So 90 percent of what I do with my five hours of prep time per week is to take fairly compelling elements of problems like this from my textbook and rebuild them in a way that supports math reasoning and patient problem solving .


And here 's how it works .


I like this question . It 's about a water tank .


The question is : How long will it take you to fill it up ?


First things first , we eliminate all the substeps .


Students have to develop those , they have to formulate those .


And then notice that all the information written on there is stuff you 'll need .


None of it 's a distractor , so we lose that .


Students need to decide , " " All right , well , does the height matter ? Does the side of it matter ?


Does the color of the valve matter ? What matters here ? " " Such an underrepresented question in math curriculum .


So now we have a water tank .


How long will it take you to fill it up ? And that 's it .


And because this is the 21st century and we would love to talk about the real world on its own terms , not in terms of line art or clip art that you so often see in textbooks , we go out and we take a picture of it .


So now we have the real deal .


How long will it take it to fill it up ?


And then even better is we take a video , a video of someone filling it up .


And it 's filling up slowly , agonizingly slowly .


It 's tedious .


Students are looking at their watches , rolling their eyes , and they 're all wondering at some point or another , " Man , how long is it going to take to fill up ? "


( Laughter ) That 's how you know you 've baited the hook , right ?


And that question , off this right here , is really fun for me because , like the intro , I teach kids — because of my inexperience — I teach the kids that are the most remedial , all right ?


And I 've got kids who will not join a conversation about math because someone else has the formula ; someone else knows how to work the formula better than me , so I won 't talk about it .


But here , every student is on a level playing field of intuition .


Everyone 's filled something up with water before , so I get kids answering the question , " " How long will it take ? " " I 've got kids who are mathematically and conversationally intimidated joining the conversation .


We put names on the board , attach them to guesses , and kids have bought in here .


And then we follow the process I 've described .


And the best part here , or one of the better parts is that we don 't get our answer from the answer key in the back of the teacher 's edition .


We , instead , just watch the end of the movie .


( Laughter ) And that 's terrifying , because the theoretical models that always work out in the answer key in the back of a teacher 's edition , that 's great , but it 's scary to talk about sources of error when the theoretical does not match up with the practical .


But those conversations have been so valuable , among the most valuable .


So I 'm here to report some really fun games with students who come pre-installed with these viruses day one of the class .


These are the kids who now , one semester in , I can put something on the board , totally new , totally foreign , and they 'll have a conversation about it for three or four minutes more than they would have at the start of the year , which is just so fun .


We 're no longer averse to word problems , because we 've redefined what a word problem is .


We 're no longer intimidated by math , because we 're slowly redefining what math is .


This has been a lot of fun .


I encourage math teachers I talk to to use multimedia , because it brings the real world into your classroom in high resolution and full color ; to encourage student intuition for that level playing field ; to ask the shortest question you possibly can and let those more specific questions come out in conversation ; to let students build the problem , because Einstein said so ; and to finally , in total , just be less helpful , because the textbook is helping you in all the wrong ways : It 's buying you out of your obligation , for patient problem solving and math reasoning , to be less helpful .


And why this is an amazing time to be a math teacher right now is because we have the tools to create this high-quality curriculum in our front pocket .


It 's ubiquitous and fairly cheap , and the tools to distribute it freely under open licenses has also never been cheaper or more ubiquitous .


I put a video series on my blog not so long ago and it got 6,000 views in two weeks .


I get emails still from teachers in countries I 've never visited saying , " " Wow , yeah . We had a good conversation about that .


Oh , and by the way , here 's how I made your stuff better , " " which , wow .


I put this problem on my blog recently : In a grocery store , which line do you get into , the one that has one cart and 19 items or the line with four carts and three , five , two and one items .


And the linear modeling involved in that was some good stuff for my classroom , but it eventually got me on " " Good Morning America " " a few weeks later , which is just bizarre , right ?


And from all of this , I can only conclude that people , not just students , are really hungry for this .


Math makes sense of the world .


Math is the vocabulary for your own intuition .


So I just really encourage you , whatever your stake is in education — whether you 're a student , parent , teacher , policy maker , whatever — insist on better math curriculum .


We need more patient problem solvers . Thank you . ( Applause )


Interpreter : Piano , " " p , " " is my favorite musical symbol .


It means to play softly .


If you 're playing a musical instrument and you notice a " " p " " in the score , you need to play softer .


Two p 's — even softer .


Four p 's — extremely soft .


This is my drawing of a p-tree , which demonstrates no matter how many thousands upon thousands of p 's there may be , you 'll never reach complete silence .


That 's my current definition of silence : a very obscure sound .


I 'd like to share a little bit about the history of American Sign Language , ASL , plus a bit of my own background .


French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s , and as time went by , mixed with local signs , it evolved into the language we know today as ASL .


So it has a history of about 200 years .


I was born deaf , and I was taught to believe that sound wasn 't a part of my life .


And I believed it to be true .


Yet , I realize now that that wasn 't the case at all .


Sound was very much a part of my life , really , on my mind every day .


As a Deaf person living in a world of sound , it 's as if I was living in a foreign country , blindly following its rules , customs , behaviors and norms without ever questioning them .


So how is it that I understand sound ?


Well , I watch how people behave and respond to sound .


You people are like my loudspeakers , and amplify sound .


I learn and mirror that behavior .


At the same time , I 've learned that I create sound , and I 've seen how people respond to me .


Thus I 've learned , for example ...


" Don 't slam the door ! "


" Don 't make too much noise when you 're eating from the potato-chip bag ! "


( Laughter ) " " Don 't burp , and when you 're eating , make sure you don 't scrape your utensils on the plate . " " All of these things I term " " sound etiquette . " " Maybe I think about sound etiquette more than the average hearing person does .


I 'm hyper-vigilant around sound .


And I 'm always waiting in eager nervous anticipation around sound , about what 's to come next .


Hence , this drawing .


TBD , to be decided .


TBC , to be continued .


TBA , to be announced .


And you notice the staff — there are no notes contained in the lines .


That 's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears .


In Deaf culture , movement is equivalent to sound .


This is a sign for " " staff " " in ASL .


A typical staff contains five lines .


Yet for me , signing it with my thumb sticking up like that doesn 't feel natural .


That 's why you 'll notice in my drawings , I stick to four lines on paper .


In the year 2008 , I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin , Germany , for an artist residency there .


Prior to this time , I had been working as a painter .


During this summer , I visited different museums and gallery spaces , and as I went from one place to the next , I noticed there was no visual art there .


At that time , sound was trending , and this struck me ...


there was no visual art , everything was auditory .


Now sound has come into my art territory .


Is it going to further distance me from art ?


I realized that doesn 't have to be the case at all .


I actually know sound .


I know it so well that it doesn 't have to be something just experienced through the ears .


It could be felt tactually , or experienced as a visual , or even as an idea .


So I decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into my art practice .


And everything that I had been taught regarding sound , I decided to do away with and unlearn .


I started creating a new body of work .


And when I presented this to the art community , I was blown away with the amount of support and attention I received .


I realized : sound is like money , power , control — social currency .


In the back of my mind , I 've always felt that sound was your thing , a hearing person 's thing .


And sound is so powerful that it could either disempower me and my artwork , or it could empower me .


I chose to be empowered .


There 's a massive culture around spoken language .


And just because I don 't use my literal voice to communicate , in society 's eyes it 's as if I don 't have a voice at all .


So I need to work with individuals who can support me as an equal and become my voice .


And that way , I 'm able to maintain relevancy in society today .


So at school , at work and institutions , I work with many different ASL interpreters .


And their voice becomes my voice and identity .


They help me to be heard .


And their voices hold value and currency .


Ironically , by borrowing out their voices , I 'm able to maintain a temporary form of currency , kind of like taking out a loan with a very high interest rate .


If I didn 't continue this practice , I feel that I could just fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency .


So with sound as my new art medium , I delved into the world of music .


And I was surprised to see the similarities between music and ASL .


For example , a musical note cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper .


And the same holds true for a concept in ASL .


They 're both highly spatial and highly inflected — meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds .


I 'd like to share with you a piano metaphor , to have you have a better understanding of how ASL works .


So , envision a piano .


ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters .


If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano — such as facial expression , body movement , speed , hand shape and so on , as you play the piano — English is a linear language , as if one key is being pressed at a time .


However , ASL is more like a chord — all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea in ASL .


If just one of those keys were to change the chord , it would create a completely different meaning .


The same applies to music in regards to pitch , tone and volume .


In ASL , by playing around with these different grammatical parameters , you can express different ideas .


For example , take the sign TO-LOOK-AT .


This is the sign TO-LOOK-AT .


I 'm looking at you .


Staring at you .


( Laughter ) ( Laughter ) Oh — busted . ( Laughter )


Uh-oh .


What are you looking at ?


Aw , stop .


( Laughter ) I then started thinking , " What if I was to look at ASL through a musical lens ? "


If I was to create a sign and repeat it over and over , it could become like a piece of visual music .


For example , this is the sign for " " day , " " as the sun rises and sets .


This is " " all day . " " If I was to repeat it and slow it down , visually it looks like a piece of music .


All ... day .


I feel the same holds true for " " all night . " " " All night . "


This is ALL-NIGHT , represented in this drawing .


And this led me to thinking about three different kinds of nights : " last night , " " overnight , " ( Sings ) " " all night long . " " ( Laughter ) I feel like the third one has a lot more musicality than the other two . ( Laughter )


This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time .


For example , 1H is one hand , 2H is two hand , present tense happens closest and in front of the body , future is in front of the body and the past is to your back .


So , the first example is " " a long time ago . " " Then " " past , " " " used to " and the last one , which is my favorite , with the very romantic and dramatic notion to it , " once upon a time . "


( Laughter ) " Common time " is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure .


Yet when I see the word " " common time , " " what automatically comes to mind for me is " " at the same time . " " So notice RH : right hand , LH : left hand .


We have the staff across the head and the chest .


[ Head : RH , Flash claw ] [ Common time ] [ Chest : LH , Flash claw ] I 'm now going to demonstrate a hand shape called the " " flash claw . " " Can you please follow along with me ?


Everybody , hands up .


Now we 're going to do it in both the head and the chest , kind of like " " common time " " or at the same time .


Yes , got it .


That means " " to fall in love " " in International [ Sign ] .


( Laughter ) International [ Sign ] , as a note , is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world .


The second one I 'd like to demonstrate is this — please follow along with me again .


And now this .


This is " " colonization " " in ASL .


( Laughter ) Now the third — please follow along again .


And again .


This is " " enlightenment " " in ASL .


So let 's do all three together .


" Fall in love , " " colonization " and " " enlightenment . " " Good job , everyone .


( Laughter ) Notice how all three signs are very similar , they all happen at the head and the chest , but they convey quite different meanings .


So it 's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving , just like music is .


However , in this day and age , we live in a very audio-centric world .


And just because ASL has no sound to it , it automatically holds no social currency .


We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency — without sound .


And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society .


And maybe people will understand that you don 't need to be deaf to learn ASL , nor do you have to be hearing to learn music .


ASL is such a rich treasure that I 'd like you to have the same experience .


And I 'd like to invite you to open your ears , to open your eyes , take part in our culture and experience our visual language .


And you never know , you might just fall in love with us .


( Applause ) Thank you .


Denise Kahler-Braaten : Hey , that 's me .


( Applause )


I 'm Michael Shermer , director of the Skeptics Society , publisher of " " Skeptic " " magazine .


We investigate claims of the paranormal , pseudo-science , fringe groups and cults , and claims of all kinds between , science and pseudo-science and non-science and junk science , voodoo science , pathological science , bad science , non-science , and plain old non-sense .


And unless you 've been on Mars recently , you know there 's a lot of that out there .


Some people call us debunkers , which is kind of a negative term .


But let 's face it , there 's a lot of bunk .


We are like the bunko squads of the police departments out there — well , we 're sort of like the Ralph Naders of bad ideas , ( Laughter ) trying to replace bad ideas with good ideas .


I 'll show you an example of a bad idea .


I brought this with me , this was given to us by NBC Dateline to test .


It 's produced by the Quadro Corporation of West Virginia .


It 's called the Quadro 2000 Dowser Rod .


( Laughter ) This was being sold to high-school administrators for $ 900 apiece .


It 's a piece of plastic with a Radio Shack antenna attached to it .


You could dowse for all sorts of things , but this particular one was built to dowse for marijuana in students ' lockers .


( Laughter ) So the way it works is you go down the hallway , and you see if it tilts toward a particular locker , and then you open the locker .


So it looks something like this .


I 'll show you .


( Laughter ) Well , it has kind of a right-leaning bias .


Well , this is science , so we 'll do a controlled experiment .


It 'll go this way for sure .


( Laughter ) Sir , do you want to empty your pockets , please , sir ? ( Laughter )


So the question was , can it actually find marijuana in students ' lockers ?


And the answer is , if you open enough of them , yes .


( Laughter ) ( Applause ) But in science , we have to keep track of the misses , not just the hits .


And that 's probably the key lesson to my short talk here : This is how psychics work , astrologers , tarot card readers and so on .


People remember the hits and forget the misses .


In science , we keep the whole database , and look to see if the number of hits somehow stands out from the total number you 'd expect by chance .


In this case , we tested it .


We had two opaque boxes : one with government-approved THC marijuana , and one with nothing .


And it got it 50 percent of the time — ( Laughter ) which is exactly what you 'd expect with a coin-flip model .


So that 's just a fun little example here of the sorts of things we do .


" " Skeptic " " is the quarterly publication . Each one has a particular theme .


This one is on the future of intelligence .


Are people getting smarter or dumber ?


I have an opinion of this myself because of the business I 'm in , but in fact , people , it turns out , are getting smarter .


Three IQ points per 10 years , going up .


Sort of an interesting thing .


With science , don 't think of skepticism as a thing , or science as a thing .


Are science and religion compatible ?


It 's like , are science and plumbing compatible ?


They 're just two different things .


Science is not a thing . It 's a verb .


It 's a way of thinking about things .


It 's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena .


I mean , what 's more likely : that extraterrestrial intelligences or multi-dimensional beings travel across vast distances of interstellar space to leave a crop circle in Farmer Bob 's field in Puckerbrush , Kansas to promote skeptic.com , our web page ?


Or is it more likely that a reader of " " Skeptic " " did this with Photoshop ?


And in all cases we have to ask — ( Laughter ) What 's the more likely explanation ?


Before we say something is out of this world , we should first make sure that it 's not in this world .


What 's more likely : that Arnold had extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship , or that the " " World Weekly News " " makes stuff up ?


( Laughter ) The same theme is expressed nicely here in this Sidney Harris cartoon .


For those of you in the back , it says here : " " Then a miracle occurs .


I think you need to be more explicit here in step two . " " This single slide completely dismantles the intelligent design arguments .


There 's nothing more to it than that .


( Applause ) You can say a miracle occurs , it 's just that it doesn 't explain anything or offer anything .


There 's nothing to test .


It 's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists .


And it 's true , scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers — dark energy or dark matter , something like that — until we figure out what it is , we 'll call it this .


It 's the beginning of the causal chain for science .


For intelligent design creationists , it 's the end of the chain .


So again , we can ask this : what 's more likely ?


Are UFOs alien spaceships , or perceptual cognitive mistakes , or even fakes ?


This is a UFO shot from my house in Altadena , California , looking down over Pasadena .


And if it looks a lot like a Buick hubcap , it 's because it is .


You don 't even need Photoshop or high-tech equipment , you don 't need computers .


This was shot with a throwaway Kodak Instamatic camera .


You just have somebody off on the side with a hubcap ready to go .


Camera 's ready — that 's it .


( Laughter ) So , although it 's possible that most of these things are fake or illusions or so on , and that some of them are real , it 's more likely that all of them are fake , like the crop circles .


On a more serious note , in all of science we 're looking for a balance between data and theory .


In the case of Galileo , he had two problems when he turned his telescope to Saturn .


First of all , there was no theory of planetary rings .


Second of all , his data was grainy and fuzzy , and he couldn 't quite make out what he was looking at .


So he wrote that he had seen — " I have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies . "


And this is what he ended up concluding that he saw .


So without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data , you can 't have a good theory .


It wasn 't solved until 1655 .


This is Christiaan Huygens 's book that catalogs all the mistakes people made trying to figure out what was going on with Saturn .


It wasn 't till Huygens had two things : He had a good theory of planetary rings and how the solar system operated , and he had better telescopic , more fine-grain data in which he could figure out that as the Earth is going around faster — according to Kepler 's Laws — than Saturn , then we catch up with it .


And we see the angles of the rings at different angles , there .


And that , in fact , turns out to be true .


The problem with having a theory is that it may be loaded with cognitive biases .


So one of the problems of explaining why people believe weird things is that we have things , on a simple level , and then I 'll go to more serious ones .


Like , we have a tendency to see faces .


This is the face on Mars .


In 1976 , where there was a whole movement to get NASA to photograph that area because people thought this was monumental architecture made by Martians .


Here 's the close-up of it from 2001 .


If you squint , you can still see the face .


And when you 're squinting , you 're turning that from fine-grain to coarse-grain , so you 're reducing the quality of your data .


And if I didn 't tell you what to look for , you 'd still see the face , because we 're programmed by evolution to see faces .


Faces are important for us socially .


And of course , happy faces , faces of all kinds are easy to see .


You see the happy face on Mars , there .


( Laughter ) If astronomers were frogs , perhaps they 'd see Kermit the Frog .


Do you see him there ? Little froggy legs .


Or if geologists were elephants ?


Religious iconography .


( Laughter ) Discovered by a Tennessee baker in 1996 .


He charged five bucks a head to come see the nun bun till he got a cease-and-desist from Mother Teresa 's lawyer .


Here 's Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Watsonville , just down the street , or is it up the street from here ?


Tree bark is particularly good because it 's nice and grainy , branchy , black-and-white splotchy and you can get the pattern-seeking — humans are pattern-seeking animals .


Here 's the Virgin Mary on the side of a glass window in Sao Paulo .


Here 's when the Virgin Mary made her appearance on a cheese sandwich — which I got to actually hold in a Las Vegas casino — of course , this being America .


( Laughter ) This casino paid $ 28,500 on eBay for the cheese sandwich . ( Laughter )


But who does it really look like ? The Virgin Mary ? ( Laughter )


It has that sort of puckered lips , 1940s-era look .


Virgin Mary in Clearwater , Florida .


I actually went to see this one .


There was a lot of people there .


The faithful come in their wheelchairs and crutches , and so on .


We went down and investigated .


Just to give you a size , that 's Dawkins , me and The Amazing Randi , next to this two , two and a half story-sized image .


All these candles , thousands of candles people had lit in tribute to this .


So we walked around the backside , to see what was going on .


It turns out wherever there 's a sprinkler head and a palm tree , you get the effect .


Here 's the Virgin Mary on the backside , which they started to wipe off .


I guess you can only have one miracle per building .


( Laughter ) So is it really a miracle of Mary , or is it a miracle of Marge ? ( Laughter )


And now I 'm going to finish up with another example of this , with auditory illusions .


There 's this film , " " White Noise , " " with Michael Keaton , about the dead talking back to us .


By the way , the whole business of talking to the dead is not that big a deal .


Anybody can do it , turns out .


It 's getting the dead to talk back that 's the really hard part .


( Laughter ) In this case , supposedly , these messages are hidden in electronic phenomena .


There 's a ReverseSpeech.com web page where I downloaded this stuff .


This is the most famous one of all of these .


Here 's the forward version of the very famous song .


( Music with lyrics ) If there 's a bustle in your hedgerow don 't be alarmed now .


It 's just a spring clean for the May Queen .


Yes , there are two paths you can go by , but in the long run , There 's still time to change the road you 're on .


( Music ends ) Couldn 't you just listen to that all day ?


All right , here it is backwards , and see if you can hear the hidden messages that are supposedly in there .


( Music with unintelligible lyrics ) ( Lyrics ) Satan !


( Unintelligible lyrics continue ) What did you get ? Audience : Satan !


Satan . OK , at least we got " " Satan " " .


Now , I 'll prime the auditory part of your brain to tell you what you 're supposed to hear , and then hear it again .


( Music with lyrics ) ( Music ends ) ( Laughter ) ( Applause ) You can 't miss it when I tell you what 's there . ( Laughter )


I 'm going to just end with a positive , nice little story .


The Skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization .


We 're always looking for little good things that people do .


And in England , there 's a pop singer .


One of the top popular singers in England today , Katie Melua .


And she wrote a beautiful song .


It was in the top five in 2005 , called , " " Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing . " " It 's a love story — she 's sort of the Norah Jones of the UK — about how she much loves her guy , and compared to nine million bicycles , and so forth .


And she has this one passage here .


( Music ) ( Lyrics ) We are 12 billion light-years from the edge That 's a guess , No one can ever say it 's true , But I know that I will always be with you .


Michael Shermer : Well , that 's nice . At least she got it close .


In America it 'd be , " " We 're 6,000 light years from the edge . " " ( Laughter ) But my friend , Simon Singh , the particle physicist now turned science educator , who wrote the book " " The Big Bang , " " and so on , uses every chance he gets to promote good science .


And so he wrote an op-ed piece in " " The Guardian " " about Katie 's song , in which he said , well , we know exactly how far from the edge .


You know , it 's 13.7 billion light years , and it 's not a guess .


We know within precise error bars how close it is .


So we can say , although not absolutely true , it 's pretty close to being true .


And , to his credit , Katie called him up after this op-ed piece came out , and said , " " I 'm so embarrassed . I was in the astronomy club .


I should 've known better . " " And she re-cut the song .


So I will end with the new version .


( Music with lyrics ) We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe .


That 's a good estimate with well-defined error bars .


And with the available information , I predict that I will always be with you .


( Laughter ) How cool is that ?


( Applause )


I was born and raised in North Korea .


Although my family constantly struggled against poverty , I was always loved and cared for first , because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family .


But then the great famine began in 1994 .


I was four years old .


My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight .


I would wander the streets searching for food , and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother 's back eating chips , and wanting to steal them from him .


Hunger is humiliation . Hunger is hopelessness .


For a hungry child , politics and freedom are not even thought of .


On my ninth birthday , my parents couldn 't give me any food to eat .


But even as a child , I could feel the heaviness in their hearts .


Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time , and in 2003 , when I was 13 years old , my father became one of them .


I saw my father wither away and die .


In the same year , my mother disappeared one day , and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money , but that she would return with money and food soon .


Since we had never been separated , and I thought we would be together forever , I didn 't even give her a hug when she left .


It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life .


But again , I didn 't know it was going to be a long goodbye .


I have not seen my mom or my sister since then .


Suddenly , I became an orphan and homeless .


My daily life became very hard , but very simple .


My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash .


But that is no way to survive .


I started to realize , begging would not be the solution .


So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets .


Sometimes , I found small jobs in exchange for food .


Once , I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine , 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day .


I was not uncommon .


Many other orphans survived this way , or worse .


When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains , I hoped that , the next morning , my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food .


That hope kept me alive .


I don 't mean big , grand hope .


I mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread , even though it usually didn 't .


But if I didn 't believe it , I wouldn 't even try , and then I would die .


Hope kept me alive .


Every day , I told myself , no matter how hard things got , still I must live .


After three years of waiting for my sister 's return , I decided to go to China to look for her myself .


I realized I couldn 't survive much longer this way .


I knew the journey would be risky , but I would be risking my life either way .


I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea , or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China .


I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen .


North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission .


Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans , where they face severe punishment .


I decided to cross during the day , first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark , second because I knew I was already taking a risk , and since not many people tried to cross during the day , I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone .


I made it to China on February 15 , 2006 .


I was 16 years old .


I thought things in China would be easier , since there was more food .


I thought more people would help me .


But it was harder than living in North Korea , because I was not free .


I was always worried about being caught and sent back .


By a miracle , some months later , I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans , and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years .


Later that year , an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee .


I went to America without knowing a word of English , yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school .


Even in North Korea , I was an F student .


( Laughter ) And I barely finished elementary school .


And I remember I fought in school more than once a day .


Textbooks and the library were not my playground .


My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying , but it didn 't work .


At one point , my father gave up on me .


He said , " " You 're not my son anymore . " " I was only 11 or 12 , but it hurt me deeply .


But nevertheless , my level of motivation still didn 't change before he died .


So in America , it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school .


I didn 't even go to middle school .


I decided to go , just because they told me to , without trying much .


But one day , I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner .


And during dinner , I wanted to have one more wing , but I realized there were not enough for everyone , so I decided against it .


When I looked down at my plate , I saw the last chicken wing , that my foster father had given me his .


I was so happy .


I looked at him sitting next to me .


He just looked back at me very warmly , but said no words .


Suddenly I remembered my biological father .


My foster father 's small act of love reminded me of my father , who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry , even if he was starving .


I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America , yet my father died of starvation .


My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him , and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him .


And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice .


I took school seriously , and for the first time ever in my life , I received an academic award for excellence , and made dean 's list from the first semester in high school .


( Applause ) That chicken wing changed my life .


( Laughter ) Hope is personal . Hope is something that no one can give to you .


You have to choose to believe in hope .


You have to make it yourself .


In North Korea , I made it myself .


Hope brought me to America .


But in America , I didn 't know what to do , because I had this overwhelming freedom .


My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction , and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America .


I did not come here by myself .


I had hope , but hope by itself is not enough .


Many people helped me along the way to get here .


North Koreans are fighting hard to survive .


They have to force themselves to survive , have hope to survive , but they cannot make it without help .


This is my message to you .


Have hope for yourself , but also help each other .


Life can be hard for everyone , wherever you live .


My foster father didn 't intend to change my life .


In the same way , you may also change someone 's life with even the smallest act of love .


A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger , and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive .


But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph 's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive .


Thank you .


( Applause ) Adrian Hong : Joseph , thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us .


I know you haven 't seen your sister for , you said , it was almost exactly a decade , and in the off chance that she may be able to see this , we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message .


Joseph Kim : In Korean ?


AH : You can do English , then Korean as well .


( Laughter ) JK : Okay , I 'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don 't think I can make it without tearing up .


Nuna , it has been already 10 years that I haven ’ t seen you .


I just wanted to say that I miss you , and I love you , and please come back to me and stay alive .


And I — oh , gosh .


I still haven 't given up my hope to see you .


I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you , and I promise I will not cry again .


( Laughter ) Yes , I 'm just looking forward to seeing you , and if you can 't find me , I will also look for you , and I hope to see you one day .


And can I also make a small message to my mom ?


AH : Sure , please .


JK : I haven 't spent much time with you , but I know that you still love me , and you probably still pray for me and think about me .


I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world .


( Applause )


How many of you had to fill out some sort of web form where you 've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this ?


How many of you found it really , really annoying ?


Okay , outstanding . So I invented that .


( Laughter ) Or I was one of the people who did it .


That thing is called a CAPTCHA .


And the reason it is there is to make sure you , the entity filling out the form , are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times .


The reason it works is because humans , at least non-visually-impaired humans , have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters , whereas computer programs simply can 't do it as well yet .


So for example , in the case of Ticketmaster , the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets , two at a time .


CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet .


And since they 're used so often , a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that is shown to the user is not so fortunate .


So this is an example from the Yahoo registration page .


The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W , A , I , T , which , of course , spell a word .


But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later .


Text : " " Help ! I 've been waiting for over 20 minutes , and nothing happens . " " ( Laughter ) This person thought they needed to wait .


This of course , is not as bad as this poor person .


( Laughter ) CAPTCHA Project is something that we did here at Carnegie Melllon over 10 years ago , and it 's been used everywhere .


Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later , which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA .


This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA , which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon , then we turned it into a startup company .


And then about a year and a half ago , Google actually acquired this company .


So let me tell you what this project started .


So this project started from the following realization : It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world .


When I first heard this , I was quite proud of myself .


I thought , look at the impact that my research has had .


But then I started feeling bad .


See here 's the thing , each time you type a CAPTCHA , essentially you waste 10 seconds of your time .


And if you multiply that by 200 million , you get that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs .


So then I started feeling bad .


( Laughter ) And then I started thinking , well , of course , we can 't just get rid of CAPTCHAs , because the security of the Web sort of depends on them .


But then I started thinking , is there any way we can use this effort for something that is good for humanity ?


So see , here 's the thing .


While you 're typing a CAPTCHA , during those 10 seconds , your brain is doing something amazing .


Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do .


So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds ?


Another way of putting it is , is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve , yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA they solve a little bit of this problem ?


And the answer to that is " " yes , " " and this is what we 're doing now .


So what you may not know is that nowadays while you 're typing a CAPTCHA , not only are you authenticating yourself as a human , but in addition you 're actually helping us to digitize books .


So let me explain how this works .


So there 's a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books .


Google has one . The Internet Archive has one .


Amazon , now with the Kindle , is trying to digitize books .


Basically the way this works is you start with an old book .


You 've seen those things , right ? Like a book ?


( Laughter ) So you start with a book , and then you scan it .


Now scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book .


It gives you an image for every page of the book .


This is an image with text for every page of the book .


The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image .


That 's using a technology called OCR , for optical character recognition , which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there .


Now the problem is that OCR is not perfect .


Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow , OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words .


For example , for things that were written more than 50 years ago , the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words .


So what we 're doing now is we 're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we 're getting people to read them for us while they 're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet .


So the next time you type a CAPTCHA , these words that you 're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize .


And now the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because , you see , one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book , it didn 't know what it was , and it 's going to present it to you .


But since it doesn 't know the answer for it , it cannot grade it for you .


So what we do is we give you another word , one for which the system does know the answer .


We don 't tell you which one 's which , and we say , please type both .


And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer , it assumes you are human , and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly .


And if we repeat this process to like 10 different people and all of them agree on what the new word is , then we get one more word digitized accurately .


So this is how the system works .


And basically , since we released it about three or four years ago , a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA where people wasted their time to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books .


So for example , Ticketmaster .


So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster , you help to digitize a book .


Facebook : Every time you add a friend or poke somebody , you help to digitize a book .


Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using reCAPTCHA .


And in fact , the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words that we 're digitizing per day is really , really large .


It 's about 100 million a day , which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year .


And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet .


( Applause ) Now of course , since we 're doing so many words per day , funny things can happen .


And this is especially true because now we 're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other .


So funny things can happen .


For example , we presented this word .


It 's the word " " Christians " " ; there 's nothing wrong with it .


But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word , bad things can happen .


So we get this . ( Text : bad christians ) But it 's even worse , because the particular website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God .


( Laughter ) Oops . ( Laughter )


Here 's another really bad one .


JohnEdwards.com ( Text : Damn liberal ) ( Laughter ) So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday .


Now , of course , we 're not just insulting people .


See here 's the thing , since we 're presenting two randomly chosen words , interesting things can happen .


So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in , which is called CAPTCHA art .


I 'm sure some of you have heard about it .


Here 's how it works .


Imagine you 're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar , like this CAPTCHA . ( Text : invisible toaster ) Then what you 're supposed to do is you take a screen shot of it .


Then of course , you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book .


But then , first you take a screen shot , and then you draw something that is related to it .


( Laughter ) That 's how it works .


There are tens of thousands of these .


Some of them are very cute . ( Text : clenched it ) ( Laughter ) Some of them are funnier .


( Text : stoned founders ) ( Laughter ) And some of them , like paleontological shvisle , they contain Snoop Dogg . ( Laughter )


Okay , so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA .


So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project .


This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCHA : 750 million , which is a little over 10 percent of the world 's population , has helped us digitize human knowledge .


And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda .


So the question that motivates my research is the following : If you look at humanity 's large-scale achievements , these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically — like for example , building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon — there is a curious fact about them , and it is that they were all done with about the same number off people .


It 's weird ; they were all done with about 100,000 people .


And the reason for that is because , before the Internet , coordinating more than 100,000 people , let alone paying them , was essentially impossible .


But now with the Internet , I 've just shown you a project where we 've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge .


So the question that motivates my research is , if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 , what can we do with 100 million ?


So based on this question , we 've had a lot of different projects that we 've been working on .


Let me tell you about one that I 'm most excited about .


This is something that we 've been semi-quietly working on for the last year and a half or so .


It hasn 't yet been launched . It 's called Duolingo .


Since it hasn 't been launched , shhhhh !


( Laughter ) Yeah , I can trust you 'll do that .


So this is the project . Here 's how it started .


It started with me posing a question to my graduate student , Severin Hacker .


Okay , that 's Severin Hacker .


So I posed the question to my graduate student .


By the way , you did hear me correctly ; his last name is Hacker .


So I posed this question to him : How can we get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free ?


Okay , so there 's a lot of things to say about this question .


First of all , translating the Web .


So right now the Web is partitioned into multiple languages .


A large fraction of it is in English .


If you don 't know any English , you can 't access it .


But there 's large fractions in other different languages , and if you don 't know those languages , you can 't access it .


So I would like to translate all of the Web , or at least most of the Web , into every major language .


So that 's what I would like to do .


Now some of you may say , why can 't we use computers to translate ?


Why can 't we use machine translation ?


Machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there .


Why can 't we use it to translate the whole Web ?


Well the problem with that is that it 's not yet good enough and it probably won 't be for the next 15 to 20 years .


It makes a lot of mistakes .


Even when it doesn 't make a mistake , since it makes so many mistakes , you don 't know whether to trust it or not .


So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine .


Actually it was a forum post .


It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript .


It was translated from Japanese into English .


So I 'll just let you read .


This person starts apologizing for the fact that it 's translated with a computer .


So the next sentence is is going to be the preamble to the question .


So he 's just explaining something .


Remember , it 's a question about JavaScript .


( Text : At often , the goat-time install a error is vomit . ) ( Laughter ) Then comes the first part of the question .


( Text : How many times like the wind , a pole , and the dragon ? ) ( Laughter ) Then comes my favorite part of the question .


( Text : This insult to father 's stones ? ) ( Laughter ) And then comes the ending , which is my favorite part of the whole thing .


( Text : Please apologize for your stupidity . There are a many thank you . ) ( Laughter ) Okay , so computer translation , not yet good enough .


So back to the question .


So we need people to translate the whole Web .


So now the next question you may have is , well why can 't we just pay people to do this ?


We could pay professional language translators to translate the whole Web .


We could do that .


Unfortunately , it would be extremely expensive .


For example , translating a tiny , tiny fraction of the whole Web , Wikipedia , into one other language , Spanish .


Wikipedia exists in Spanish , but it 's very small compared to the size of English .


It 's about 20 percent of the size of English .


If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish , it would cost at least 50 million dollars — and this is at even the most exploited , outsourcing country out there .


So it would be very expensive .


So what we want to do is we want to get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free .


Now if this is what you want to do , you pretty quickly realize you 're going to run into two pretty big hurdles , two big obstacles .


The first one is a lack of bilinguals .


So I don 't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the Web who are bilingual enough to help us translate .


That 's a big problem .


The other problem you 're going to run into is a lack of motivation .


How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the Web for free ?


Normally , you have to pay people to do this .


So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free ?


Now when we were starting to think about this , we were blocked by these two things .


But then we realized , there 's actually a way to solve both these problems with the same solution .


There 's a way to kill two birds with one stone .


And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do , and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals , and that is language education .


So it turns out that today , there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language .


People really , really want to learn a foreign language .


And it 's not just because they 're being forced to do so in school .


For example , in the United States alone , there are over five million people who have paid over $ 500 for software to learn a new language .


So people really , really want to learn a new language .


So what we 've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website — it 's called Duolingo — where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the Web .


And so basically they 're learning by doing .


So the way this works is whenever you 're a just a beginner , we give you very , very simple sentences .


There 's , of course , a lot of very simple sentences on the Web .


We give you very , very simple sentences along with what each word means .


And as you translate them , and as you see how other people translate them , you start learning the language .


And as you get more and more advanced , we give you more and more complex sentences to translate .


But at all times , you 're learning by doing .


Now the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works .


First of all , people are really , really learning a language .


We 're mostly done building it , and now we 're testing it .


People really can learn a language with it .


And they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software .


So people really do learn a language .


And not only do they learn it as well , but actually it 's way more interesting .


Because you see with Duolingo , people are actually learning with real content .


As opposed to learning with made-up sentences , people are learning with real content , which is inherently interesting .


But perhaps more surprisingly , the translations that we get from people using the site , even though they 're just beginners , the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators , which is very surprising .


So let me show you one example .


This is a sentence that was translated from German into English .


The top is the German .


The middle is an English translation that was done by somebody who was a professional English translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation .


And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo , none of whom knew any German before they started using the site .


You can see , it 's pretty much perfect .


Now of course , we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators .


We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator .


Now even though we 're combining the translations , the site actually can translate pretty fast .


So let me show you , this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish .


Remember , this is 50 million dollars-worth of value .


So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish , we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users .


And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users .


Since all the projects that my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users , we 're hopeful that we 'll be able to translate extremely fast with this project .


Now the thing that I 'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education .


So here 's the thing : The current business model for language education is the student pays , and in particular , the student pays Rosetta Stone 500 dollars .


( Laughter ) That 's the current business model .


The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world 's population doesn 't have 500 dollars .


So it 's extremely unfair towards the poor .


This is totally biased towards the rich .


Now see , in Duolingo , because while you learn you 're actually creating value , you 're translating stuff — which for example , we could charge somebody for translations .


So this is how we could monetize this .


Since people are creating value while they 're learning , they don 't have to pay their money , they pay with their time .


But the magical thing here is that they 're paying with their time , but that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language .


So the nice thing about Duolingo is I think it provides a fair business model — one that doesn 't discriminate against poor people .


So here 's the site . Thank you .


( Applause ) So here 's the site .


We haven 't yet launched , but if you go there , you can sign up to be part of our private beta , which is probably going to start in about three or four weeks .


We haven 't yet launched this Duolingo .


By the way , I 'm the one talking here , but actually Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team , some of whom are here .


So thank you .


( Applause )


In Oxford in the 1950s , there was a fantastic doctor , who was very unusual , named Alice Stewart .


And Alice was unusual partly because , of course , she was a woman , which was pretty rare in the 1950s .


And she was brilliant , she was one of the , at the time , the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians .


She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married , after she had kids , and even after she got divorced and was a single parent , she continued her medical work .


And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science , the emerging field of epidemiology , the study of patterns in disease .


But like every scientist , she appreciated that to make her mark , what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it .


The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers .


Most disease is correlated with poverty , but in the case of childhood cancers , the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families .


So , what , she wanted to know , could explain this anomaly ?


Now , Alice had trouble getting funding for her research .


In the end , she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize .


And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data .


Now , she had no idea what to look for .


This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search , so she asked everything she could think of .


Had the children eaten boiled sweets ?


Had they consumed colored drinks ?


Did they eat fish and chips ?


Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing ?


What time of life had they started school ?


And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back , one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of .


By a rate of two to one , the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant .


Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom .


Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point , a threshold .


It flew in the face of conventional wisdom , which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age , which was the X-ray machine .


And it flew in the face of doctors ' idea of themselves , which was as people who helped patients , they didn 't harm them .


Nevertheless , Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956 .


People got very excited , there was talk of the Nobel Prize , and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared .


In fact , she need not have hurried .


It was fully 25 years before the British and medical — British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women .


The data was out there , it was open , it was freely available , but nobody wanted to know .


A child a week was dying , but nothing changed .


Openness alone can 't drive change .


So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands .


So , how did she know that she was right ?


Well , she had a fantastic model for thinking .


She worked with a statistician named George Kneale , and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn 't .


So , Alice was very outgoing and sociable , and George was a recluse .


Alice was very warm , very empathetic with her patients .


George frankly preferred numbers to people .


But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship .


He said , " " My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong . " " He actively sought disconfirmation .


Different ways of looking at her models , at her statistics , different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her .


He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories .


Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong , that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right .


It 's a fantastic model of collaboration — thinking partners who aren 't echo chambers .


I wonder how many of us have , or dare to have , such collaborators .


Alice and George were very good at conflict .


They saw it as thinking .


So what does that kind of constructive conflict require ?


Well , first of all , it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves .


That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive , which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves , and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds , different disciplines , different ways of thinking and different experience , and find ways to engage with them .


That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy .


And the more I 've thought about this , the more I think , really , that that 's a kind of love .


Because you simply won 't commit that kind of energy and time if you don 't really care .


And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds .


Alice 's daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist , they made her think and think and think again .


" " My mother , " " she said , " " My mother didn 't enjoy a fight , but she was really good at them . " " So it 's one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship .


But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face , many of the biggest disasters that we 've experienced , mostly haven 't come from individuals , they 've come from organizations , some of them bigger than countries , many of them capable of affecting hundreds , thousands , even millions of lives .


So how do organizations think ?


Well , for the most part , they don 't .


And that isn 't because they don 't want to , it 's really because they can 't .


And they can 't because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict .


In surveys of European and American executives , fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise .


Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke , afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage , and felt that they were bound to lose .


Eighty-five percent is a really big number .


It means that organizations mostly can 't do what George and Alice so triumphantly did .


They can 't think together .


And it means that people like many of us , who have run organizations , and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can , mostly fail to get the best out of them .


So how do we develop the skills that we need ?


Because it does take skill and practice , too .


If we aren 't going to be afraid of conflict , we have to see it as thinking , and then we have to get really good at it .


So , recently , I worked with an executive named Joe , and Joe worked for a medical device company .


And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on .


He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people .


He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help .


But when he looked around his organization , nobody else seemed to be at all worried .


So , he didn 't really want to say anything .


After all , maybe they knew something he didn 't .


Maybe he 'd look stupid .


But he kept worrying about it , and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved .


In the end , Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns .


And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation .


It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts .


So now Joe had allies . They could think together .


And yes , there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument , but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative , to solve the problem , and to change the device .


Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower , except that like almost all whistle-blowers , he wasn 't a crank at all , he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served .


But he had been so afraid of conflict , until finally he became more afraid of the silence .


And when he dared to speak , he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined .


And his colleagues don 't think of him as a crank .


They think of him as a leader .


So , how do we have these conversations more easily and more often ?


Well , the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they 're prepared to defend .


It doesn 't really matter what the statements are about , what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority .


I think it 's a fantastic system , but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people , and way too late in life .


I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development , if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society .


The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we 've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden .


It comes from information that is freely available and out there , but that we are willfully blind to , because we can 't handle , don 't want to handle , the conflict that it provokes .


But when we dare to break that silence , or when we dare to see , and we create conflict , we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking .


Open information is fantastic , open networks are essential .


But the truth won 't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it .


Openness isn 't the end .


It 's the beginning .


( Applause )


Thank you .


Two years ago , I stood on the TED stage in Arusha , Tanzania .


I spoke very briefly about one of my proudest creations .


It was a simple machine that changed my life .


Before that time , I had never been away from my home in Malawi .


I had never used a computer .


I had never seen an Internet .


On the stage that day , I was so nervous .


My English lost , I wanted to vomit .


( Laughter ) I had never been surrounded by so many azungu , white people . ( Laughter )


There was a story I wouldn 't tell you then .


But well , I 'm feeling good right now .


I would like to share that story today .


We have seven children in my family .


All sisters , excepting me .


This is me with my dad when I was a little boy .


Before I discovered the wonders of science , I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers .


Like everyone else , we grew maize .


One year our fortune turned very bad .


In 2001 we experienced an awful famine .


Within five months all Malawians began to starve to death .


My family ate one meal per day , at night .


Only three swallows of nsima for each one of us .


The food passes through our bodies .


We drop down to nothing .


In Malawi , the secondary school , you have to pay school fees .


Because of the hunger , I was forced to drop out of school .


I looked at my father and looked at those dry fields .


It was the future I couldn 't accept .


I felt very happy to be at the secondary school , so I was determined to do anything possible to receive education .


So I went to a library .


I read books , science books , especially physics .


I couldn 't read English that well .


I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them .


Another book put that knowledge in my hands .


It said a windmill could pump water and generate electricity .


Pump water meant irrigation , a defense against hunger , which we were experiencing by that time .


So I decided I would build one windmill for myself .


But I didn 't have materials to use , so I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials .


Many people , including my mother , said I was crazy .


( Laughter ) I found a tractor fan , shock absorber , PVC pipes .


Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo , I built my machine .


It was one light at first .


And then four lights , with switches , and even a circuit breaker , modeled after an electric bell .


Another machine pumps water for irrigation .


Queues of people start lining up at my house ( Laughter ) to charge their mobile phone .


( Applause ) I could not get rid of them .


( Laughter ) And the reporters came too , which lead to bloggers and which lead to a call from something called TED .


I had never seen an airplane before .


I had never slept in a hotel .


So , on stage that day in Arusha , my English lost , I said something like , " I tried . And I made it . "


So I would like to say something to all the people out there like me to the Africans , and the poor who are struggling with your dreams .


God bless .


Maybe one day you will watch this on the Internet .


I say to you , trust yourself and believe .


Whatever happens , don 't give up .


Thank you .


( Applause )


In the 1980s in the communist Eastern Germany , if you owned a typewriter , you had to register it with the government .


You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter .


And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from .


If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought , they could track down who created that thought .


And we in the West couldn 't understand how anybody could do this , how much this would restrict freedom of speech .


We would never do that in our own countries .


But today in 2011 , if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page , that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer .


This is happening to us today .


And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it .


And this is an example of the ways that our own governments are using technology against us , the citizens .


And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today .


If we take a look at what 's really happening in the online world , we can group the attacks based on the attackers .


We have three main groups .


We have online criminals .


Like here , we have Mr. Dimitry Golubov from the city of Kiev in Ukraine .


And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand .


These guys make money .


They use online attacks to make lots of money , and lots and lots of it .


We actually have several cases of millionaires online , multimillionaires , who made money with their attacks .


Here 's Vladimir Tsastsin form Tartu in Estonia .


This is Alfred Gonzalez .


This is Stephen Watt .


This is Bjorn Sundin .


This is Matthew Anderson , Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so on .


These guys make their fortunes online , but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking , or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer .


The U.S. Secret Service , two months ago , froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here , and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it when it was frozen .


Mr. Jain himself is on the loose ; nobody knows where he is .


And I claim it 's already today that it 's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world .


And it 's very obvious that this is only going to get worse .


In the future , the majority of crime will be happening online .


The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money .


They 're motivated by something else — motivated by protests , motivated by an opinion , motivated by the laughs .


Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks .


So those are the three main attackers : criminals who do it for the money , hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest , but then the last group are nation states , governments doing the attacks .


And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar .


This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens .


DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority from The Netherlands — or actually , it was .


It was running into bankruptcy last fall because they were hacked into .


Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly .


And I asked last week in a meeting with Dutch government representatives , I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack .


And his answer was yes .


So how do people die as the result of a hack like this ?


Well DigiNotar is a C.A.


They sell certificates .


What do you do with certificates ?


Well you need a certificate if you have a website that has https , SSL encrypted services , services like Gmail .


Now we all , or a big part of us , use Gmail or one of their competitors , but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran , where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections , so the local government can 't snoop on their discussions .


Except they can if they hack into a foreign C.A.


and issue rogue certificates .


And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar .


What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening , for example , in Egypt ?


Well in Egypt , the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police in April 2011 , and when they were looting the building they found lots of papers .


Among those papers , was this binder entitled " " FINFISHER . " " And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany which had sold the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting — and in very large scale — all the communication of the citizens of the country .


They had sold this tool for 280,000 Euros to the Egyptian government .


The company headquarters are right here .


So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens .


But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well .


For example , in Germany , just a couple of weeks ago the so-called State Trojan was found , which was a trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens .


If you are a suspect in a criminal case , well it 's pretty obvious , your phone will be tapped .


But today , it goes beyond that .


They will tap your Internet connection .


They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a trojan , which enables them to watch all your communication , to listen to your online discussions , to collect your passwords .


Now when we think deeper about things like these , the obvious response from people should be that , " " Okay , that sounds bad , but that doesn 't really affect me because I 'm a legal citizen .


Why should I worry ?


Because I have nothing to hide . " " And this is an argument , which doesn 't make sense .


Privacy is implied .


Privacy is not up for discussion .


This is not a question between privacy against security .


It 's a question of freedom against control .


And while we might trust our governments right now , right here in 2011 , any right we give away will be given away for good .


And do we trust , do we blindly trust , any future government , a government we might have 50 years from now ?


And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years .


We are losing our listening .


We spend roughly 60 percent of our communication time listening , but we 're not very good at it .


We retain just 25 percent of what we hear .


Now — not you , not this talk , but that is generally true .


( Laughter ) Let 's define listening as making meaning from sound .


It 's a mental process , and it 's a process of extraction .


We use some pretty cool techniques to do this .


One of them is pattern recognition .


( Crowd noises ) So in a cocktail party like this , if I say , " " David , Sara , pay attention " " — some of you just sat up .


We recognize patterns to distinguish noise from signal , and especially our name .


Differencing is another technique we use .


If I left this pink noise on for more than a couple of minutes , ( Pink noise ) you would literally cease to hear it .


We listen to differences ; we discount sounds that remain the same .


And then there is a whole range of filters .


These filters take us from all sound down to what we pay attention to .


Most people are entirely unconscious of these filters .


But they actually create our reality in a way , because they tell us what we 're paying attention to right now .


I 'll give you one example of that .


Intention is very important in sound , in listening .


When I married my wife , I promised her I would listen to her every day as if for the first time .


Now that 's something I fall short of on a daily basis .


( Laughter ) But it 's a great intention to have in a relationship . ( Laughter )


But that 's not all .


Sound places us in space and in time .


If you close your eyes right now in this room , you 're aware of the size of the room from the reverberation and the bouncing of the sound off the surfaces ; you 're aware of how many people are around you , because of the micro-noises you 're receiving .


And sound places us in time as well , because sound always has time embedded in it .


In fact , I would suggest that our listening is the main way that we experience the flow of time from past to future .


So , " " Sonority is time and meaning " " — a great quote .


I said at the beginning , we 're losing our listening .


Why did I say that ?


Well , there are a lot of reasons for this .


First of all , we invented ways of recording — first writing , then audio recording and now video recording as well .


The premium on accurate and careful listening has simply disappeared .


Secondly , the world is now so noisy , ( Noise ) with this cacophony going on visually and auditorily , it 's just hard to listen ; it 's tiring to listen .


Many people take refuge in headphones , but they turn big , public spaces like this , shared soundscapes , into millions of tiny , little personal sound bubbles .


In this scenario , nobody 's listening to anybody .


We 're becoming impatient .


We don 't want oratory anymore ; we want sound bites .


And the art of conversation is being replaced — dangerously , I think — by personal broadcasting .


I don 't know how much listening there is in this conversation , which is sadly very common , especially in the UK .


We 're becoming desensitized .


Our media have to scream at us with these kinds of headlines in order to get our attention .


And that means it 's harder for us to pay attention to the quiet , the subtle , the understated .


This is a serious problem that we 're losing our listening .


This is not trivial , because listening is our access to understanding .


Conscious listening always creates understanding , and only without conscious listening can these things happen .


A world where we don 't listen to each other at all is a very scary place indeed .


So I 'd like to share with you five simple exercises , tools you can take away with you , to improve your own conscious listening .


Would you like that ?


Audience : Yes !


Good . The first one is silence .


Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate , so that you can hear the quiet again .


If you can 't get absolute silence , go for quiet , that 's absolutely fine .


Second , I call this " " the mixer . " " ( Noise ) So even if you 're in a noisy environment like this — and we all spend a lot of time in places like this — listen in the coffee bar to how many channels of sound can I hear ?


How many individual channels in that mix am I listening to ?


You can do it in a beautiful place as well , like in a lake .


How many birds am I hearing ?


Where are they ? Where are those ripples ?


It 's a great exercise for improving the quality of your listening .


Third , this exercise I call " " savoring , " " and this is a beautiful exercise .


It 's about enjoying mundane sounds .


This , for example , is my tumble dryer .


( Dryer ) It 's a waltz — one , two , three ; one , two , three ; one , two , three .


I love it !


Or just try this one on for size .


( Coffee grinder ) Wow !


So , mundane sounds can be really interesting — if you pay attention .


I call that the " " hidden choir " " — it 's around us all the time .


The next exercise is probably the most important of all of these , if you just take one thing away .


This is listening positions — the idea that you can move your listening position to what 's appropriate to what you 're listening to .


This is playing with those filters .


Remember I gave you those filters ?


It 's starting to play with them as levers , to get conscious about them and to move to different places .


These are just some of the listening positions , or scales of listening positions , that you can use .


There are many .


Have fun with that . It 's very exciting .


And finally , an acronym .


You can use this in listening , in communication .


If you 're in any one of those roles — and I think that probably is everybody who 's listening to this talk — the acronym is RASA , which is the Sanskrit word for " " juice " " or " " essence . " " And RASA stands for " " Receive , " " which means pay attention to the person ; " " Appreciate , " " making little noises like " " hmm , " " " " oh , " " " " OK " " ; " " Summarize " " — the word " " so " " is very important in communication ; and " " Ask , " " ask questions afterwards .


Now sound is my passion , it 's my life .


I wrote a whole book about it . So I live to listen .


That 's too much to ask for most people .


But I believe that every human being needs to listen consciously in order to live fully — connected in space and in time to the physical world around us , connected in understanding to each other , not to mention spiritually connected , because every spiritual path I know of has listening and contemplation at its heart .


That 's why we need to teach listening in our schools as a skill .


Why is it not taught ? It 's crazy .


And if we can teach listening in our schools , we can take our listening off that slippery slope to that dangerous , scary world that I talked about , and move it to a place where everybody is consciously listening all the time , or at least capable of doing it .


Now , I don 't know how to do that , but this is TED , and I think the TED community is capable of anything .


So I invite you to connect with me , connect with each other , take this mission out .


And let 's get listening taught in schools , and transform the world in one generation to a conscious , listening world — a world of connection , a world of understanding and a world of peace .


Thank you for listening to me today .


( Applause )


( Music ) ( Applause ) ( Music ) ( Applause )


I 'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values .


Now , it 's generally understood that questions of morality — questions of good and evil and right and wrong — are questions about which science officially has no opinion .


It 's thought that science can help us get what we value , but it can never tell us what we ought to value .


And , consequently , most people — I think most people probably here — think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life : questions like , " " What is worth living for ? " " " What is worth dying for ? "


" What constitutes a good life ? "


So , I 'm going to argue that this is an illusion — that the separation between science and human values is an illusion — and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history .


Now , it 's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values , because science deals with facts , and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres .


It 's often thought that there 's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be .


But I think this is quite clearly untrue .


Values are a certain kind of fact .


They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures .


Why is it that we don 't have ethical obligations toward rocks ?


Why don 't we feel compassion for rocks ?


It 's because we don 't think rocks can suffer . And if we 're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects , as indeed we are , it 's because we think they 're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering .


Now , the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim : This is something that we could be right or wrong about . And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects .


And there 's no notion , no version of human morality and human values that I 've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes .


Even if you get your values from religion , even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death — either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell — you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes .


And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim , which , of course , may or may not be true .


Now , to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life , for human beings , we know that there is a continuum of such facts .


We know that it 's possible to live in a failed state , where everything that can go wrong does go wrong — where mothers cannot feed their children , where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration , where people are murdered indiscriminately .


And we know that it 's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic , to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable .


And we know — we know — that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space .


Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea ?


Probably not .


Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye , so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors ? Probably not .


There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish , whether or not we understand these truths .


And morality relates to these truths .


So , in talking about values we are talking about facts .


Now , of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels — from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements .


But if we 're going to talk about human well-being we are , of necessity , talking about the human brain .


Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain — whatever happens after death .


Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife , in this life , his personality — his rather unfortunate personality — is the product of his brain .


So the contributions of culture — if culture changes us , as indeed it does , it changes us by changing our brains .


And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can , at least in principle , be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind — neuroscience , psychology , etc .


So , what I 'm arguing is that value 's reduced to facts — to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings .


And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings .


And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape , with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures , both personal and collective .


And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access , that few people access .


And these await our discovery .


Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual .


Perhaps there are other states that we can 't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them .


Now , let me be clear about what I 'm not saying . I 'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space , or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question .


I don 't think , for instance , that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child , or whether we should bomb Iran 's nuclear facilities , or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense .


( Laughter ) But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers , whether or not we can find them .


And just admitting this — just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish — will change the way we talk about morality , and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future .


For instance , there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal , where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board , hard , and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin .


And hundreds of thousands of children , incidentally , are subjected to this every year .


The locations of these enlightened districts , I think , will fail to surprise you .


We 're not talking about Connecticut .


And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious .


The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod , lest we spoil the child — this is in Proverbs 13 and 20 , and I believe , 23 .


But we can ask the obvious question : Is it a good idea , generally speaking , to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior ?


( Laughter ) Is there any doubt that this question has an answer , and that it matters ?


Now , many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined , and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed .


And so , how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being ?


Well , consider by analogy , the concept of physical health .


The concept of physical health is undefined .


As we just heard from Michael Specter , it has changed over the years .


When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30 .


It 's now around 80 in the developed world .


There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability .


People will send you donations when you 're in that condition .


( Laughter ) Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open , genuinely open for revision , does not make it vacuous .


The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science .


Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape : There may be equivalent ways to thrive ; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing .


Now , why wouldn 't this undermine an objective morality ?


Well think of how we talk about food : I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat .


There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food .


But there 's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison .


The fact that there are many right answers to the question , " " What is food ? " " does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition .


Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions .


So , for instance , if it 's really wrong to lie , it must always be wrong to lie , and if you can find an exception , well then there 's no such thing as moral truth .


Why would we think this ?


Consider , by analogy , the game of chess .


Now , if you 're going to play good chess , a principle like , " " Don 't lose your Queen , " " is very good to follow .


But it clearly admits some exceptions .


There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do .


There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do .


And yet , chess is a domain of perfect objectivity .


The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all .


Now , this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere .


Consider the great problem of women 's bodies : What to do about them ?


Well this is one thing you can do about them : You can cover them up .


Now , it is the position , generally speaking , of our intellectual community that while we may not like this , we might think of this as " " wrong " " in Boston or Palo Alto , who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags ?


And who are we to say , even , that they 're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable , or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way ?


Well , who are we not to say this ?


Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this ?


I 'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil — women should be able to wear whatever they want , as far as I 'm concerned .


But what does voluntary mean in a community where , when a girl gets raped , her father 's first impulse , rather often , is to murder her out of shame ?


Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute : Your daughter gets raped , and what you want to do is kill her .


What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing ?


Now , to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society .


For instance , this is what it 's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world .


Now , granted , for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images .


( Laughter ) But if we are in a reflective mood , we can ask , " " Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women 's bodies ? " " I mean , is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children ?


Probably not . OK , so perhaps there 's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance .


( Applause ) Perhaps there are many such places — again , given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape .


But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak .


Now the irony , from my perspective , is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another .


And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind , not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being .


In fact , the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering .


This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue .


But the demagogues are right about one thing : We need a universal conception of human values .


Now , what stands in the way of this ?


Well , one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality — especially secular , academic , scientist types .


When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don 't in any other area of our lives .


So , for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion , and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness .


On the other hand , we have someone like Ted Bundy ; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women .


So , we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one 's time .


( Laughter ) Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say , " " Well , there 's nothing for the Dalai Lama to be really right about — really right about — or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science .


He likes chocolate , he likes vanilla .


There 's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other . " " Notice that we don 't do this in science .


On the left you have Edward Witten .


He 's a string theorist .


If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around , in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten .


The other half will tell you they don 't like the question .