Ted Transcripts

The four stories we tell ourselves about death
by
Stephen Cave

I have a question: Who here remembers when they first realized they
were going to die?
I do. I was a young boy, and my grandfather had just died, and I
remember a few days later lying in bed at night trying to make sense of
what had happened. What did it mean that he was dead? Where had he
gone? It was like a hole in reality had opened up and swallowed him.
But then the really shocking question occurred to me: If he could die,
could it happen to me too? Could that hole in reality open up and
swallow me? Would it open up beneath my bed and swallow me as I
slept? Well, at some point, all children become aware of death. It can
happen in different ways, of course, and usually comes in stages. Our
idea of death develops as we grow older. And if you reach back into the
dark corners of your memory, you might remember something like what
I felt when my grandfather died and when I realized it could happen to
me too, that sense that behind all of this the void is waiting.
And this development in childhood reflects the development of our
species. Just as there was a point in your development as a child when
your sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for you to
realize you were mortal, so at some point in the evolution of our species,
some early human's sense of self and of time became sophisticated
enough for them to become the first human to realize, "I'm going to
die." This is, if you like, our curse. It's the price we pay for being so damn
clever. We have to live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can
possibly happen one day surely will, the end of all our projects, our
hopes, our dreams, of our individual world. We each live in the shadow
of a personal apocalypse.
And that's frightening. It's terrifying. And so we look for a way out. And
in my case, as I was about five years old, this meant asking my mum.
Now when I first started asking what happens when we die, the grown-
ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of
awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity, and the phrase I heard most
often was that granddad was now "up there looking down on us," and if I
should die too, which wouldn't happen of course, then I too would go up
there, which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator. Now
this didn't sound very plausible. I used to watch a children's news
program at the time, and this was the era of space exploration. There
were always rockets going up into the sky, up into space, going up there.
But none of the astronauts when they came back ever mentioned having
met my granddad or any other dead people. But I was scared, and the
idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot
better than being swallowed by the void while I slept. And so I believed
it anyway, even though it didn't make much sense.
And this thought process that I went through as a child, and have been
through many times since, including as a grown-up, is a product of what
psychologists call a bias. Now a bias is a way in which we systematically
get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort
reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works
like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and
they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they
can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator.
Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all. It has been demonstrated
in over 400 empirical studies. Now these studies are ingenious, but
they're simple. They work like this. You take two groups of people who
are similar in all relevant respects, and you remind one group that
they're going to die but not the other, then you compare their behavior.
So you're observing how it biases behavior when people become aware
of their mortality. And every time, you get the same result: People who
are made aware of their mortality are more willing to believe stories that
tell them they can escape death and live forever. So here's an example:
One recent study took two groups of agnostics, that is people who are
undecided in their religious beliefs. Now, one group was asked to think
about being dead. The other group was asked to think about being
lonely. They were then asked again about their religious beliefs. Those
who had been asked to think about being dead were afterwards twice as
likely to express faith in God and Jesus. Twice as likely. Even though the
before they were all equally agnostic. But put the fear of death in them,
and they run to Jesus.
Now, this shows that reminding people of death biases them to believe,
regardless of the evidence, and it works not just for religion, but for any
kind of belief system that promises immortality in some form, whether
it's becoming famous or having children or even nationalism, which
promises you can live on as part of a greater whole. This is a bias that
has shaped the course of human history.
Now, the theory behind this bias in the over 400 studies is called terror
management theory, and the idea is simple. It's just this. We develop
our worldviews, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and
our place in it, in order to help us manage the terror of death. And these
immortality stories have thousands of different manifestations, but I
believe that behind the apparent diversity there are actually just four
basic forms that these immortality stories can take. And we can see
them repeating themselves throughout history, just with slight
variations to reflect the vocabulary of the day. Now I'm going to briefly
introduce these four basic forms of immortality story, and I want to try
to give you some sense of the way in which they're retold by each culture
or generation using the vocabulary of their day.
Now, the first story is the simplest. We want to avoid death, and the
dream of doing that in this body in this world forever is the first and
simplest kind of immortality story, and it might at first sound
implausible, but actually, almost every culture in human history has had
some myth or legend of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth or
something that promises to keep us going forever. Ancient Egypt had
such myths, ancient Babylon, ancient India. Throughout European
history, we find them in the work of the alchemists, and of course we
still believe this today, only we tell this story using the vocabulary of
science. So 100 years ago, hormones had just been discovered, and
people hoped that hormone treatments were going to cure aging and
disease, and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells, genetic
engineering, and nanotechnology. But the idea that science can cure
death is just one more chapter in the story of the magical elixir, a story
that is as old as civilization. But betting everything on the idea of finding
the elixir and staying alive forever is a risky strategy. When we look back
through history at all those who have sought an elixir in the past, the
one thing they now have in common is that they're all dead.
So we need a backup plan, and exactly this kind of plan B is what the
second kind of immortality story offers, and that's resurrection. And it
stays with the idea that I am this body, I am this physical organism. It
accepts that I'm going to have to die but says, despite that, I can rise up
and I can live again. In other words, I can do what Jesus did. Jesus died,
he was three days in the [tomb], and then he rose up and lived again.
And the idea that we can all be resurrected to live again is orthodox
believe, not just for Christians but also Jews and Muslims. But our desire
to believe this story is so deeply embedded that we are reinventing it
again for the scientific age, for example, with the idea of cryonics. That's
the idea that when you die, you can have yourself frozen, and then, at
some point when technology has advanced enough, you can be thawed
out and repaired and revived and so resurrected. And so some people
believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again, and other
people believe an omnipotent scientist will do it.
But for others, the whole idea of resurrection, of climbing out of the
grave, it's just too much like a bad zombie movie. They find the body too
messy, too unreliable to guarantee eternal life, and so they set their
hopes on the third, more spiritual immortality story, the idea that we
can leave our body behind and live on as a soul. Now, the majority of
people on Earth believe they have a soul, and the idea is central to many
religions. But even though, in its current form, in its traditional form,
the idea of the soul is still hugely popular, nonetheless we are again
reinventing it for the digital age, for example with the idea that you can
leave your body behind by uploading your mind, your essence, the real
you, onto a computer, and so live on as an avatar in the ether.
But of course there are skeptics who say if we look at the evidence of
science, particularly neuroscience, it suggests that your mind, your
essence, the real you, is very much dependent on a particular part of
your body, that is, your brain. And such skeptics can find comfort in the
fourth kind of immortality story, and that is legacy, the idea that you can
live on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great Greek
warrior Achilles, who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy so that he might
win immortal fame. And the pursuit of fame is as widespread and
popular now as it ever was, and in our digital age, it's even easier to
achieve. You don't need to be a great warrior like Achilles or a great king
or hero. All you need is an Internet connection and a funny cat.
(Laughter) But some people prefer to leave a more tangible, biological
legacy -- children, for example. Or they like, they hope, to live on as part
of some greater whole, a nation or a family or a tribe, their gene pool.
But again, there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is
immortality. Woody Allen, for example, who said, "I don't want to live
on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment."
So those are the four basic kinds of immortality stories, and I've tried to
give just some sense of how they're retold by each generation with just
slight variations to fit the fashions of the day. And the fact that they
recur in this way, in such a similar form but in such different belief
systems, suggests, I think, that we should be skeptical of the truth of any
particular version of these stories. The fact that some people believe an
omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again and others believe an
omnipotent scientist will do it suggests that neither are really believing
this on the strength of the evidence. Rather, we believe these stories
because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe
them because we are so afraid of death.
So the question is, are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way
that is shaped by fear and denial, or can we overcome this bias? Well the
Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could. He argued that the fear
of death is natural, but it is not rational. "Death," he said, "is nothing to
us, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we
are gone." Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult to really grasp, to
really internalize, because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to
imagine. So 2,000 years later, another philosopher, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, put it like this: "Death is not an event in life: We do not
live to experience death. And so," he added, "in this sense, life has no
end."
So it was natural for me as a child to fear being swallowed by the void,
but it wasn't rational, because being swallowed by the void is not
something that any of us will ever live to experience.
Now, overcoming this bias is not easy because the fear of death is so
deeply embedded in us, yet when we see that the fear itself is not
rational, and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can
unconsciously bias us, then we can at least start to try to minimize the
influence it has on our lives.
Now, I find it helps to see life as being like a book: Just as a book is
bounded by its covers, by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded
by birth and death, and even though a book is limited by beginning and
end, it can encompass distant landscapes, exotic figures, fantastic
adventures. And even though a book is limited by beginning and end,
the characters within it know no horizons. They only know the
moments that make up their story, even when the book is closed. And so
the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page. Long
John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of "Treasure Island."
And so it should be with us. Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its
beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know
the moments in between, the moments that make up your life. It makes
no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers, whether before
your birth or after your death. And you needn't worry how long the book
is, or whether it's a comic strip or an epic. The only thing that matters is
that you make it a good story.

What is so special about the human brain
by
Suzana Herculano-Houzel

What is so special about the human brain? Why is it that we study other
animals instead of them studying us? What does a human brain have or
do that no other brain does? When I became interested in these
questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what
different brains were made of. Though it was based on very little
evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including
the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons
that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that
two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400
grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. Now, if neurons are the
functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of
these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. And yet, one is a
chimp, and the other is a cow. Now maybe cows have a really rich
internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us
realize it, but we eat them. I think most people will agree that chimps
are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors
than cows are. So this is a first indication that the "all brains are made
the same way" scenario is not quite right.

But let's play along. If all brains were made the same way and you were
to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should
always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain,
the more cognitively able its owner should be. So the largest brain
around should also be the most cognitively able. And here comes the
bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. It seems quite vexing.
Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh
between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos,
which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be
special to explain our cognitive abilities. It must be really extraordinary,
an exception to the rule. Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it
could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be,
with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of
our bodies. So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting
things than just operating the body. That's because the size of the brain
usually follows the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that
our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing
ourselves to great apes. Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we
are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the
other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain.

The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses.
Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent
of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. That's 500
calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working.

So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy
than it should, so it's special. And this is where the story started to
bother me. In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to
life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody
else but not to us? Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption
that all brains are made in the same way. Maybe two brains of a similar
size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. Maybe a
very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more
modest-sized brain. Maybe the human brain actually has the most
neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral
cortex. So this to me became the important question to answer: how
many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare
to other animals?

Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion
neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this
number came from. But nobody did. I've been digging through the
literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never
find it. It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of
neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.

So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it
essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. It works like this:
You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent,
which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so
you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a
clear soup. This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse
brain. Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can
agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the
liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five
samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and
therefore tell how many cells that brain had. It's simple, it's
straightforward, and it's really fast. So we've used that method to count
neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all
brains are not made the same way. Take rodents and primates, for
instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron
increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster
than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons without the
average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to
add neurons to your brain. The result is that a primate brain will always
have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger
the brain, the larger this difference will be. Well, what about our brain
then? We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion
of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral
cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract
reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I
think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive
abilities. But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean.
Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and
its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could
calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a
rodent brain. So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36
kilos. That's not possible. A brain that huge would be crushed by its own
weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. I
don't think it looks like us.

So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that
we are not rodents. The human brain is not a large rat brain. Compared
to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to
make, given that we know that we are not rodents. We are primates, so
the correct comparison is to other primates. And there, if you do the
math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would
have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some
66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very
unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate.
And all of you are primates.

And so was Darwin. I love to think that Darwin would have really
appreciated this. His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other
primate brains.

So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its
number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain. I think that's a very
humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in
nature.

Why does it cost so much energy, then? Well, other people have figured
out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs,
and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we
could do the math. And it turns out that both human and other brains
cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per
day. So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of
its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just
as much energy as you would expect. So the reason why the human
brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of
neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a
given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is
large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special.

Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of
neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't
they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? When we
realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I
figured, maybe there's a simple reason. They just can't afford the energy
for both a large body and a large number of neurons. So we did the
math. We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets
per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy
a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain
number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body
size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a
certain number of hours per day.

And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a
tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. So a primate that
eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then
its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. To weigh any more than
that, it has to give up neurons. So it's either a large body or a large
number of neurons. When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both.

One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more
hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point,
it's just not possible. Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about
30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating,
and that seems to be about as much as they can do. Nine hours of
feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate.

What about us? With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body
mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day
feeding, which is just not feasible. If we ate like a primate, we should not
be here.

How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy
as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding,
then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of
the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our
ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago,
when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods
outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew
and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to
be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them
yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us
to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons
than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food
all day long.

So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large,
dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a
major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of
neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this
explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in
evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large
brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to
culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators,
all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need
for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So
what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we
look for the solution in raw food.

So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other
animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in
the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our
remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other
animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach
that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we
cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think
that's how we got to become human.

Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. I now
look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming
up with the invention that probably made us humans. Thank you very
much. (Applause)




Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets
By
Saki Mafundikwa

I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States,
and Africa called me back. And I founded my country's first graphic
design and new media college. And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of
Vigital Arts. The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of
school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation
of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. We offer
a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully
completed their high school education. And typography's a very
important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look
inward for influence. Here's a poster designed by one of the students
under the theme "Education is a right." Some logos designed by my
students.

Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-
known fact, and I wrote the book "Afrikan Alphabets" to address that.
The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as
illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of
the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. So it's a special-interest writing
system. The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed
Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical
sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the
first one at the top on the left. It's called Sankofa. It means, "Return and
get it." Learn from the past. This pictograph by the Jokwe people of
Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. At the top is God, at
the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is
the moon. All the paths lead to and from God. These secret societies of
the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola
respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and
well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti.

In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri
society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women,
who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the
same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their
singing -- a sort of a musical score, if you may. In South Africa, Ndebele
women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their
homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the
beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces.

Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic
script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. and is used to write
Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. King Ibrahim Njoya
of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of
25. Shü-mom is a writing system. It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an
alphabet. And here we see three stages of development that it went
through in 30 years. The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of
literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. It's a
syllabary and reads from left to right. Next door, in Sierra Leone, the
Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left.

Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design
sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today,
designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are
more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. The creative
spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been,
if only designers could look within. This Ethiopic cross illustrates what
Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to
computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals.

Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which
still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. Most probably,
one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the
alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their
invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt,
and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. That is, until
1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these
inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western
Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C.,
centuries before Mesopotamia. Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place
that they were discovered, these inscriptions -- research is still going on,
a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among
scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. Over here, you see a
paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting
with the letter A, "ālep," at the top, and "bêt," in the middle, and so
forth. It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans
like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work
on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery.

The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey
and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa,
which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and
build on a future for us and our children. It is also time that designers in
Africa stop looking outside. They've been looking outward for a long
time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp,
right within them.
Thank you very much.

(Applause)

Fix your bad English

Hi. James, from EngVid. Today's video is on, well, "The Book of Bad
English". There are mistakes that native speakers make that ESL people
pick up -- and "ESL" is "English as a Second Language". People learning
English, they pick up because native speakers don't even know they're
making this mistake. So I want to teach you six common ones that come
regularly or happen regularly in conversation. And I want you to learn
them and make your English perfect. Let's go to the board.
Now, let's start with No. 1, one of my favorite ones: "amount" and
"number". "Amount" is, sort of, like, "how much". A "number" is, you
know, "thing". When we look at "amount", you can think of you can't
count it, all right? A lot of times, when we say "amount" -- like, "I have a
large amount of water in my house" -- you can't count water. But you
can count a number, so: "The number of people who come to the city is
in the thousands", so you can count them. Here's an example. Tell me if
this is right or wrong. "The amount of students who are late is growing
every day" or "the number of students who are late is growing every
day." You should say "number" because you can count students. You
can't count amount. That rhymes. Maybe that'll help, right? You can't
count amount. You can't count amount. So when we want to talk about
a number of something or a body of something, "amount" is for things
you cannot count, and "number" is for things you can count. English
people make this mistake a lot.
Next: "among" and "between". When I used to teach "among" and
"between", I would say, "'Among' is 'with'. So there're five chairs, and
you're 'with' another. And 'between' is you're in the middle." That's it.
Because I was so smart. And then I found out it's just this: two. More
than two. That's it. Nothing special. When you talk about "between",
except -- and this is a major exception -- when you're talking about
differences. Differences you have to use "between". But generally
speaking, "among" is more than two. "I was sitting among my friends at
the bar." You can know there're probably four or five, not two. But "let's
keep this between you and me"? A lot of times, Canadians say, "Let's
keep this among us." And it's like, "Among who?" "The rest of those
guys, you know. The Americans. They don't need to know this." Okay.
So "between us" -- usually two, right? It could be two groups. "There was
a fight between this country and that country." Right? Because it's two
groups. But "among" is for more than two, cool? All right. So "among" --
more than two; "between" -- two.
What about "bring" and "take"? This is something that a lot of students
make a mistake on. So you say, "Bring this to me" or "take this to him."
It's very easy. "Bring" is "to the speaker", okay? And "take" is "away from
the speaker". Now, if you're born in England, that's easy because they
always talk about "I want takeaway." Takeaway. Because they take the
food away from the restaurant, right? So one of my favorite sayings that
we say in England -- not England -- that we say here is, like -- watch
every space movie: "Take me to your leader." You'll never see a space
movie, unless it's made by me -- and it would say, "Bring me to your
leader." We don't do that. You say, "Take them to the leader" because
you're taking them away from this spot where the speaker is to a new
location or spot. So "take" and "bring" are easy because it's "bring --
come towards". Here's a mistake -- not Canadians -- English speakers
make that you should be aware of. They'll say something like, "Don't
forget to bring your bag with you" instead of, "Don't forget to take your
bag." Do you know what the difference is? Well, you're leaving, right? So
you need to take it away. Remember I said "away from"? Take the bag
away from you. When you say, "Bring the bag with you", the speaker's
speaking, you're still moving away from the speaker, right? So you've got
to use this. But Canadians and Americans and Brits say it a lot. They'll
say, "Bring it with you." No. "Take" it with you. You know the difference
now because you're smart. And you're studying from The Book of Bad
English. Good for you. There's a worm in that book. Watch it.
Okay. "Fewer" or "less". I'm going to make a statement, and think which
one is correct. "'Fewer' than a million people have watched the videos on
EngVid. 'Less' than a million people have watched the videos on
EngVid." Which one would be correct? Yeah. If you said "less than", no.
"Less" is similar to "amount". You say "fewer" for things you can count.

The birds and the bees are just the beginning
By
Carin Bondar

Anyone in the room thought about sex today? (Laughter) Yeah, you did.
Thank you for putting your hand up over there. Well, I'm here to
provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams.
I'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about
wild sex.

Now, when humans think about sex, male and female forms are
generally what come to mind, but for many millions of years, such
specific categories didn't even exist. Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a
trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings. It wasn't until about
500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a
thing that gives DNA out, and a vagina, something that receives it. Now
invariably, you're probably thinking about what belongs to our own
species, these very familiar structures, but the diversity that we see in
sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to
the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty mind-
blowing.

Penile diversity is especially profuse. So this is a paper nautilus. It's a
close relative of squid and octopus, and males have a hectocotylus. Just
what is a hectocotylus? A detachable, swimming penis. It leaves the
[body of the male], finds the female through pheromonal cues in the
water, attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm. For many
decades, biologists actually felt that the hectocotylus was a separate
organism altogether. Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America.
And the tapir has a prehensile penis. It actually has a level of dexterity in
its penis much akin to what we have with our hands. And it uses this
dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into
the female's uterus, not to mention it's a pretty good size. The biggest
penis in the animal kingdom, however, is not that of the tapir. The
biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs
to the meager beach barnacle, and this video is actually showing you
what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of
a barnacle. (Laughter) Mm-hm. (Laughter)

So with all of this diversity in structure, one might think, then, that
penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes
of successful reproduction. Simply insert part A into slot B, and we
should all be good to go. But of course, that doesn't exactly happen, and
that's because we can't just take form into account. We have to think
about function as well, and when it comes to sex, function relates to the
contributions made by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs. And
these contributions are far from equal. Eggs are very expensive to make,
so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares
them with. Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap, so it
makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when
it comes to siring members of future generations.

So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the
sexes? I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male, or if she has
the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough, then it makes
more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant
things: avoiding predators, taking care of offspring, gathering and
ingesting food. This is, of course, bad news for any male who has yet to
make a deposit in her sperm bank, and this sets the scene for some
pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization. This is bedbug sex,
and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination. Males have a spiked,
barbed penis that they literally stab into the female, and they don't stab
it anywhere near her vagina. They stab it anywhere in her body, and the
sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries. If a
female gets too many stab wounds, or if a stab wound happens to
become infected, she can actually die from it.

Now if you've ever been out for a nice, peaceful walk by the lake and
happened to see some ducks having sex, you've undoubtedly been
alarmed, because it looks like gang rape. And quite frankly, that's exactly
what it is. A group of males will grab a female, hold her down, and
ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her corkscrew-
shaped vagina over and over and over again. From flaccid to ejaculation
in less than a second. Now the female actually gets the last laugh,
though, because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow
the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries.

Now, I like to share stories like this with my audiences because, yeah, we
humans, we tend to think sex, sex is fun, sex is good, there's romance,
and there's orgasm. But orgasm didn't actually evolve until about 65
million years ago with the advent of mammals. But some animals had it
going on quite a bit before that. There are some more primitive ways of
pleasing one's partner.

Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small
ones. It's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not
otherwise any different. Those that have long penile appendages are not
bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all. So going back to our
biological minds, then, we might think that females should choose to
have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages, because she
can use her time for other things: avoiding predators, taking care of
young, finding and ingesting food. But biologists have repeatedly
observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the
long appendages. Why do they do this? Well, according to the biological
literature, "During copulation, the genitalia of certain males may elicit
more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or
stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract." Mm-hm.

These are Mexican guppies, and what you see on their upper maxilla is
an outgrowth of epidermal filaments, and these filaments basically form
a fish mustache, if you will. Now males have been observed to prod the
female's genital opening prior to copulating with her, and in what I have
lovingly termed the Magnum, P.I. hypothesis, females are
overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish
mustaches. A little guppy porn for you right there.

So we've seen very different strategies that males are using when it
comes to winning a female partner. We've seen a coercion strategy in
which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a
female have sex. We've also seen a titillation strategy where males are
actually pleasing their female partners into choosing them as a sex
partner. Now unfortunately, in the animal kingdom, it's the coercion
strategy that we see time and time again. It's very common in many
phyla, from invertebrates to avian species, mammals, and, of course,
even in primates.

Now interestingly, there are a few mammalian species in which females
have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn't allow for sexual coercion
to take place. Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris,
or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally, much like a penis,
and in fact it's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at
their external morphology. So before a male can insert his penis into a
female's vagina, she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-
out it in her own body. I mean, imagine putting a penis into another
penis. It's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with
the action. Now, even more interesting is the fact that elephant and
hyena societies are entirely matriarchal: they're run by females, groups
of females, sisters, aunts and offspring, and when young males attain
sexual maturity, they're turfed out of the group. In hyena societies, adult
males are actually the lowest on the social scale. They can take part in a
kill only after everybody else, including the offspring. So it seems that
when you take the penis power away from a male, you take away all the
social power he has.

So what are my take-home messages from my talk today? Well, sex is
just so much more than insert part A into slot B and hope that the
offspring run around everywhere. The sexual strategies and reproductive
structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how
males and females will react to each other, which then dictates how
populations and societies form and evolve.

So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals, including
ourselves, spend a good amount of time thinking about sex, but what
might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their
lives and our lives are influenced by it.

So thank you, and happy daydreaming.

(Applause)


Why I must come out
By
Geena Rocero

The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside
what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you
become that? I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not
alone at all. So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally
achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. My
outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. For
complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at
that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have
arrived. But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. All
of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our
moment in history, even our own bodies. Some people have the courage
to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their
skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. Those people are
always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable.

In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my
friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. I
think, in mystery, this is called the reveal. Here is mine.

I was assigned boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia. I
remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around
our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. And my mom
asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?" I said,
"Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl." I knew then how to self-identify.

Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know
it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. Because of my success,
I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I
am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish
to break free. Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. I have a
mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. Many are not
so fortunate.

There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery
of gender. There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. There is a Hindu
goddess, hijra goddess. So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in
the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. I was in front of the stage,
and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me,
and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of
woman I would like to be. So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a
boy, I met this woman named T.L. She is a transgender beauty pageant
manager. That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the
beauty pageant?" She convinced me that if I joined that she would take
care of the registration fee and the garments, and that night, I won best
in swimsuit and best in long gown and placed second runner up among
40-plus candidates. That moment changed my life. All of a sudden, I was
introduced to the world of beauty pageants. Not a lot of people could say
that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll
take it.

So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the
pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it
would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains -- it rains a
lot in the Philippines -- the organizers would have to move it inside
someone's house. I also experienced the goodness of strangers,
especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines.
But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community.

In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told
me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to
the United States. I resisted it. I told my mom, "Mom, I'm having fun.
I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant
queen." But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "Did you know
that if you move to the United States you could change your name and
gender marker?" That was all I needed to hear. My mom also told me to
put two E's in the spelling of my name. She also came with me when I
had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. It's interesting, in some of
the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most
prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. At that time in the United
States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name
and gender marker. So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I
remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena
and gender marker F. That was a powerful moment. For some people,
their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that
was my license to live, to feel dignified. All of a sudden, my fears were
minimized. I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York
and be a model.

Many are not so fortunate. I think of this woman named Ayla Nettles.
She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living
her truth, but hatred ended her life. For most of my community, this is
the reality in which we live. Our suicide rate is nine times higher than
that of the general population. Every November 20, we have a global
vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. I'm here at this stage
because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for
injustice. This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Today, this very
moment, is my real coming out. I could no longer live my truth for and
by myself. I want to do my best to help others live their truth without
shame and terror. I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be
a need for a November 20 vigil.

My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. Will you?

Thank you very much.

(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Kathryn Schulz: Geena, one quick question for you. I'm wondering what
you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends,
to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a
person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's
being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that
person to help them become good and caring and kind family members
to them?

Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. The support
system, with my mom especially, and my family, that in itself is just so
powerful. I remember every time I would coach young trans women, I
would mentor them, and sometimes when they would call me and tell
me that their parents can't accept it, I would pick up that phone call and
tell my mom, "Mom, can you call this woman?" And sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of
our being, right? I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm
trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender
assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow
people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have
with parents, with colleagues. The transgender movement, it's at the
very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. There's
still a lot of work that needs to be done. There should be an
understanding. There should be a space of curiosity and asking
questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies.

KS: Thank you. That was so lovely. GR: Thank you.

(Applause)

A word game to communicate in any language
By
Ajit Narayanan

I work with children with autism. Specifically, I make technologies to
help them communicate.

Now, many of the problems that children with autism face, they have a
common source, and that source is that they find it difficult to
understand abstraction, symbolism. And because of this, they have a lot
of difficulty with language.

Let me tell you a little bit about why this is. You see that this is a picture
of a bowl of soup. All of us can see it. All of us understand this. These are
two other pictures of soup, but you can see that these are more abstract
These are not quite as concrete. And when you get to language, you see
that it becomes a word whose look, the way it looks and the way it
sounds, has absolutely nothing to do with what it started with, or what
it represents, which is the bowl of soup. So it's essentially a completely
abstract, a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in
the real world, and this is something that children with autism have an
incredible amount of difficulty with. Now that's why most of the people
that work with children with autism -- speech therapists, educators --
what they do is, they try to help children with autism communicate not
with words, but with pictures. So if a child with autism wanted to say, "I
want soup," that child would pick three different pictures, "I," "want,"
and "soup," and they would put these together, and then the therapist or
the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say. And
this has been incredibly effective; for the last 30, 40 years people have
been doing this. In fact, a few years back, I developed an app for the iPad
which does exactly this. It's called Avaz, and the way it works is that kids
select different pictures. These pictures are sequenced together to form
sentences, and these sentences are spoken out. So Avaz is essentially
converting pictures, it's a translator, it converts pictures into speech.

Now, this was very effective. There are thousands of children using this,
you know, all over the world, and I started thinking about what it does
and what it doesn't do. And I realized something interesting: Avaz helps
children with autism learn words. What it doesn't help them do is to
learn word patterns. Let me explain this in a little more detail. Take this
sentence: "I want soup tonight." Now it's not just the words here that
convey the meaning. It's also the way in which these words are arranged,
the way these words are modified and arranged. And that's why a
sentence like "I want soup tonight" is different from a sentence like
"Soup want I tonight," which is completely meaningless. So there is
another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of
difficulty coping with, and that's the fact that you can modify words and
you can arrange them to have different meanings, to convey different
ideas. Now, this is what we call grammar. And grammar is incredibly
powerful, because grammar is this one component of language which
takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an
infinite amount of information, an infinite amount of ideas. It's the way
in which you can put things together in order to convey anything you
want to.

And so after I developed Avaz, I worried for a very long time about how I
could give grammar to children with autism. The solution came to me
from a very interesting perspective. I happened to chance upon a child
with autism conversing with her mom, and this is what happened.
Completely out of the blue, very spontaneously, the child got up and
said, "Eat." Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom
was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by
talking to her in questions. So she asked, "Eat what? Do you want to eat
ice cream? You want to eat? Somebody else wants to eat? You want to
eat cream now? You want to eat ice cream in the evening?" And then it
struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible. She
had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without
grammar. And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for.
Instead of arranging words in an order, in sequence, as a sentence, you
arrange them in this map, where they're all linked together not by
placing them one after the other but in questions, in question-answer
pairs. And so if you do this, then what you're conveying is not a sentence
in English, but what you're conveying is really a meaning, the meaning
of a sentence in English. Now, meaning is really the underbelly, in some
sense, of language. It's what comes after thought but before language.
And the idea was that this particular representation might convey
meaning in its raw form.

So I was very excited by this, you know, hopping around all over the
place, trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I
hear into this. And I found that this is not enough. Why is this not
enough? This is not enough because if you wanted to convey something
like negation, you want to say, "I don't want soup," then you can't do
that by asking a question. You do that by changing the word "want."
Again, if you wanted to say, "I wanted soup yesterday," you do that by
converting the word "want" into "wanted." It's a past tense. So this is a
flourish which I added to make the system complete. This is a map of
words joined together as questions and answers, and with these filters
applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain
nuances. Let me show you this with a different example.

Let's take this sentence: "I told the carpenter I could not pay him." It's a
fairly complicated sentence. The way that this particular system works,
you can start with any part of this sentence. I'm going to start with the
word "tell." So this is the word "tell." Now this happened in the past, so
I'm going to make that "told." Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to
ask questions. So, who told? I told. I told whom? I told the carpenter.
Now we start with a different part of the sentence. We start with the
word "pay," and we add the ability filter to it to make it "can pay." Then
we make it "can't pay," and we can make it "couldn't pay" by making it
the past tense. So who couldn't pay? I couldn't pay. Couldn't pay whom?
I couldn't pay the carpenter. And then you join these two together by
asking this question: What did I tell the carpenter? I told the carpenter I
could not pay him.

Now think about this. This is —(Applause)— this is a representation of
this sentence without language. And there are two or three interesting
things about this. First of all, I could have started anywhere. I didn't
have to start with the word "tell." I could have started anywhere in the
sentence, and I could have made this entire thing. The second thing is, if
I wasn't an English speaker, if I was speaking in some other language,
this map would actually hold true in any language. So long as the
questions are standardized, the map is actually independent of language.
So I call this FreeSpeech, and I was playing with this for many, many
months. I was trying out so many different combinations of this.

And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech. I was
trying to convert language, convert sentences in English into sentences
in FreeSpeech, and vice versa, and back and forth. And I realized that
this particular configuration, this particular way of representing
language, it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go
between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other. So I could
actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular
representation into English. And so I developed this thing. I developed
this thing called the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech
sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text.
And by putting these two pieces together, the representation and the
engine, I was able to create an app, a technology for children with
autism, that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar.

So I tried this out with kids with autism, and I found that there was an
incredible amount of identification. They were able to create sentences
in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more
effective than equivalent sentences in English, and I started thinking
about why that might be the case. And I had an idea, and I want to talk
to you about this idea next. In about 1997, about 15 years back, there
were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain
processes language, and they found something very interesting. They
found that when you learn a language as a child, as a two-year-old, you
learn it with a certain part of your brain, and when you learn a language
as an adult -- for example, if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a
completely different part of my brain is used. Now I don't know why
that's the case, but my guess is that that's because when you learn a
language as an adult, you almost invariably learn it through your native
language, or through your first language. So what's interesting about
FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create
language, a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech, they're
not using this support language, they're not using this bridge language.
They're directly constructing the sentence.

And so this gave me this idea. Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for
children with autism but to teach language to people without
disabilities? And so I tried a number of experiments. The first thing I did
was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are
coded in the form of shapes, in the form of colors, and you have people
putting these together and trying to understand how this works. And I
built an app out of it, a game out of it, in which children can play with
words and with a reinforcement, a sound reinforcement of visual
structures, they're able to learn language. And this, this has a lot of
potential, a lot of promise, and the government of India recently
licensed this technology from us, and they're going to try it out with
millions of different children trying to teach them English. And the
dream, the hope, the vision, really, is that when they learn English this
way, they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue.

All right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about speech. This is
speech. So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered
between all of us. Now what's interesting about speech is that speech is
one-dimensional. Why is it one-dimensional? It's one-dimensional
because it's sound. It's also one-dimensional because our mouths are
built that way. Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound.
But if you think about the brain, the thoughts that we have in our heads
are not one-dimensional. I mean, we have these rich, complicated,
multi-dimensional ideas. Now, it seems to me that language is really the
brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one
hand into speech on the other hand. Now what's interesting is that we
do a lot of work in information nowadays, and almost all of that is done
in the language domain. Take Google, for example. Google trawls all
these countless billions of websites, all of which are in English, and
when you want to use Google, you go into Google search, and you type
in English, and it matches the English with the English. What if we
could do this in FreeSpeech instead? I have a suspicion that if we did
this, we'd find that algorithms like searching, like retrieval, all of these
things, are much simpler and also more effective, because they don't
process the data structure of speech. Instead they're processing the data
structure of thought. The data structure of thought. That's a provocative
idea.

But let's look at this in a little more detail. So this is the FreeSpeech
ecosystem. We have the Free Speech representation on one side, and we
have the FreeSpeech Engine, which generates English. Now if you think
about it, FreeSpeech, I told you, is completely language-independent. It
doesn't have any specific information in it which is about English. So
everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into
the engine. That's a pretty interesting concept in itself. You've encoded
an entire human language into a software program. But if you look at
what's inside the engine, it's actually not very complicated. It's not very
complicated code. And what's more interesting is the fact that the vast
majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific. And
that gives this interesting idea. It might be very easy for us to actually
create these engines in many, many different languages, in Hindi, in
French, in German, in Swahili. And that gives another interesting idea.
For example, supposing I was a writer, say, for a newspaper or for a
magazine. I could create content in one language, FreeSpeech, and the
person who's consuming that content, the person who's reading that
particular information could choose any engine, and they could read it
in their own mother tongue, in their native language. I mean, this is an
incredibly attractive idea, especially for India. We have so many
different languages. There's a song about India, and there's a description
of the country as, it says, (in Sanskrit). That means "ever-smiling speaker
of beautiful languages."

Language is beautiful. I think it's the most beautiful of human creations.
I think it's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented. It
entertains, it educates, it enlightens, but what I like the most about
language is that it empowers.

I want to leave you with this. This is a photograph of my collaborators,
my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and
autism and various other things. The girl's name is Pavna, and that's her
mother, Kalpana. And Pavna's an entrepreneur, but her story is much
more remarkable than mine, because Pavna is about 23. She has
quadriplegic cerebral palsy, so ever since she was born, she could neither
move nor talk. And everything that she's accomplished so far, finishing
school, going to college, starting a company, collaborating with me to
develop Avaz, all of these things she's done with nothing more than
moving her eyes.

Daniel Webster said this: He said, "If all of my possessions were taken
from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of
communication, for with it, I would regain all the rest." And that's why,
of all of these incredible applications of FreeSpeech, the one that's
closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children
with disabilities to be able to communicate, the power of
communication, to get back all the rest.

Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)


Suicidal crickets, zombie roaches and other parasite tales
By
Ed Yong

A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals
gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in
the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers
include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or
gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often
true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals
are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their
bodies. And that is often not the case.

This is Artemia, a brine shrimp. You probably know it better as a sea
monkey. It's small, and it typically lives alone, but it can gather in these
large red swarms that span for meters, and these form because of a
parasite. These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm. A tapeworm is
effectively a long, living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked
mouth at the other. As a freelance journalist, I sympathize. (Laughter)
The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia's body, but it also does
other things. It castrates them, it changes their color from transparent to
bright red, it makes them live longer, and as biologist Nicolas Rode has
found, it makes them swim in groups. Why? Because the tapeworm, like
many other parasites, has a complicated life cycle involving many
different hosts. The shrimp are just one step on its journey. Its ultimate
destination is this, the greater flamingo. Only in a flamingo can the
tapeworm reproduce, so to get there, it manipulates its shrimp hosts
into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a
flamingo to spot and to devour, and that is the secret of the Artemia
swarm. They aren't sociable through their own volition, but because
they are being controlled. It's not safety in numbers. It's actually the
exact opposite. The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies,
turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo.

And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation. This is a
suicidal cricket. This cricket swallowed the larvae of a Gordian worm, or
horsehair worm. The worm grew to adult size within it, but it needs to
get into water in order to mate, and it does that by releasing proteins
that addle the cricket's brain, causing it to behave erratically. When the
cricket nears a body of water, such as this swimming pool, it jumps in
and drowns, and the worm wriggles out of its suicidal corpse. Crickets
are really roomy. Who knew?

The tapeworm and the Gordian worm are not alone. They are part of an
entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites, of fungi, viruses, and
worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and
overriding the wills of their hosts. Now, I first learned about this way of
life through David Attenborough's "Trials of Life" about 20 years ago,
and then later through a wonderful book called "Parasite Rex" by my
friend Carl Zimmer. And I've been writing about these creatures ever
since. Few topics in biology enthrall me more. It's like the parasites have
subverted my own brain. Because after all, they are always compelling
and they are delightfully macabre. When you write about parasites, your
lexicon swells with phrases like "devoured alive" and "bursts out of its
body." (Laughter)

But there's more to it than that. I'm a writer, and fellow writers in the
audience will know that we love stories. Parasites invite us to resist the
allure of obvious stories. Their world is one of plot twists and
unexpected explanations. Why, for example, does this caterpillar start
violently thrashing about when another insect gets close to it and those
white cocoons that it seems to be standing guard over? Is it maybe
protecting its siblings? No. This caterpillar was attacked by a parasitic
wasp which laid eggs inside it. The eggs hatched and the young wasps
devoured the caterpillar alive before bursting out of its body. See what I
mean? Now, the caterpillar didn't die. Some of the wasps seemed to stay
behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are
metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons. This caterpillar is a
head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature
that killed it.

(Applause)

We have a lot to get through. I only have 13 minutes. (Laughter)

Now, some of you are probably just desperately clawing for some solace
in the idea that these things are oddities of the natural world, that they
are outliers, and that point of view is understandable, because by their
nature, parasites are quite small and they spend a lot of their time inside
the bodies of other things. They're easy to overlook, but that doesn't
mean that they aren't important. A few years back, a man called Kevin
Lafferty took a group of scientists into three Californian estuaries and
they pretty much weighed and dissected and recorded everything they
could find, and what they found were parasites in extreme abundance.
Especially common were trematodes, tiny worms that specialize in
castrating their hosts like this unfortunate snail. Now, a single
trematode is tiny, microscopic, but collectively they weighed as much as
all the fish in the estuaries and three to nine times more than all the
birds. And remember the Gordian worm that I showed you, the cricket
thing? One Japanese scientist called Takuya Sato found that in one
stream, these things drive so many crickets and grasshoppers into the
water that the drowned insects make up some 60 percent of the diet of
local trout. Manipulation is not an oddity. It is a critical and common
part of the world around us, and scientists have now found hundreds of
examples of such manipulators, and more excitingly, they're starting to
understand exactly how these creatures control their hosts.

And this is one of my favorite examples. This is Ampulex compressa, the
emerald cockroach wasp, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that
an emerald cockroach wasp in possession of some fertilized eggs must
be in want of a cockroach. When she finds one, she stabs it with a
stinger that is also a sense organ. This discovery came out three weeks
ago. She stabs it with a stinger that is a sense organ equipped with small
sensory bumps that allow her to feel the distinctive texture of a roach's
brain. So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag, she finds the brain,
and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons.
Israeli scientists Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal found that the venom is
a very specific chemical weapon. It doesn't kill the roach, nor does it
sedate it. The roach could walk away or fly or run if it chose to, but it
doesn't choose to, because the venom nixes its motivation to walk, and
only that. The wasp basically un-checks the escape-from-danger box in
the roach's operating system, allowing her to lead her helpless victim
back to her lair by its antennae like a person walking a dog. And once
there, she lays an egg on it, egg hatches, devoured alive, bursts out of
body, yadda yadda yadda, you know the drill. (Laughter) (Applause)

Now I would argue that, once stung, the cockroach isn't a roach
anymore. It's more of an extension of the wasp, just like the cricket was
an extension of the Gordian worm. These hosts won't get to survive or
reproduce. They have as much control over their own fates as my car.
Once the parasites get in, the hosts don't get a say.

Now humans, of course, are no stranger to manipulation. We take drugs
to shift the chemistries of our brains and to change our moods, and
what are arguments or advertising or big ideas if not an attempt to
influence someone else's mind? But our attempts at doing this are crude
and blundering compared to the fine-grained specificity of the parasites.
Don Draper only wishes he was as elegant and precise as the emerald
cockroach wasp. Now, I think this is part of what makes parasites so
sinister and so compelling. We place such a premium on our free will
and our independence that the prospect of losing those qualities to
forces unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. Orwellian
dystopias and shadowy cabals and mind-controlling supervillains --
these are tropes that fill our darkest fiction, but in nature, they happen
all the time.

Which leads me to an obvious and disquieting question: Are there dark,
sinister parasites that are influencing our behavior without us knowing
about it, besides the NSA? If there are any — (Laughter) (Applause) I've
got a red dot on my forehead now, don't I? (Laughter)

If there are any, this is a good candidate for them. This is Toxoplasma
gondii, or Toxo, for short, because the terrifying creature always
deserves a cute nickname. Toxo infects mammals, a wide variety of
mammals, but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat. And scientists like
Joanne Webster have shown that if Toxo gets into a rat or a mouse, it
turns the rodent into a cat-seeking missile. If the infected rat smells the
delightful odor of cat piss, it runs towards the source of the smell rather
than the more sensible direction of away. The cat eats the rat. Toxo gets
to have sex. It's a classic tale of Eat, Prey, Love. (Laughter) (Applause)

You're very charitable, generous people. Hi, Elizabeth, I loved your talk.

How does the parasite control its host in this way? We don't really
know. We know that Toxo releases an enzyme that makes dopamine, a
substance involved in reward and motivation. We know it targets certain
parts of a rodent's brain, including those involved in sexual arousal. But
how those puzzle pieces fit together is not immediately clear. What is
clear is that this thing is a single cell. This has no nervous system. It has
no consciousness. It doesn't even have a body. But it's manipulating a
mammal? We are mammals. We are more intelligent than a mere rat, to
be sure, but our brains have the same basic structure, the same types of
cells, the same chemicals running through them, and the same parasites.
Estimates vary a lot, but some figures suggest that one in three people
around the world have Toxo in their brains. Now typically, this doesn't
lead to any overt illness. The parasite holds up in a dormant state for a
long period of time. But there's some evidence that those people who are
carriers score slightly differently on personality questionnaires than
other people, that they have a slightly higher risk of car accidents, and
there's some evidence that people with schizophrenia are more likely to
be infected. Now, I think this evidence is still inconclusive, and even
among Toxo researchers, opinion is divided as to whether the parasite is
truly influencing our behavior. But given the widespread nature of such
manipulations, it would be completely implausible for humans to be the
only species that weren't similarly affected.

And I think that this capacity to constantly subvert our way of thinking
about the world makes parasites amazing. They're constantly inviting us
to look at the natural world sideways, and to ask if the behaviors we're
seeing, whether they're simple and obvious or baffling and puzzling, are
not the results of individuals acting through their own accord but
because they are being bent to the control of something else. And while
that idea may be disquieting, and while parasites' habits may be very
grisly, I think that ability to surprise us makes them as wonderful and as
charismatic as any panda or butterfly or dolphin.

At the end of "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin writes about
the grandeur of life, and of endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful, and I like to think he could easily have been talking about a
tapeworm that makes shrimp sociable or a wasp that takes cockroaches
for walks.

But perhaps, that's just a parasite talking.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Teach teachers how to create magic
By
Cristopher Emdin

Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page
paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead
education professor wondering to herself what this task that she's
engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life, which is
be an educator, change lives, and spark magic. Right now there is an
aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a
professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging
way possible. Right now there's a first-year teacher at home who is
pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards, who is
trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately, while at
the same time saying to herself over and over again, "Don't smile till
November," because that's what she was taught in her teacher education
program. Right now there's a student who is coming up with a way to
convince his mom or dad that he's very, very sick and can't make it to
school tomorrow. On the other hand, right now there are amazing
educators that are sharing information, information that is shared in
such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their
seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person
so they can soak up all that knowledge. Right now there is also a person
who has an entire audience rapt with attention, a person that is weaving
a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening
have never imagined or seen before, but if they close their eyes tightly
enough, they can envision that world because the storytelling is so
compelling. Right now there's a person who can tell an audience to put
their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says, "Put them
down." Right now.

So people will then say, "Well, Chris, you describe the guy who is going
through some awful training but you're also describing these powerful
educators. If you're thinking about the world of education or urban
education in particular, these guys will probably cancel each other out,
and then we'll be okay."

The reality is, the folks I described as the master teachers, the master
narrative builders, the master storytellers are far removed from
classrooms. The folks who know the skills about how to teach and
engage an audience don't even know what teacher certification means.
They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call
an education. And that to me is sad. It's sad because the people who I
described, they were very disinterested in the learning process, want to
be effective teachers, but they have no models. I'm going to paraphrase
Mark Twain. Mark Twain says that proper preparation, or teaching, is so
powerful that it can turn bad morals to good, it can turn awful practices
into powerful ones, it can change men and transform them into angels.

The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching, not
in any college or university, but by virtue of just being in the same
spaces of those who engage. Guess where those places are? Barber shops,
rap concerts, and most importantly, in the black church. And I've been
framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy. Who here has been to a
black church? We got a couple of hands. You go to a black church, their
preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience, so
he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes, and
then he takes a pause, and he says, "Oh my gosh, they're not quite
paying attention." So he says, "Can I get an amen?"

Audience: Amen.

Chris Emdin: So I can I get an amen? Audience: Amen.

CE: And all of a sudden, everybody's reawoken. That preacher bangs on
the pulpit for attention. He drops his voice at a very, very low volume
when he wants people to key into him, and those things are the skills
that we need for the most engaging teachers. So why does teacher
education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards
and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the
basic skills, that magic that you need to engage an audience, to engage a
student? So I make the argument that we reframe teacher education,
that we could focus on content, and that's fine, and we could focus on
theories, and that's fine, but content and theories with the absence of
the magic of teaching and learning means nothing.

Now people oftentimes say, "Well, magic is just magic." There are
teachers who, despite all their challenges, who have those skills, get into
those schools and are able to engage an audience, and the administrator
walks by and says, "Wow, he's so good, I wish all my teachers could be
that good." And when they try to describe what that is, they just say, "He
has that magic."

But I'm here to tell you that magic can be taught. Magic can be taught.
Magic can be taught. Now, how do you teach it? You teach it by allowing
people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening. If you
want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education, you've got to leave
the confines of that university and go into the hood. You've got to go in
there and hang out at the barbershop, you've got to attend that black
church, and you've got to view those folks that have the power to engage
and just take notes on what they do. At our teacher education classes at
my university, I've started a project where every single student that
comes in there sits and watches rap concerts. They watch the way that
the rappers move and talk with their hands. They study the way that he
walks proudly across that stage. They listen to his metaphors and
analogies, and they start learning these little things that if they practice
enough becomes the key to magic. They learn that if you just stare at a
student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch, you don't
have to say a word because they know that that means that you want
more. And if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching
teachers how to create that magic then poof! we could make dead
classes come alive, we could reignite imaginations, and we can change
education.

Thank you.

(Applause)

My daughter Malala
By
Ziauddin Yousafzai

In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually
known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his
daughter, and I am proud of it.

(Applause)

Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in
2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the
national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular
young girl of her country. Before that, she was my daughter, but now I
am her father. Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the
story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and
exploitation. You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very
beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. She is not
welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. The neighborhood comes
and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the
father. And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. When
she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. When she
gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the
expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels
guilty like a criminal.

Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter,
when she grows old, she suffers too. At the age of five, while she should
be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a
school. Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. She can have
fun. She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move
around in the streets like a butterfly. But when she enters her teens,
when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home
without a male escort. She is confined under the four walls of her home.
She is no more a free individual. She becomes the so-called honor of her
father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the
code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed.

And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not
only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of
the family. I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one
brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his
seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if
his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some
livelihood. So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the
happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor.

And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called
obedience. A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and
very submissive. It is the criteria. The role model good girl should be
very quiet. She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the
decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if
she does not like them. If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if
she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not
want to be dubbed as disobedient. If she is married very early, she has to
accept. Otherwise, she will be called disobedient. And what happens at
the end? In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she
gives birth to more sons and daughters. And it is the irony of the
situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to
her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. And this vicious
cycle goes on, goes on.

Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be
changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if
men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing
countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can
abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go
against the basic human rights of the women.

Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time,
believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went
and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. And
long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was
fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. Her
name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. A
few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came
-- and it was a coincidence -- he came to my home and he brought a
family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at
the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. But when I
looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name,
and wrote, "Malala."

And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I
admitted her in my school. You will be asking, then, why should I
mention about the admission of a girl in a school? Yes, I must mention
it. It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed
countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal
societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. Enrollment in a school means
recognition of her identity and her name. Admission in a school means
that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can
explore her potentials for her future life. I have five sisters, and none of
them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before,
when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the
family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my
sisters. And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of
my sisters written on any document. That was the reason that I valued
my daughter. What my father could not give to my sisters and to his
daughters, I thought I must change it.

I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. I
encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. I
encouraged her to go with me to different meetings. And all these good
values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. And this was not only she,
only Malala. I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students
and boy students as well. I used education for emancipation. I taught my
girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. I
taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor.

Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women,
and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the
women in society. But we came across a new phenomenon. It was lethal
to human rights and particularly to women's rights. It was called
Talibanization. It means a complete negation of women's participation
in all political, economical and social activities. Hundreds of schools
were lost. Girls were prohibited from going to school. Women were
forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets.
Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed.
Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing
when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you
speak for your rights. It's really the most scary thing.

At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education.
She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New
York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she
could. And her voice was the most powerful voice. It spread like a
crescendo all around the world. And that was the reason the Taliban
could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in
the head at point blank range.

It was a doomsday for my family and for me. The world turned into a big
black hole. While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I
whispered into the ears of my wife, "Should I be blamed for what
happened to my daughter and your daughter?"

And she abruptly told me, "Please don't blame yourself. You stood for
the right cause. You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the
cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in
inspired from you and she joined you. You both were on the right path
and God will protect her."

These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again.

When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe
pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut
down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. But
my daughter never complained. She used to tell us, "I'm fine with my
crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. I'll be okay. Please
don't worry." She was a solace for us, and she consoled us.

Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the
most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an
icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl.
She cries when her homework is incomplete. She quarrels with her
brothers, and I am very happy for that.

People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala
so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? I tell them, don't ask
me what I did. Ask me what I did not do. I did not clip her wings, and
that's all.

Thank you very much.

(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

A 50-cent microscope that folds like origami.
By
Manu Prakash

The year is 1800. A curious little invention is being talked about. It's
called a microscope. What it allows you to do is see tiny little lifeforms
that are invisible to the naked eye. Soon comes the medical discovery
that many of these lifeforms are actually causes of terrible human
diseases. Imagine what happened to the society when they realized that
an English mom in her teacup actually was drinking a monster soup, not
very far from here. This is from London.

Fast forward 200 years. We still have this monster soup around, and it's
taken hold in the developing countries around the tropical belt. Just for
malaria itself, there are a million deaths a year, and more than a billion
people that need to be tested because they are at risk for different
species of malarial infections.

Now it's actually very simple to put a face to many of these monsters.
You take a stain, like acridine orange or a fluorescent stain or Giemsa,
and a microscope, and you look at them. They all have faces. Why is that
so, that Alex in Kenya, Fatima in Bangladesh, Navjoot in Mumbai, and
Julie and Mary in Uganda still wait months to be able to diagnose why
they are sick? And that's primarily because scalability of the diagnostics
is completely out of reach. And remember that number: one billion.

The problem lies with the microscope itself. Even though the pinnacle of
modern science, research microscopes are not designed for field testing.
Neither were they first designed for diagnostics at all. They are heavy,
bulky, really hard to maintain, and cost a lot of money. This picture is
Mahatma Gandhi in the '40s using the exact same setup that we actually
use today for diagnosing T.B. in his ashram in Sevagram in India.

Two of my students, Jim and James, traveled around India and Thailand,
starting to think about this problem a lot. We saw all kinds of donated
equipment. We saw fungus growing on microscope lenses. And we saw
people who had a functional microscope but just didn't know how to
even turn it on. What grew out of that work and that trip was actually
the idea of what we call Foldscopes.

So what is a Foldscope? A Foldscope is a completely functional
microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization,
projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding
paper. So, now you think, how is that possible? I'm going to show you
some examples here, and we will run through some of them. It starts
with a single sheet of paper. What you see here is all the possible
components to build a functional bright-field and fluorescence
microscope. So, there are three stages: There is the optical stage, the
illumination stage and the mask-holding stage. And there are micro
optics at the bottom that's actually embedded in the paper itself. What
you do is, you take it on, and just like you are playing like a toy, which it
is, I tab it off, and I break it off.

This paper has no instructions and no languages. There is a code, a color
code embedded, that tells you exactly how to fold that specific
microscope. When it's done, it looks something like this, has all the
functionalities of a standard microscope, just like an XY stage, a place
where a sample slide could go, for example right here. We didn't want to
change this, because this is the standard that's been optimized for over
the years, and many health workers are actually used to this. So this is
what changes, but the standard stains all remain the same for many
different diseases. You pop this in. There is an XY stage, and then there
is a focusing stage, which is a flexure mechanism that's built in paper
itself that allows us to move and focus the lenses by micron steps.

So what's really interesting about this object, and my students hate
when I do this, but I'm going to do this anyway, is these are rugged
devices. I can turn it on and throw it on the floor and really try to stomp
on it. And they last, even though they're designed from a very flexible
material, like paper.

Another fun fact is, this is what we actually send out there as a standard
diagnostic tool, but here in this envelope I have 30 different foldscopes
of different configurations all in a single folder. And I'm going to pick
one randomly. This one, it turns out, is actually designed specifically for
malaria, because it has the fluorescent filters built specifically for
diagnosing malaria. So the idea of very specific diagnostic microscopes
comes out of this.

So up till now, you didn't actually see what I would see from one of these
setups. So what I would like to do is, if we could dim the lights, please, it
turns out foldscopes are also projection microscopes. I have these two
microscopes that I'm going to turn -- go to the back of the wall -- and
just project, and this way you will see exactly what I would see. What
you're looking at -- (Applause) — This is a cross-section of a compound
eye, and when I'm going to zoom in closer, right there, I am going
through the z-axis. You actually see how the lenses are cut together in
the cross-section pattern. Another example, one of my favorite insects, I
love to hate this one, is a mosquito, and you're seeing the antenna of a
culex pipiens. Right there. All from the simple setup that I actually
described.

So my wife has been field testing some of our microscopes by washing
my clothes whenever I forget them in the dryer. So it turns out they're
waterproof, and -- (Laughter) — right here is just fluorescent water, and
I don't know if you can actually see this. This also shows you how the
projection scope works. You get to see the beam the way it's projected
and bent.

Can we get the lights back on again?

So I'm quickly going to show you, since I'm running out of time, in terms
of how much it costs for us to manufacture, the biggest idea was roll-to-
roll manufacturing, so we built this out of 50 cents of parts and costs.
(Applause) And what this allows us to do is to think about a new
paradigm in microscopy, which we call use-and-throw microscopy. I'm
going to give you a quick snapshot of some of the parts that go in. Here
is a sheet of paper. This is when we were thinking about the idea. This is
an A4 sheet of paper. These are the three stages that you actually see.
And the optical components, if you look at the inset up on the right, we
had to figure out a way to manufacture lenses in paper itself at really
high throughputs, so it uses a process of self-assembly and surface
tension to build achromatic lenses in the paper itself. So that's where the
lenses go. There are some light sources. And essentially, in the end, all
the parts line up because of origami, because of the fact that origami
allows us micron-scale precision of optical alignment. So even though
this looks like a simple toy, the aspects of engineering that go in
something like this are fairly sophisticated.

So here is another obvious thing that we would do, typically, if I was
going to show that these microscopes are robust, is go to the third floor
and drop it from the floor itself. There it is, and it survives.

So for us, the next step actually is really finishing our field trials. We are
starting at the end of the summer. We are at a stage where we'll be
making thousands of microscopes. That would be the first time where
we would be doing field trials with the highest density of microscopes
ever at a given place. We've started collecting data for malaria, Chagas
disease and giardia from patients themselves.

And I want to leave you with this picture. I had not anticipated this
before, but a really interesting link between hands-on science education
and global health. What are the tools that we're actually providing the
kids who are going to fight this monster soup for tomorrow? I would
love for them to be able to just print out a Foldscope and carry them
around in their pockets.

Thank you.

(Applause)


ווח '' ר זא '' מ '' קי
Xavier Ozdiken Moyek