occasionally we went in all the way up to our armpits, but thankfully never deeper than that.
And less than five weeks ago, after 105 days, we crossed this oddly inauspicious finish line, the coast of Ross Island on the New Zealand side of Antarctica. You can see the ice in the foreground and the sort of rubbly rock behind that. Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles. We'd made the longest ever polar journey on foot, something I'd been dreaming of doing for a decade.
And looking back, I still stand by all the things I've been saying for years about the importance of goals and determination and self-belief, but I'll also admit that I hadn't given much thought to what happens when you reach the all-consuming goal that you've dedicated most of your adult life to, and the reality is that I'm still figuring that bit out. As I said, there are very few superficial signs that I've been away. I've put on 30 pounds. I've got some very faint, probably covered in makeup now, frostbite scars. I've got one on my nose, one on each cheek, from where the goggles are, but inside I am a very different person indeed. If I'm honest, Antarctica challenged me and humbled me so deeply that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to put it into words. I'm still struggling to piece together my thoughts. That I'm standing here telling this story is proof that we all can accomplish great things, through ambition, through passion, through sheer stubbornness, by refusing to quit, that if you dream something hard enough, as Sting said, it does indeed come to pass. But I'm also standing here saying, you know what, that cliche about the journey being more important than the destination? There's something in that. The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it.
A lot of people have asked me, what next? Right now, I am very happy just recovering and in front of hotel buffets. But as Bob Hope put it, I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it. (Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)
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