Photo: James Duncan Davidson

In an extraordinary finale for TED2013, Eric Whitacre stages a type of performance that has never been seen before, with a choir assembled to sing his composition, “Cloudburst.” It’s not just any choir. He’s joined on stage by 100 live singers formed from choirs from California State University, Long Beach Campus, California State University, Fullerton Campus, and Riverside City College. That’s been done before. He is also joined, via Skype, by 32 singers from 32 different countries connecting from their homes.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Whitacre is famous for his Virtual Choir, and the follow-up, shown first on stage at TED. But no one has ever attempted to put a live choir together with a virtual one. In part this is because of the latency issues of the connection. It’s less than a second, but in singing that is still a potentially huge problem. So, he adapted “Cloudburst,” one of his earliest pieces, to embrace that latency.

The effect is stunning. We listen to this amazing piece, aware of the vast connection enabled by the Internet.

Photo: Ryan Lash

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

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Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Jared Diamond on why societies collapse

Growing old in traditional societies

Jared Diamond is the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was a provocative answer to the question of why Europe dominated the world for much of recent history. More recently, he has written The World Before Yesterday, an investigation of traditional societies, and what the modern world might learn from them.

For this talk, he’s focusing on one chapter of that book and ask the question: what can we learn about how to treat elderly people from traditional societies? There are many, many traditional societies, and they are very different from modern societies. “Tribes,” says Diamond, “constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a society.” He is quick to add that they shouldn’t scorned as primitive, nor romanticized as happy and peaceful.

Now in our society, most old people end up living separately from their children, and away from the friends they grew up with. In traditional societies everyone lives out their lives among their children and friends. That says, their treatment varies wildly.

At the worst extreme, many get rid of elderly by one of several methods:

• Neglect and not feeding them.
• Abandoning them when the group moves.
• Encouraging suicide.
• Killing them.

This happens, says Diamond, mainly under two conditions: Nomads that are incapable of physically carrying them, or people living in marginal or fluctuating environments, such as the arctic or deserts. To us it sounds horrible, “But what could those traditional societies do differently?”

On the opposite extreme are the New Guinea farming societies he has been studying recently and most other sedentary farming societies. There the elderly are fed, remain and live in the same hut or a nearby hut to their children.

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What does this mean?

There are two reasons for this variation, the usefulness of old people and the society’s values. There are many things that elderly people contribute to their societies: They may be effective in producing food. They can babysitting grandchildren, freeing their children to hunt and gather. They can craft things. And often they are the leaders and the most knowledgeable. The last point has a huge significance that would never occur to us in literate societies, “It’s their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death.” In other cases, the society places an emphasis on respect for the elderly, as in East Asia. That contrasts strongly with the United States. Here, the elderly are at a huge disadvantage. For example in job applications, or in hospitals — in that case there is an explicit policy to treat younger people first.

There are several reasons for that low status: The Protestant work ethic, the emphasis on self-reliance and indepenence, and the cult of youth. Clearly, there have been many changes for the better, but there have also been changes for the worse:

• There are more old people and fewer young people than at any time. This makes each elderly person more of a burden.
• The breaking of social ties with age. Americans move on average every 5 years, and are likely to end up away from their children and friends.
• Formal retirement from the workforce, and the loss of self-esteem which accompanies that.
• They are, “Objectively less useful than in traditional societies.” The slow pace of change there means what you learn as a child is still useful. Not in ours. (For example, the TV set Diamond grew up with in 1948 had three knobs, today he has a remote with 41 buttons.)

What can we do?

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The lessons

This is clearly a huge problem, but Diamond thinks there are a few good takeaways from traditional societies about the value of our elders:

• Elderly people are increasingly useful for high-quality child care, particularly as women enter workforce. Compared to alternative of paid child-care, superior motivated child-care.
• They have gained in value because of the experience in living condition that are gone, but might come back. None of the young people, including most voters and politicians, have lived through a depression, or a World War.
• While there are many things they can’t do as well, there are many things they can do better. Some skills increase with age, like understanding of people and human relationships, the ability to help others without ego, and understanding and making connections between large, interdisciplinary data sets. That makes them better at supervising, administrating, advising, and simliar roles.

It’s a lot of food for thought. He reminds us that we should consider, without romanticizing, that, “Traditional society elders have traditionally more rich lives. They think of dangers far less than we do, and they don’t die of heart disease and diabetes.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

When Daniel Ogilvie was a child, he often imagined what would it be like to be dead. (“I think that’s why I was so popular.”) He’d imagine himself in a coffin, cold and lonely. So he asked his Sunday school teacher what heaven was like. What he heard: Heaven is like a picnic that goes on forever with friends and loved ones. That didn’t appeal: How long, wondered Ogilvie, before they got on each other’s nerves? “I think four or five hours into eternity, and I would have had it.”

Ogilvie grew up and became a professor of psychology at Rutgers University. But he was reminded of those childish thoughts when his 4-year-old daughter came to him crying one night and said, “I don’t want to be a thing that dies.” He didn’t know how to respond; his wife simply said, “Don’t worry, dear, you have a long life ahead of you.”

Now, Ogilvie thought, for many families, that would be the time to talk about heaven. “It’s one of many platforms for later discussions about God, the soul and the afterlife.” And he is worried that how we do this. Afterlife beliefs are not taught to kids as “This is what we believe,” but rather as “These are facts.” These ideas are then internalized, and protected by feelings. Views that accord with it are accepted, views that don’t are attacked.

He designed a course to explore that: “Causes and Consequences of Soul Beliefs.” And in that class, they uncovered some interesting ideas. For example, why is it so easy for children to understand the idea that there’s a soul and there’s an afterlife? It is, he thinks, because “They already suspect that something is going to survive their death.” For example, as a child in his imaginary coffin, he thought he was cold and lonely: He was imagining himself dead, but his psychology continued.

One of the remarkable things about humans, says Ogilvie, is that we are able to be in one place and imagine ourselves somewhere else. “We’re always thinking and preparing for the next step.” That’s what happened to his daughter. She “was lying in bed thinking about mental time travel. She went too far and came back with very bad news.” We can imagine all kinds of things, but the thought of death is unacceptable.

And Ogilvie wants to make clear, “Religions have been good for us for most of history.” They helped with group bonding. With more organization though, there is ”the emergence of priesthood, the emergence of rulers, chiefs who said you not only need to behave yourself in this particular way but that this is how the gods want you to do it.” They exert social control. “I’ve noticed people with different beliefs don’t like each other,” he drily notes. “Lots of wars are fought over it. That’s a big concern for me.”

So, he asks us to do what he asks his students to do. “Talk about what you were told to believe. Have that conversation with other people.” That gives us a broader perspective. He finishes by returning to what his wife was able to do with his daughter, “My wife directed a conversation to the joys, the sorrows, the beauty, the awesome opportunities of this life. Engage in this conversation. Do it for me, for yourself, for the wellbeing of our planet.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability

“If you’re middle-aged and North American, you probably learned to dance when you were in a gymnasium in junior high.” Allison Hunt didn’t get that training, because her mother was always chaperoning the dances, and worse than that: dancing. What could be more embarrassing to a teenager? She says: “You know the expression, dance like no one is watching? I was at the back of the gym watching like no one was dancing.”

In this short audience talk, Hunt talks about what happened after her recent hip replacement. She was recovering, and saw Brené Brown’s talk on vulnerability. Deciding that she needed to get past the embarrassment of the past, she took private hip-hop lessons. One on one. “I take my vulnerability very seriously.”

The good news: You don’t need to move your feet. It’s all upper-body. As her instructor said, “When you’re in a club on the dance floor, no one can see your feet.”

So she learned, and she shares four rules of hip-hop that helped her relax.

1. No smiling in hip-hop.
2. Remember you have hands. If you don’t, you will default into jazz-hands or the dreaded finger guns. Use fists, that’s more badass. That’s more, “I think ‘mother’ is half a word.”
3. Music is vital. Don’t be caught dancing without it.
4. The louder the music, the better you dance.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Helen Fisher: Why we love, why we cheat

Humans have sex like apes

Christopher Ryan begins his talk with a strong reminder, “We didn’t descend from apes. We are apes.” A special kind, but we are one. We’re closer to chimps and bonobos than they are to any other primate. But he wants to know, “What kind of ape are we? Particularly in terms of our sexuality.”

That’s a subject he’s been investigating as the co-author, with Cacilda Jethá, of Sex at Dawn. He says that there has been a standard narrative — that men and women are locked in an eternal struggle. That throughout history men have “leased” women’s sexuality in return for security.

This narrative is mistaken. It turns out that in many societies those things were shared in what he calls a “fierce egalitarianism.” Ryan makes it clear that he is not saying they were noble savages. But he notes that that social structure did exist, and is further saying this extends to sexuality. That “human sexuality has essentially evolved, until agriculture, as a way of maintaining and establishing the complex social networks that our ancestors were very good at.” He is also quick to note he is saying ancestors were promiscuous, but is not saying they were having sex with strangers, because, “There were no strangers.”

This is also not to criticize monogamy. “To argue that our ancestors were sexual omnivores,” says Ryan, “is no more a criticism of monogamy than arguing that our ancestors were dietary omnivores is a criticism of vegetarianism.”

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Evidence from anatomy and anthropology

Where did our misconceptions about sex come from? Well, Darwin, as it turns out, was a world-class Victorian prude. He was fascinated by the colorful genital swelling in bonobos, but what he didn’t know is that female chimps have sex 1-4 times an hour with up to a dozen partners. Furthermore, Ryan notes that female chimps are sexually available for 40% of their menstrual cycles, but bonobos for 90% — almost as much as humans, who are capable of engaging in sex at any point in their cycle. That is a trait that is vanishingly rare among mammals.

For Ryan, a key question to understanding the origin of human sexuality is, “Are human beings a species that evolved in the context of sperm competition?” Are they competing against each other or with the sperm of other men as well? It doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, the average human has sex about a thousand times per birth. “If that seems high to you,” laughs Ryan, “don’t worry, it seems low to other people in the audience.” A more typical number among apes is to have sex about a dozen times per birth. Additionally, Ryan notes, humans and bonobos are among the only animals that have sex face to face. They also have external testicles. Says Ryan, ”External testicles are like having an extra fridge in the garage for beer. If you’re the kind of guy that has a beer fridge, you expect a party to happen at any moment.”

The evidence that the standard model isn’t correct extends beyond anatomy to anthropology. When one looks, they find all kinds of societies which have sexual practices that should not exist if the standard model is correct. In one culture, they found no shame about sex, and women with many lovers — some with well over 100. Who takes care of the children of those unions? The responsibility falls to the mother, her sisters and brothers. The biological father has no role.

In the Amazon basin, there are a few societies where a child can have many fathers. Those cultures believe that a fetus is made of accumulated semen. A woman who wants a child who is smart, funny and strong will have sex with one man who is smart, one who is funny and one who is strong. When the child is born, each of these men will come forward. Paternity is a team endeavor.

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What does this mean?

Why is this important? Ryan is worried: “Our evolved nature is in conflict with many aspects of the modern world…. There is a conflict between what we feel and what we’re told we should feel.”

He hopes that thinking about the origin of sex will make us become more tolerant of alternative arrangements than the Victorian models. And most importantly, to “finally put to rest the notion that men have an innate right or instinctive need to control women’s sexual behavior.” He says our real fight is not between the genders, but with “an outdated Victorian notion of morality, that conflates desire with property rights.”

In other words: Forget about “men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Men are from Africa, and women are from Africa.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Adam Spencer is a radio host in in Sydney during the morning commute. But he says he’s here not as a radio host or as a comedian, “But as someone who is was and always will be a mathematician.”

He got bit in second grade when a teacher told him, “That would be like putting a square peg in a round hole.” He said, not trying to be funny, “But Miss, surely if the diameter of the square is less than the diameter of the circle, then surely the square peg will go straight through the round hole.” Silence until his friend leaned over and punched him in the head. That punch was meant to send a message — the world was branching into two paths and he had to make a decision. “I took a look at the road map of life, and ran off down the street marked GEEK as fast as my chubby, asthmatic legs woud take me.”

Spencer explains his love of mathematics: “Numbers are the notes with which the symphony of the universe is written.” Today, his goal is to show us some of the most beautiful notes. For him, those are the prime numbers. Most of us remember that 6 isn’t prime, while 7 is, because 6 is the product of two smaller numbers, 2 and 3, while 7 isn’t. There are two things Spencer wants us to know about primes: 1 is not a prime (“Proving that fact is a great party trick. At the right party.”), and there are an infinite number of them.

Despite the fact that there are infinitely many primes, mathematicians at any point in history want to know: What is the biggest prime we know? Now he’s going to do some math, but, “Don’t. freak. out.” Just remember that 2⁵ is 2x2x2x2x2.

It turns out most of the giant primes we know take the form 2^{(prime number)} -1. Not all of them, 2¹¹-1 is not prime, but 2¹³-1, 2¹⁷-1, and 2¹⁹-1 are. “Then they thin out.”

Over the years, many have searched for primes like these. In 1876, 2¹²⁷-1 was proven to be prime, an accomplishment that earned Edouard Lucas a place on European currency, “Back when that was a compliment.”

It can also be dramatic to show that a number is not prime. For decades, mathematician knew that 2⁶⁷-1 was not prime, but didn’t know the factors. In 1903 at a major mathematics meeting, Frank Nelson Cole walked up to the board and started writing. He never said a word, just multiplied the numbers out, showing that he had factored the number. The room went wild.

Computers, of course, changed everything. By 1996 2^^1,398,269-1 was known to be prime. Most recently, in fact so recently Spencer had to change is talk because of it, Curtis Cooper found that 2^57,885,161-1 was prime. That number is 17,425,170 digits long, and would be one and a half times the length of the Harry Potter novels if you wrote it out.

What comes through so clearly in the talk is just how excited Spencer is about this. He says, “We know this is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime. That fills me with almost sexual excitement, and who am I kidding when I say almost.”

Why do we care about this? There are practical uses of primes in cryptography and testing microchips, but for Spencer it’s much more. Currently the searches are done as a large networked hunt, with many people and computers participating. “This is a metaphor for the time in which we live,” says Spencer, “When human minds and machines can conquer together… How lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together.”

It is inspirational, because, like the Higgs Boson and many other scientific voyages of discovery, “We thought it might be there and we went and found it.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“80% of deaf people in the world,” says Mohamed Jemni, “do not have access to education.” Jemni, professor of ICT and Educational Technologies at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, is working with new technology to find ways of helping the deaf to communicate. His team has developed WebSign, an extraordinary set of applications, to “break the silence of deaf.”

The first example he shows is a piece of software that can do automatic translation of text into sign. When someone types, an avatar on screen translates. It’s striking both how simple it seems, and that no one had done it before.

But it’s not simple. To make it work, they need a large dictionary of signs. That could have been an enormous task, taking vase resources. However, they have developed a very simple interface to create signs without special skills, setting the configuration of the hands, and the facial expressions (a crucial component of sign language). Any user can do this. Using this interface they can us volunteer resources to create this dictionary. In fact, they need dictionaries, not just one, since sign language is not universal — there are many, many variants.

They have also developed other applications.

• One interface is designed to help people in learning and teaching sign language. They produce multimedia content, and the avatar appears to teach the language.
• A crucial piece of communicating in the modern world is mobile phones. Their software can auto-translate MMS messages, enabling communication, even for those who are illiterate in the written language.
• Consider announcement services. What happens if you are deaf and riding a train, and a crucial announcement is played on the public address system? What could you do? Well, his application can diffuse the message via MMS to local phones, which can translate it into sign.

He’s developed all these applications to improve the life of people  with disabilities. Jemni believes that, “The disability is not the problem, the accessibility is the problem.” He wants to disseminate this technology is everywhere, and is looking to share it with anyone, “who wants to contribute to breaking the silence of deaf.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The growing desert

Allan Savory has dedicated his life to studying management of grasslands. And if that doesn’t sound exciting, just wait, because it touches on the deepest roots of climate change and the future of the planet.

“The most massive, tsunami, perfect storm is bearing down on us,” is the grim beginning to Savory’s talk. This storm is the result of rising population, of land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. Savory is also unsure of the belief that new technology will solve all of the problems. He agrees that only tech will create alternatives to fossil fuels, but that’s not the only thing causing climate change.

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” he says. It’s a process that happens if we leave ground bare, allowing water to evaporate. Even heavy rainfalls will quickly vanish. Terrifyingly, about two-thirds of the world’s land is desertifying. This is huge, because ”the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil and organic matter. When we damage soils, we give off carbon.”

Even worse, we might think that only arid and semi-arid land is becoming desert, but tall grasslands are in danger as well. They can have a cancer “that we don’t recognize until it’s terminal form.”

This is mostly caused by livestock. Everyone knows this, says Savory. Scientists have known it for decades. Livestock damage the land, leading to dry ground, leading to desert. This makes sense, and turns out to be quite wrong.

A terrible mistake

In the 1950s, Savory helped to set aside large areas of Africa for national parks. As soon as they removed the people (to protect the animals), the land deteriorated. His theory, backed up by data, was that it was because there were too many elephants. That was “political dynamite,” he said, but a panel agreed with his assessment.

So they shot 40,000 elephants.

But the deterioration only got worse. The elephants were not the problem after all. Says Savory, “That was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life. I will carry that to my grave.” It did give Savory one thing: “I was absolutely determined to find solutions.”

Later, in California he was shocked to find similar problems in national parks, but there was no livestock nearby. So he looked at research stations where cattle had been removed, to prove that that would stop desertification. It didn’t. ”Clearly,” he says, “we have never understood what is causing desertification.”

If it wasn’t livestock, as had been assumed for centuries, what was it? “What we had failed to understand was that … the soil and vegetation developed with large numbers of grazing animals.” They also had predators, and so defended themselves by making herds, which are forced to move. This movement prevented over-grazing, while periodic trampling produced good soil. It wasn’t the livestock, but the way the livestock were kept by farmers.

The problems spiral out from this failure to understand. If grass dies on its own, at the end of a season, it must decay biologically before the next growing season. If it doesn’t, it will stifle the next growth. The typical method used to deal with that is to burn the grassland. That does remove the dead grass, allowing a new crop to grow, but it is very damaging, releasing an amount of carbon equivalent to 6,000 cars/second.

Holistic management

So what can they do? “There is only one option left to climatologists and scientists. That is to do the unthinkable: to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for the herds.” Those herds mulch it down, leaving both the trampled grass and their dung. The grass is then free to grow without having damaged with fire.

Now, how do you actually do that? Herders had 10,000 years of experience moving animals, “but they had created the great man-made deserts of the world.” And then 100 years of modern science that accelerated that process. Clearly more was needed.

He studied other professions — and found new management techniques. With this, he was able to develop what he calls Holistic Management — a way of moving livestock around to mimic the patterns of nature.

The results are stunning. For location after location he shows two comparison photos, one using his technique, one not. The difference is, “a profound change,” and he’s not kidding — in some cases the locations are unrecognizable (in one case the audience gasped). Not only is the land greener, crop yields are increasing. For example, in Patagonia, an expanding desert, they put 25,000 sheep into one flock. They found an extraordinary 50% improvement in production of land in the first year.

“What we are doing globally is causing climate change, as much or more than by fossil fuels,” says Savory. It is also causing poverty, suffering, and war. “If this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop climate change even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels.”

He is currently using this on 15 million hectares on five continents. He estimated that if we do it on half the available land, the growth with take in enough carbon to go back to pre-industrial levles, while feeding people.

“I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for our children, for their children, and for all of humanity.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao were the winners in British Columbia of the 2012 Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada. After a visit to a Vancouver waste station, Wang and Yao were blown away by the enormous amount of waste in plastic. Plastic is very hard to sort for recycling — all types have a similar density. Says Wang, “Plastics are useful, but the downside of this convenience is that plastics cause serious problems like the destruction of ecosystems.”

So Wang and Yao decided to see if there was a way to break them down … with bacteria! It’s a cool idea, but difficult. They made a proposal in grade 12: Find a bacteria from local river to metabolize phthalates. Phthalates are a component of plastic, but they’re not well bonded, so they easily pollute and are found in products like babies’ toys, cosmetics, food wraps. In fact, the EPA has classified them as a top-priority pollutant.

Wang and Yao figured that if there were places along the local river that were contaminated, then maybe bacteria have evolved to degrade them. So they met a professor who gave them lab space and set to work. They collected samples from three sites, and enriched cultures with phthalates as the only food source. And they discovered that “bacteria can do it” — several local species had indeed evolved to metabolize phthalates. They DNA-sequenced the bacteria, and found several that were not previously associated with phthalate degradation. That’s a real discovery.

Most interestingly, Wang says, “We found the most efficient degraders came from the local landfill.” Nature was indeed evolving ways of dealing with the problem, one that we could someday use. Yao finishes by noting, ”We weren’t the first ones to break down phthalates, but we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem.”

Photo: James duncan Davidson

Recently, the New York Times released Snow Fall, an extraordinary interactive experience that was heralded by many as a milestone in interactive narrative. The experience was enhanced by extra media, as had many projects before. But unlike previous projects the blending was seamless and the whole experience felt completely natural. TED invited the designer, Jacky Myint, to talk about her process.

Myint never considered herself a storyteller, she avoided people’s attention. But that is exactly what she wants for her designs. “I want the user’s full attention. I want their focus in time… I want them to have a moment of wonder. I like to think of stories as living organisms jostling for people’s attention. As a designer I ask myself how do I help this story tell itself?”

A first example: How do you tell a story where the narrative was in the numbers? For a piece on how falling vaccine numbers were causing a resurgence in diseases, “Data was the star.” So they created an interactive map, with layers of discovery for the user to explore and connect with.

She works now at the New York Times interactive desk. The challenge there is to be different when working with words. Not to replicate what’s being told with articles, but finding a new way to tell stories. For a story about a vocal producer, they wanted to give a sense of what that person does. So they took a cue from games, allowing an user to select what mixes they think are the best.

Which brings us to Snow Fall, the tragic story of a group of 16 skiers who died in an avalanche. The challenge was to find a way to weave together video, diagrams, audio and code in a way that felt natural yet surprising. Says Myint, ”We chose which elements told the story at the right moment in the text, so that each media was doing what it’s best at.”

It was a project that required extensive iteration, making sure that each element was natural, added to the experience, and didn’t take away from the narrative. A key point that came across is just how much time and effort went into the development.

More on how Myint and her collaborators made Snow Fall >>

Closing, Myint reflects, “Our job as interactive storytellers is to find the right form that best serves the story.”