23 October 2009

Navigating our global future: Ian Goldin on TED.com

As globalization and technological advances bring us hurtling towards a new integrated future, Ian Goldin warns that not all people may benefit equally. But, he says, if we can recognize this danger, we might yet realize the possibility of improved life for everyone. (Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 7:07)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/4F

Watch Ian Goldin's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

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28 September 2009

Q&A with Parag Khanna: Redrawing the map for a safe, secure world

Last week, Parag Khanna sat with the TED Blog to discuss no less than the political future of the world we live in. He works in the expansive field of geopolitics, and his TEDTalk discusses the history and future of some of the world’s most troubled states and the possibilities of a borderless world. In this interview, he expanded on his theories, delving into the causes of terrorism, the impact of the G20, a solution for Sudan and more.

Can you explain exactly what it is that you do? Your title is Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, and I’m not sure that we all know precisely what that means.

It’s essentially designed to be misleading so that no one will ever actually know what I truly do. (Laughter) And most of the ambiguity rests in the fact that what people struggle to grasp is that at think tanks a lot of people, like me, actually get paid to do whatever we want. So that explains it, partially.

But let me start at the top level -- the New America Foundation is an independent, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, and it’s one of the youngest and definitely the hottest think tank in Washington. And it has, as in other places, a mix of domestic and foreign policy experts, and it’s run by Steve Coll, the former Washington Post editor, and the chairman of the board is Eric Schmidt of Google, and it’s a very dynamic and lively place.

The American Strategy Program is the foreign-policy wing of the think tank, and it has people like Peter Bergen from CNN and myself and others. And the Global Governance Initiative is my particular program, in which I’m exploring the future of diplomacy, not just from the perspective of what happens to intergovernmental relations and the United Nations and standing institutions like the World Bank, but rather how do all of the important actors in the world today, like News Corp and Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, Bill Clinton and the Clinton Initiative, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the US government -- all of these players exist in a very complicated diplomatic knit. And my project is intended to clarify what the new patterns of diplomacy are among them: How are they cooperating? What issues are they cooperating on? What’s their purpose? Diplomacy is the future of understanding how we run the world, basically.

That’s a very interesting position to be in. Have you seen any of your work creating any influence or ripples in the world around you?

Should I speak for myself or New America Foundation as a whole?

Both, if you can.

Well, what I do is I tend to go to countries and interview the leaders, but I don’t interview them like a journalist. I talk to their leaders as someone who’s developed a certain knowledge or expertise on emerging markets or rising powers. And I don’t so much interview people as I debate with them, and I argue with them, and I get them to say what they really believe, not what they want to see in the newspaper tomorrow. And that’s how I gathered the material for my book, in addition to reading a hell of a lot and traveling around countries and talking to all sorts of people.

I can’t take responsibility for the policies that other countries develop, but I’ve built up a substantial network of young and current leaders in a lot of countries and I have regular interactions with them on important issues. With the US government, I’ve worked with the Department of Defense advising on the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. I can’t actually talk about the specific things that went on there. As with many people who’ve been involved in the conflicts over there, I’ve tried to assert a certain way in which things should go, but influence is a very complicated landscape. We keep on pushing and pushing on certain issues, in the hope of seeing some kind of change.

New America Foundation has had a lot of success in areas like education policy, tax policy, climate policy as well -- it’s a very progressive place. But the question of influence is very interesting, and I think people should ask themselves more seriously -- whether they’re journalists or think tank people or academics -- “What’s the measure of my influence?” Is someone influential because millions of people read his column, or does anything actually ever change according to what he suggested or recommended? We tend to conflate the two measurements of visibility versus a change. I, for one, I like to set the bar very high and say, “Did something change?”

That’s very inspiring. I’d like to delve some more into application and talk about relatively current events. Obama’s been in office for a little over half a year, and when he was elected the global attitude toward him was much friendlier. Do you think that this friendlier global climate really will prove advantageous to the United States in diplomacy and foreign relations?

I think when people are struggling to understand public opinion toward the United States between the Bush administration and the Obama administration, there’s a very simple explanation that I never hear people give, which is that when Obama was running for President, he didn’t represent America, he represented the anti-Bush and a different America. But now that he’s President and represents America, he’s conflated again, so that Obama equals America. If American policy is still bad, now Obama takes the blame rather than Bush taking the blame. So if you want to explain the fall-off or drop-off in popularity or approval for Obama, that is how you’d explain it. Because people want or expect change instantaneously, and obviously they’re not going to get that because the power of inertia is so great.

Not only is the power of inertia great, in the case of the war in Iraq -- where in fact he’s been very fast, he’s been pulling troops out -- but it still takes time. In Afghanistan, his very controversial decision is that he’s trying to increase the number of troops there. In many people’s eyes that means deepening an occupation, digging in deeper, and that obviously also isn’t necessarily popular.

Now, I do believe he was quite revolutionary in his early diplomacy. He reached out within the first 100 days to the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and a whole host of countries that the Bush administration considered rogue states. And he said, “Look, it’s time to start anew, it’s time to work on pragmatic interests.” He canceled this whole missile defense plan that had no strategic defense whatsoever and that had been hampering American relations with Russia for years and years. And overnight, he just changed it. So I think he deserves a tremendous amount of credit for quickstarting a process in the first 100 days. And, of course, people will be disappointed if they don’t see reciprocal results right away. But they’re just not going to. That’s not the way it works. I still have a lot of faith in the process that he has initiated.

READ MORE: Parag Khanna discusses the G20, a solution for Sudan, terrorism and borders, explains who's really going to address climate change and how we may yet come to live in a borderless world.

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14 May 2009

Q&A with Hans Rosling (Part 1): A deeper look at AIDS transmission and disease stats

On Monday, the TEDBlog had a long chat with Hans Rosling, the extraordinary global health professor that makes data come alive. He had his third TEDTalk posted yesterday and again wowed us all, explaining complex information with animated graphs -- and humor. In this interview, he delves into his theories on concurrency and AIDS transmission, our ideological ruts and developing the Obama-meter!

Hans had so much interesting news to share, that we had to split our interview in two! Return tomorrow for Part 2 of the interview, when Hans will recount meeting Fidel Castro, explain how cancer changed him and divulge the secret of why we love him so.

So, you’ve seen your TEDTalk already?

Oh yes, and I got so disappointed because, first, I went over the time. Also, we had technical problems and spent the last two hours before my talk debugging the presentation. So, the presentation I gave is not as good as the version that was on my computer. It just did not come out well at all. You know, it’s a real challenge to talk about a subject as complicated as AIDS in front of a large audience.

And I made that one mistake. I said male circumcision prevents HIV transmission when really it reduces it in a population. And when someone hears this, he will think, “If I have a circumcision, I can’t contract HIV,” and this is not the case. However, at least this part was edited out of the talk.

I thought the talk was very good. Do you always feel this way about your talks? Have you given a talk that you thought was good?

TheTEDTalk from 2006 is almost perfect. Even the mistakes I made in that talk were almost perfect. Then, the screen was low and you could see the graphics around me while I was talking. It was so good for my style of presenting. But in 2007, you raised the screen.

Anyway, I didn’t know that format was going to be so good. This was a technique I discovered by serendipity, like the joke in my talk about solidifying the beam of the laser. People really liked that, because they are so fed up with laser pointers which are such an overused technology. Now, I’m working on a bamboo version so that it will be biodegradable.

We know AIDS spreads more rapidly with concurrent sex partners, but what exactly do Africa’s concurrent partner relationships look like?

Well, this concurrency I have only observed in some parts of southern and eastern Africa. You must remember that there are tremendous variations between practices in all of Africa. Remember in the talk, I spoke about the difference between Salt Lake City and San Francisco. For example, the gay community in Salt Lake City is not that strong. But where there is the practice of concurrent partners, between the ages of 15 and 30 you may have less partners and less intercourse and have 50 times more HIV.

Now, Swedes have serial monogamy, which is one partner after another but no overlap. And then there is polygamy. Concurrent partners does not mean polygamy. These are as different as snow and sand. I want to carefully explain this, because this area is so heavy with moral judgment.

Having concurrent partners means that during a one month period, on a regular basis, you have sex with more than one person. There is not one main partner and then little affairs, either. In these societies, sex is linked to the social transaction. Sex has a different social role. There’s not as much jealousy with regard to sex. Now, it sounds as if I am defending concurrent partners. But with the Swedish way, serial monogamy, you just drop partners. It’s not very nice.

There is another model as well. In the Middle East, you marry when you are between 17 and 21 and you only have sex with the person you marry. And, actually these people probably have more intercourse, with their spouse, than anyone else. Many of these couples have a great sex life, too.

Also, as I said in the talk, HIV doesn’t have the same risk of transmission at all times. From the time of infection, the virus’ levels grow and peak in the blood in the first six weeks. With no other STD present, the risk of transmission is actually very low at other times. So with serial monogamy, even if a person is infected, they continue to have sex only with the person that infected them until their viral levels have fallen. Whereas, if you have sex with two other people just after infection, the virus is more likely to spread.

Promiscuous parts of the gay community in the United States, and in Sweden, also have concurrent partners. Note that I said promiscuous. For heroin abusers, this concurrency pattern is also the same as they reuse needles from many different people. This is also significant as blood is more contagious than any other bodily fluid.

There is no research consensus on concurrency, but it is the most probable hypothesis.

READ MORE: Hans talks about ideological mistakes, circumcision, his swine flu commentary and the Obama-meter

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01 October 2007

Gore's call for a carbon/jobs Marshall plan

Al Gore (TED2006 speech) at last week's Clinton Global Initiative:

"The key to fighting global poverty is to have the wealthy nations and the developing nations join together to reduce global warming ... What we need is a global Marshall plan to make the creation of jobs around the reduction of carbon the central principle for how we develop this." (From the FT)

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12 August 2007

Wired's Anderson on Lomborg's "Cool It"

Wired editor Chris Anderson got an advance copy of Bjorn Lomborg's upcoming book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, and his summary is: read it, but don't follow his advice.

Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

In the book, the Danish political scientist offers numerous examples of how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn't stand up to scrutiny (for example: the most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica).

"It's time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy," writes Anderson. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this, he adds: the others are economics (rising direct and indirect costs of oil and carbon fuels) and geopolitics (oil revenues prop up bad governments around the world).

There is a fourth reason that Anderson forgets, and which has been convincingly put forth by Al Gore in his TED2006 speech: it's a moral imperative.

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26 July 2007

Powerful new documentary on the Darfur genocide

TED Curator Chris Anderson writes: Last night, I attended the New York premiere of The Devil Came on Horseback, a searing documentary about Darfur, told through the eyes of US military observer Brian Steidle, whose photographs of the ongoing genocide there exploded onto the world two years ago. They raised awareness then, and the new film has the potential to do so again. It packs a powerful punch. I came out seething with anger, and I think that was the intent. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times writes: "Brutal, urgent, devastating -- the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible." See it if you possibly can. If anyone out there thinks they can help boost distribution of the film (similar to how this community helped with An Inconvenient Truth), please let me know by writing to chris at ted dot com, and I'll connect you with the filmmakers Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg.

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